Part One: The Elephant in the Room – Sexual Behaviour Disorder

A personal look at naturism, pornography, and the limits of our own story

There’s a conversation the naturist community doesn’t love having. It sits at the uncomfortable intersection of the two things we work hardest to keep separate: nudity and sex. But we’ve learned that avoiding uncomfortable conversations is usually how they find you anyway, so here we are.

We’ve written before about being very sex positive and learning how to disconnect nudity from sex in naturist spaces. “Naturism, Sex, and All the Messy Bits We’re Not Supposed to Say Out Loud“. But for some people, that shift does not come easily.

It’s also worth being careful with the language here. People often use terms like sex addiction and porn addiction interchangeably, but clinically the broader conversation now sits more often under the umbrella of compulsive sexual behaviour disorder. In other words, pornography can be one expression of the struggle, but it is not the whole story. The deeper issue is not always one specific behavior. It is the repeated inability to control sexual urges or behaviors even when they begin causing harm, distress, secrecy, or disruption in a person’s life.

We want to talk about CSBD and naturism. Not from a clinical distance, and not with a wagging finger pointed at anyone, but from where we actually sit and what we see. Just two people who came to naturism later in life, still figuring out what it’s done to us and why.

Because it’s done something. We just can’t fully explain it.

What Shifted, and What We Can’t Fully Explain

Let’s be honest about the environment first. We are living in a moment of constant sexual saturation, and the delivery mechanism fits in your pocket. Whatever you’re looking for sexually is three taps away, available at any hour, completely anonymous, and sometimes free. The algorithms running those platforms aren’t neutral… they’re specifically designed to learn what keeps you engaged and serve you more of it. Loneliness, boredom, stress, a bad day at work… the phone knows, and it has something ready. That’s not an accident. It’s the product.

Alvin Cooper coined the term “Triple-A engine” back in 1998. It refers to a theory of why the internet, particularly in the context of pornography, has become such a powerful and popular medium. The “Triple-A” stands for Accessibility: content is available 24/7, enabling easy access to vast amounts of material from any location. Affordability: content is generally low-cost or free. Anonymity: users can browse without being seen, enabling them to hide their identity, which lowers personal, social, and legal inhibitors.

You see the result of it everywhere if you’re paying attention. Scroll through many social media profiles and the same porn content gets recycled endlessly… an unbroken loop of imagery that used to require effort to find and now just arrives uninvited. And for those who are genuinely lonely, not just bored, there’s an entire economy built around that loneliness now. OnlyFans didn’t create the problem, but it industrialized it. It took something that was already isolating and made it feel like connection.

I’ll start with something I noticed about myself, with the caveat that I’ve never struggled with a clinical sex or pornography addiction of any kind. But like a lot of men in Western society, pornography was background noise for most of my adult life. Not an obsession or a crisis… more like a bad habit that lived in the same drawer as underwear and late-night snacking. It was there, it was easy, and I didn’t think much about it.

Since Corin and I discovered naturism, that noise has dropped dramatically. What’s replaced it surprised me more than the drop itself. I find myself genuinely drawn to naturist photography and artistic nudes. Not as a substitute, but as something that holds my attention in a completely different way. Pornography is usually built to sexualize and objectify. The artistic nude photography I now appreciate is trying to find something else… vulnerability, dignity, the full range of what a human being actually looks like. There is also an emotional element to it. The body is still present, but it isn’t the point. The person is.

I’ve tried to work out how much of that is naturism and how much is simply getting older. Honest answer: I can’t separate them. They arrived together. But the best way I can describe the shift is this… it’s like trying to go back to watching WWE wrestling after you’ve found the UFC. In the WWE, everything is choreographed for a reaction. The lighting, the drama, the personas… all of it is high-gloss artifice built to keep you watching. But once you’ve seen the original UFC, where it’s raw and unpredictable and genuinely human, the staged version just starts to look like what it is.

A weekend at our club in Manitoba does something similar. You see real people… every age, every shape, every scar and soft edge and untidy bit of skin. An older man absorbed in a crossword in the afternoon sun. A woman laughing while she wrestles a stubborn tent pole into the ground. Slowly, without announcing itself, your brain starts to lose the shortcut it spent decades building. The road that ran straight from nudity to sex starts to grow over. Something quieter takes its place.

Corin: The Comparison That Quietly Stopped

My experience was less about what I was consuming and more about a voice I’d been carrying for years without fully noticing it.

For a long time I looked at other women the way the media taught me to… through a lens of constant, mostly unconscious comparison. Scanning for flaws to feel marginally better, or scanning for perfection to feel worse. It was the lens I’d been handed… not one I chose. As a woman growing up, I was well aware of pornography and the impossible expectations they set for me.

