Social nudity (often called nudism or naturism) is poorly accepted by a large percentage of the people; something I explore on the On Nudity and Naturism page on my main website, as I have from time to time here.
This poor acceptance of social nudity seems to be because people do not understand social nudity, and curiously that seems to be a philosophical question; one that revolves around one’s mental imagery and state of mind. An interesting, but quite lengthy, article over at Naturist Philosopher looks at this question in detail.

It turns out that the problem is that most people do not have the right schema (mental context/image) to understand because they have no experience of social nudity on which to build this understanding. Their only experience of nudity is generally in a sexual context so this is the image they use to (mis)understand social nudity. And because social sex is (mostly) taboo everyone runs scared of social nudity — and indeed often private nudity within a contained, safe, family setting — thinking it can be nothing but sexual, and therefore “not nice”.
But social nudity isn’t sexual. Or at least no more (actually probably less) sexual than socialising clothed is. And we don’t generally worry about that!
However we aren’t going to change the popular misconceptions without giving people an alternative on which they can build a new schema. So we need some new paradigms and metaphors to explain social nudity to the uninitiated.
One such metaphor might be that clothes are like body armour: providing a barrier to protect me from the environment, the supposed ill-intentions of others and removing any vulnerability I might feel.
All social nudity is doing is removing the barrier — the packaging, if you like — between me and the environment, allowing me to feel the sun and the breeze on my skin and have the freedom I don’t have wearing clothes. And that’s actually fine because in general others don’t stare or make unwanted physical contact, and vulnerability is but a construct of my mind. This surely has to be goodness.
Social nudity is distinct from private nudity (as many of us indulge in at home) in that it emphasises the non-necessity or non-desirability of clothing in normal, everyday, non-sexual human relations. What the naturist movement has to do is to find ways of explaining this paradigm to people. And explaining it in such a way that it starts to give them some semblance of the experience they need to change their mental schema and become more accepting of social nudity.
Maybe, Naturist Philosopher suggests, the key is freedom. After all food free from pesticides is seen as goodness. So why shouldn’t a lifestyle incorporating freedom from clothes be equally desirable?