Naked at Lunch (21 page)

“But you’d never done anything like this before. Weren’t you nervous?”

She nodded. “Once in the plane I realized where I was going and then I start to have the tachycardia, but it was too late. And once I was there, it’s like okay there’s no way back; I have to do it. And I was very impressed at how nice they were. I didn’t feel pressure at all.”

Which I have to say was pretty much my experience of the Naked European Walking Tour. I was very apprehensive when I first arrived and left feeling like I’d made a bunch of friends.

“And what was it like the first time you undressed in front of everyone?”

“I felt shy, you know, because I didn’t know anyone and there’s the body thing, but then I think the attitude was so relaxed and everybody was so friendly and it was hot as well. So once I jumped in the lake I thought, ‘Look, they’ve seen me now, so no way back.’”

“Did you have conflicting emotions about it or did it make you happy?”

“I feel really happy that I did that actually, because I think it was beautiful. It was a very challenge experience. I will recommend it even to my mother-in-law, you know, because I think people live ignoring the body. And if you have your belly, your double chin, you’re big, you’re small, it’s fine. Be friends with that. So for me it was an opportunity to be friends with my body.”

We encountered a lot of different people on the trail and I had noticed that Conxita had gotten a lot of long looks from men and women, so I asked her, “Did you ever feel like you were being looked at or treated as a sexual object?”

She shook her head and laughed. “I never had the thought of I’m going to be raped in the shower. No, thank you.”

“Did you find the experience had changed you in some way?”

“Yes. I felt really kind of proud and kind of sexy, like, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’ For some days I felt really empowered.”

Which is pretty much what I thought. Even if they were attracted to Conxita, no one could act aggressively sexual, as it would’ve made all the women in the hut—and possibly some of the men—uncomfortable. Except for Cap d’Agde and its swinger scene, this has been my experience of nonsexual social nudism. Sitting around the pool at the Desert Sun Resort or the Hotel Vera Playa Club is like being in one of those Victorian drawing room comedies and sex is the elephant in the room that no one wants to mention for fear of spilling their tea.

But why shouldn’t they? Aren’t humans sexual animals?

I think Ruth Barcan gets it exactly right when she says, “In a kind of circular logic, nudism had to seem non-sexual in order to attract women and it needed women in order to prove it had nothing to do with sex.”
⁴⁸

Because if nudism isn’t about sex, if it’s just about personal freedom or positive body image or not having a tan line, then it’s somehow safe for men and women to enjoy being naked together in a social situation and that makes it somewhat more palatable to the public at large.

A good illustration of the conflict between our animal impulse to be sexual and the rigid nonsexual rules of social nudism is the battle between longtime nudist Catherine Holmes and the Maryland Health Society (MaHeSo), a nudist resort and campground in Davidsonville, Maryland. Holmes had a long-term lease on a cabin at the rustic resort and became concerned about reports of swinging activity. Blow jobs were rumored to have been administered in the pool—although I’d imagine that would require some kind of snorkel or scuba gear—and people were allegedly hooking up in the woods. Although Holmes hadn’t seen any of these activities herself, the hearsay was enough for her to seek a restraining order and unspecified damages against the resort, claiming that the nature of the club had changed. “It used to be sexuality and nudity were two totally different things,” she said.
⁴⁹

I’m not saying she didn’t have a case. After all, in its list of rules the resort states clearly that “Violence, overt sexual behavior, questionable conduct with children or any other behavior that offends or embarrasses others is not permitted.”
⁵⁰
But the club revoked her membership and Paul Blumenthal, the attorney for the resort, argued that the complaint was “completely and utterly devoid of any specific facts.”
⁵¹

Apparently the judge agreed and her claims were denied.

And so Catherine Holmes did what any red-blooded anti-swinger pro-nonsexual social nudist would do: she barricaded herself in her cabin and posted anti-swinger signs on her windows.

The standoff lasted five months before the resort got a court order to evict her and she was forced to move.

One of Holmes’s complaints about the perceived sexualization of the resort was that many of the men wore cock rings. Vicky Jarboe, president of the board of directors for MaHeSo, responded by saying, “Yes, my husband wears a cock ring, along with probably 16–20 other men here. What’s wrong with that? We’ve got 80-year-old men here wearing cock rings. She’s pulling at straws.”
⁵²

There’s a joke in there somewhere.

Historically, positioning nudism as nonsexual is a way to short-circuit any morality police or politicians who might try to quash a group of consenting adults from enjoying themselves without clothes. It eases the fevered imaginations of the funwreckers who want to enforce their idea of what’s appropriate or inappropriate. Why shouldn’t a group of adults do whatever they want with whomever they want as long as no one gets hurt? I mean, seriously. But even Gay Naturists International, a men-only homosexual nudist organization, has nonsexual codes of conduct on its website: “Our goal is to promote healthy, legal, non-sexual nude recreation. While GNI knows sex is natural, sex is not equated with naturism.”
⁵³

The opposite of this, and definitely unsafe for your average nonsexual social nudist, is the erotic, nonprofit ecological organization started in Norway called Fuck for Forest (FFF). Modern-day merry pranksters, the dreadlocked and tattooed members of FFF are eco-activists who use sex and pornography to promote an ideal of nudity and free love in harmony with nature. “Sex is often shown to attract us to buy all kind of bullshit products and ideas, so why not for a good cause? We think it is important to show a more liberal relationship to our bodies, as a contrast to the suppressed world we live in.”
⁵⁴

FFF engages in nudity and public sex acts to bring attention to its point of view, which is summed up in its manifesto as “War and nature destruction is normalized, while public lovemaking and nudity is considered offensive and criminalized.”

