Why France is such a great place to get naked.

So we’ve been in Europe for about five weeks now. Four weeks in France, and now, several days in Greece.

Much of the time in France this summer was work related, though we were able to steal away for a couple nights on the magical Ile du Levant, and carved out a week at our “go to” place, La Jenny, before jetting off to the dependably blue skies and turquoise seas of Greece. We like getting naked in Greece, and in Croatia, and if the conditions are right, in the Caribbean and Germany as well. But at the end of the day, France gets the prize.

If we’re going strictly from a meteorological point of view, even the best parts of France can be tricky. Get a cold front on the Atlantic coast, or a severe dose of the Mistral blowing up from the Mediterranean, and your week or two of sun-worshiping can become a soggy or sand-blasted mess! The Adriatic and Aegean Seas are much more predictable in the Vitamin D consumption department.

But here’s some interesting data…

When I make a new blog post that I think might be of interest to a certain demographic or group, I tend to post a link on a relevant message board, such as clothesfree.com or the British Naturist Corner. Despite my limited abilities of being conversant in French, I have particularly enjoyed being part of the VivreNu community – the comprehensive resource for naturism in France. After a year’s absence, (as I’ve not done much naturist blogging over the past 11 months)  I posted a link to a recent blog post on VivreNu. Within one or two hours, “referred click-throughs” from VivreNu had nearly outnumbered that from any other country, including that of the good old (but decidedly prudish) US of A.

In other words, the naturist community in France is alive and thriving. I’m not really a facts and figures guy, but from an anecdotal point of view, I would say that the French people have fewer hang-ups about casual encounters with naked people, while French families seem to be the most likely (along with the Germans and the Dutch) to go on a family “nakation.” It was this very phenomenon that drew us into French naturism in the first place, and if the VivreNu data is of any consequence, it seems that France continues to grab the brass ring when it comes to going on holiday with nothin’ but the radio on!

Truthfully, I’m not fond of gross generalizations. And there are a lot of great places to get naked in Europe, and I predict that there will be more and more opportunities for no-tan-line vacations in Asia and South America in the coming years, but for now –

All hail to nakedness in France, and those who celebrate the right to bare all amidst vineyards, sunflowers, and historic chateau. France will always be the place where naturism genuinely made sense to me – in a way that I had dreamt it should be – and for that, I am forever grateful to the people who are able to say “a breast is a breast, a penis is a penis, and it appears everyone sports a remarkably similar pair of buttocks!”

Viva la France.