Better Off Dead

The Skinbook experiment seems to have come to a bitter end. All the tell-tale signs predicting doom were there all along, from the ill-conceived (and probably illegal) "Name and Shame" blog, to their infantile response, and not to mention their warped intentions for founding the site in the first place. When the Ning network pulled the plug on any nudity throughout their network, the Skinbook admins tried to start something from scratch, but apparently their egos clashed, as evidenced by this statement released yesterday:

A message to all members of www.theskinbook.net/h3

It is with much regret that I have come to the decision to bring Skinbook to an end.

Afterall the effort (and money) we have put into saving the Skinbook network; the complaining, negativity, abuse and general lack of support we have recieved from our users has been quite frankly, disgusting... I am no longer prepared to provide the Skinbook network to any members past or present.

As much as we have attempted over the past couple of years to bring together the naturist community and give the naturist lifestyle a positive public image, the treatment of my team here at Skinbook has finally made it clear (to myself at least) why this lifestyle is both fragmented from within and ostracized from without.

What you take this to mean is up to you to speculate individually. For me this revelation doesn`t require an explination, it requires merely a reaction; my reaction being that from now on I see fit only to completely distance myself from this lifestyle (from both a philosophical and physical stand point) and most certainly from ANY medium which serves to promote it.

Good luck in your quests to find unity within your chosen lifestyle... you need it!

Karl Maddocks

For the purpose of legal matters we would like to make clear that we retain all rights to the Skinbook name, logo and any other associated media.

Anyone with an ounce of intelligence can see the hypocrisy in this statement. As a network set up to be apart from the existing naturist and nudist organizations, Skinbook BY DESIGN was divisive. In a Time Magazine article, which claimed that Skinbook was the "only genuine" nudist social network, Maddocks is quoted as being repulsed by "single elderly guys in sandals and socks", clearly drawing some sort of line in the sand between young and old, labeling existing nudist resorts as being "cultish and weird".

In addition, Skinbook only accepted 10% of its applicants, certainly rejecting a lot of real nudists. One has to speculate whether or not their membership, which they claimed averaged between 35 and 40 years of age, was deliberately skewed by the administrators.

In the case of Skinbook, I'm don't mind saying "I told you so." Maddocks' bitter and vitriolic diatribe, blaming his failure on the nudist community, is despicable. People by nature are divided, it takes leadership to bring them together. What Maddocks and his buddies did was further fragment people who practice the nudist lifestyle, and present to the public a false image of what being nude in social situations is all about.

Just go back to why Skinbook was created in the first place, and you will see why it was doomed to failure. Maddocks explained, "We couldn't communicate on MySpace and Facebook about nudism since we were all kind of embarrassed. So we said, 'Let's start our own forum and call it Skinbook.' The rest is history." People who are embarrassed by their own lifestyles have no business trying to become leaders.

So, good luck to YOU, Karl Maddocks. The nudist community is a lot better off without you now that you have decided to completely distance yourself from the lifetsyle. You were never a nudist, only an opportunist looking to exploit a sincere lifestyle for your own self-promotion.