Unlike the nonsexual social nudist activism of the Naktivists, FFF’s version of free hiking includes having group sex in trees and filming it. Or oral sex in parks. Or a three-way in the streets of Berlin. Basically they have sex just about anywhere you can get two or three or four naked bodies together. As they say, “It is a nature [
sic
]
right to be naked and have sex, anywhere.”

I admire the sense of playful in-your-faceness that FFF exhibits, but its members are also environmentalists with an organization involved in projects in Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Slovakia, and Ecuador. As they say, “Sex has in this world become a tool for marketing. But usually it is just used to sell us crappy products and ideas, not giving the true honor to sexual energy at all.”

Organized social nudism isn’t really in a position to honor sexual energy. Throughout its history too many nudists have been arrested or stigmatized, clubs shut down, and nude beaches closed. Nudists have a tenuous relationship with society and one that might break down if nudists were suddenly fucking in the trees. That’s why they have so many rules about nonsexual behavior; they don’t want to give their enemies any ammunition to shut them down for being immoral or obscene or a threat to public decency.

David Wraith is a writer and founder of Sex Positive St. Louis, who sometimes organizes events like nude bowling night. Because he is a self-described voyeur and exhibitionist, he had a slightly different take on nudism than your average AANR member. “There are those that say that nudism is absolutely not about sex, and I think that’s kind of bullshit, honestly. I don’t think it’s all about sex, but I don’t think you can say that anything is absolutely, 100 percent not about sex.”
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While I agree with Wraith that it’s difficult to have anything in the modern world that is “100 percent not about sex,” I have to say that my experience so far has shown me that, while they might not be celibate, nudists are trying really hard not to be sexy. But then I wonder if they’re not overthinking it. Can you spark the erotic imagination without clothes?

********
A great name for a heavy metal band.

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She also advises her readers: “Blindfold him with his tie. Blocking his sight heightens his other senses, and not knowing your next move will drive him insane (in a good way).”

Trends in Genital Topiary

W
hen you look at photographs of nudists from, say, the 1920s and compare them with photos from the 1950s, they look pretty much the same. The human body didn’t evolve, there were no radical advances in hairstyles, no sci-fi growth of wings or gills or antennae. Naked people frolicking in the fields of Germany in 1924 look pretty much like naked Americans or French or British people frolicking in their respective fields in 1955. Photographic technology changed, going from a somewhat diffuse black and white to kooky Kodachrome, but without the whims and whatnots of style, the fads and flair of fashion, to give a sense of time or place, people look the same.

Flip through a current issue of
N
or any other nudist publication and you quickly realize that things have changed. There is a noticeable thickening of bodies—the obesity epidemic appears to have hit American nudism especially hard—and there is a distinct change in hairstyles. Which is not to say that braids or bobs or ponytails are different; it is pubic hair that has gone missing. Like time-lapse footage of a disappearing glacier, the curly covering on our genitals has slowly receded until it is now almost nonexistent. I don’t think we can blame this on climate change.

But I’m not surprised. It’s not just nudists who are trimming, shaving, and Brazilian waxing their mons pubis; as Ashley Fetters reported in the
Atlantic
, “Today, it’s all but commonplace for women to go to extreme measures to get bald, pre-pubescent nether regions . . .”
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Fetters quotes a study by Indiana University and Kinsey Institute researchers that discovered nearly 60 percent of American women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and half of women between twenty-five and twenty-nine prefer to have hairless genitals. The researchers say this phenomenon is described as the “new norm.”
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Of course not everyone is trying to make her vulva look fresh-faced. The Indiana University study found that “women’s total removal of their pubic hair was associated with younger age, sexual orientation, sexual relationship status, having received cunnilingus in the past 4 weeks,” and other factors. I think frequent oral sex is probably reason enough for a shave, but compare those figures with a 1968 survey of Australian nudists where 10 percent removed all of their pubic hair, 50 percent trimmed their pubic hair, and the rest did nothing to their pubic hair.
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The pubic hair paradigm has been flipped on its head.

While the study only looked at women’s pubic hair, or lack thereof, in the nudist world it’s not just the women who are going hairless; there is some serious manscaping going on.

When I was getting ready to go to my first ever nudist resort, I thought that I should do a little manscaping experiment on myself. I didn’t want to spoil my first nonsexual social nude experience with a crotch that looked like Rip Van Winkle’s beard. I did a little research and was encouraged by the fact that men’s magazines—
Esquire
,
GQ
,
and
Men’s Fitness
—have all published articles and advice about manscaping.

Apparently, it feels good and the ladies love it.

I will admit that a part of me wondered if these articles weren’t just product placement for companies like Gillette and Panasonic to sell body hair trimmers to insecure dudes. But was I an insecure dude? If I’m being completely honest, yes, I was not so super confident in my physical appearance that I thought strutting around a nudist resort was going to draw oohs and aahs from the other guests. I didn’t think I would wow them with my manly endowment. I was just hoping they wouldn’t all point and laugh. So when the articles promised that if I trimmed off an inch of pubic hair, my penis would magically look an inch or so longer, I thought it was worth a try. I mean, from a graphic design standpoint it makes sense, and besides, who wouldn’t want the confidence boost an extra inch can provide? At least that’s what the magazines said.