De-sexualizing Nudity
I love being naked outside in nature. I love the sensations on my skin — feeling the warmth of the sun, the wind stirring my body hairs, water enveloping and caressing me. I live near a nude beach, so it’s possible for me and other community members to enjoy these sensations together at the ocean; in part because we’ve all seen each other’s bodies at the beach, we’re less shy about nudity off the beach as well.
I remember being shy about naked bodies when I was a 16-year-old exchange student in Germany. A girl at school was showing pictures from her summer vacation, and she was topless in one of them. I’m pretty sure I blushed, and I didn’t know where to put my eyes. Later that year, I went swimming at a pond with a couple of friends. They changed out of their wet swimsuits into dry clothes by the car before returning home; I chose to wear my wet suit under my clothes all the drive home, extra aware of how uncomfortable it was because I could have made a different choice. Germany didn’t make me into a nudist while I was there, yet it did provide a foundation of understanding that not every culture was as afraid of public nudity as the U.S.A.’s culture.
It was about ten years later that I became a nudist myself. I was spending the winter in Hawai’i, and I had wanted to go to Hapuna Beach on the Big Island. The guy giving me and my then-husband a ride took us instead to a nude beach just down the coastline from Hapuna. After sitting on the beach for hours, afraid to act, I finally got up the courage to get into the ocean while not wearing any clothes. I could hardly believe how good it felt. I had been a swimmer for years and already loved being in the water; I estimated that being in the water without wet fabric dragging on my skin increased my pleasure of swimming in the ocean at least five times. Five times!!! How could a piece of fabric that is small enough to fit in a large envelope make such a huge difference? For me, it did, and since then I have always chosen swimming naked over swimming with a suit whenever possible.
I found being naked in front of other people a little like singing in front of an audience — terrifying at first, then normal once I got used to it, with some waves of fear or resistance coming up once in awhile, never as intense as the first ice-breaking. As my body has changed from one of a 26-year-old to one of a 41-year-old, sometimes I feel a little self-conscious about revealing my new cellulite, or that my spare tire has some more air in it. Then I remind myself that I plan on being naked at the beach when I’m 90, if I manage to live that long, presumably with lots of wrinkles and flab, so I’d better be ok with being naked now. After all, I’m being nude in nature for myself, not for others, and it would be a shame to deny myself that pleasure because I‘m loathe to let other humans see my body.
One thing I love about being part of a sub-culture that accepts public nudity is how it desexualizes the body. Nudity is, in general, way less sexy and provocative than clothing. In cultures where public nudity is not acceptable, showing skin is perceived as a message of sexual availability, or an attempt to turn others on. I recently watched a video on the fight to make public breastfeeding more acceptable, and one person commented that breasts are for your partner, and to show them in public is disrespectful to women whose boyfriends or husbands will see your breasts. To this person, breasts are primarily for sexual turn-on. It is impossible to use them for their primary biological function, feeding babies, without sexual turn-on getting mixed in, as long as this person is in the room and a cover-up isn’t being used.
Just as breasts have a function of breast-feeding, my body functions to swim, to dance, to walk, to garden, to take me through life. Some of those activities are enhanced by being topless, or totally nude. I really appreciate being in a culture where I can dress or undress to optimize my own experience without sexual turn-on getting mixed in. In some cultures, wearing a tank top is a sign of sexual availability, so women can’t wear tank tops without being looked at or harassed in a certain way. Those cultures’ decision to sexualize shoulders and armpits affects women’s ability to be cool and comfortable in hot weather. In mainstream U.S., breasts are sexualized, which affects women’s abilities to breastfeed or garden topless. When sexual turn-on gets mixed in with nudity, so does turn-off — people who are deemed sexually unattractive are shamed for showing their bodies, as if society’s desire not to see my unclothed 90-year-old body is more important than my ability to swim naked in the ocean.
Sexualization of nudity seems to go hand in hand with modesty. Once something becomes taboo, a charge develops around it. I’ve read plenty of Elizabethan novels where men go ga-ga over the glimpse of an ankle. Modesty in clothing is supposedly designed to prevent people from being overwhelmed by their sexual urges, yet it seems to have the opposite effect of stoking those urges to the point where an ankle or a shoulder can send one into fits of passion. If we go the opposite direction, as they do at Burning Man, and allow people to dress or undress as they like according to their comfort, nudity quickly becomes de-sexualized, and titillation comes far more from artful concealment rather than from how much skin one is showing.
There are probably some people out there who don’t want nudity de-sexualized, because there is a certain power that comes with modesty. To be able to seduce with an ankle is heady stuff. I submit, however, that overall the price isn’t worth it. In addition to the power of seduction that comes with modesty also comes the potential for body shame. Seeing lots of naked bodies at the beach or at Burning Man has taught me we come in all shapes and sizes and ages, and helps me accept myself better than if most of the bodies I saw were in movies or magazines.
At the end of the day, I believe my body is primarily for myself, and only secondarily for others. Modesty taboos suppose that society also has a stake in my body, a right to dictate what I can and can’t wear, and that in some cases society’s right to interact with my body in a certain way takes precedence over my right to interact with myself in a certain way. I disagree with this notion when it comes to how I dress. I make concessions to the prevailing culture — I wouldn’t wear a bikini in downtown Nairobi, and I wear a shirt in most places in the U.S. — and yet I appreciate and seek out cultures in which a naked body is seen as natural and normal, because that is the culture I believe is the healthiest and most enjoyable to be in.