There was an afternoon by the pool at our club… a specific afternoon I still think about where I looked around and realized the lens was mostly gone. I wasn’t cataloguing anyone. I wasn’t measuring. I was looking at a grandmother whose skin told the whole story of her life, and what I felt wasn’t critique. It was something closer to warmth.

I don’t know exactly when the shift happened for me either. That’s the thing about slow change… you only notice it once you look back and realize you’ve been feeling different for a while. But sitting there that afternoon, one thought surfaced clearly. If I can look at these women with this much kindness, why have I never managed to look at myself that way?

That question didn’t resolve anything immediately. But it started something. And it changed how I looked at Kevin, and at our life together, in ways I’m still finding.

We never really sat down and thought about these specific things before we met Shawn McCammon.

What the Therapist Said

Shawn is a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist and a certified sex addiction treatment provider. He’s also a retired Army Colonel with 34 years of service, and… he’s a naturist. He reached out to us after reading some of our articles, and what he told us was unexpected.

In his clinical work, Shawn has identified a growing belief inside parts of the naturist community… and inside some corners of the Christian naturist community specifically… that naturism can function as a cure for sex addiction. The theory goes that if you simply spend enough time around non-sexualized bodies, the brain resets and the compulsion dissolves.

Shawn has a name for that idea. He sees it as one more behavioral strategy, alongside rubber bands snapped against the wrist, nanny software, accountability partners, and sheer willpower. In his clinical view, those approaches may manage behavior for a while, but they do not resolve the addiction underneath. All the things people try. All the things that usually fail.

This isn’t because naturism isn’t real, or because what happens at a naturist club isn’t genuinely transformative for some people. It’s because transformation and recovery are not the same thing. As Shawn puts it, the behaviors… the pornography, the compulsive seeking… aren’t the addiction. They’re symptoms. The addiction lives underneath, in places that a change of environment can’t reach on its own.

What he told us next is what we couldn’t stop thinking about. If someone arrives at a naturist park still in what he calls “consumer mode”… still carrying unaddressed trauma, still using sensation to manage emotional pain… the environment doesn’t neutralize the compulsion. It hands it a new geography.

We think that’s worth talking about openly.

The Danger of the “Magic Pill” Mentality

Because our own experiences have been so positive… so “grounding” in a way that’s hard to put into words… it’s incredibly tempting to want to bottle that feeling up and sell it as a universal cure. When you find something that finally turns down the volume of a loud, hyper-sexualized world, your first instinct is to grab everyone you know by the shoulders and say, “This is it! This is the answer! Just frick’n try it!”

​But we have to be careful with that impulse. There’s a specific kind of responsibility that comes with sharing this lifestyle, and part of that responsibility is acknowledging where the “magic” of the beach ends and the hard work of being human begins.

​If we tell someone struggling with a deep-seated clinical addiction that “naturism will fix you,” we aren’t just being optimistic; we might be setting them up for a devastating failure. We’re essentially handing them a hammer and telling them it’s a Swiss Army knife. Naturism is a tool… a fantastic, life-affirming, perspective-shifting tool… but it isn’t the whole toolbox.

​Addiction is often rooted in things that clothes… or the lack of them… simply can’t reach. It lives in the deep emotional voids, the unaddressed trauma, and the attachment issues that most of us spent years, if not decades, trying to cover up with various “noises.”

If you walk into a naturist park carrying a heavy, unresolved addiction, you’re just a person with an addiction who happens to be naked. The lack of clothing doesn’t automatically strip away the internal compulsions; in fact, for someone in the thick of a struggle, it can sometimes make the internal noise even louder because the “distraction” of clothes is gone.

Neither of us came to naturism carrying a clinical addiction. What we experienced… the quieting of the noise, the recalibration of the gaze… happened to two people who were, in the clinical sense, fine. Not in crisis. Not caught in a cycle they couldn’t break. And that distinction matters more than we initially wanted to admit.

Because when a brain is genuinely addicted, the mechanism is different. The pathways are deeper. The triggers don’t politely step aside because the environment changed. What felt like grounding and perspective to us might function very differently for someone who is struggling in ways we’ve never had to struggle.

That’s where Part One leaves us. Not with a cure, and not with a neat conclusion. Just with a boundary we think matters. Naturism may change how some of us see bodies, desire, and ourselves. But that does not make it treatment. And pretending otherwise helps no one.

So in Part Two, we’re going to ask Shawn some questions so he can explain what’s actually going on… what addiction really is beneath the behavior, why the usual fixes keep failing, and what genuine recovery actually requires. Because he was there.

Coming next week.

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