Naked At Lunch E-Book

Mark Haskell Smith

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In the great wandering tradition of Bill Bryson, Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson, journalist Mark Haskell Smith strips down the world of social nudism in a hilarious, wildly entertaining and profoundly enlightening book about those who renounce clothing and embrace what lies beneath. Naked at Lunch is one man's cracklingly witty, compellingly odd and oddly life-affirming journey into the subculture of nudism. Celebrated journalist Mark Haskell Smith meets, and indeed joins, those shucking off social conventions by shucking off their clothes - he hikes bareback in the Alps with a naked rambler's society, he buys baguettes in the buff in a French resort and he meets the marginally dressed mayor of a Spanish clothes-optional municipality. But this is not just a book of naked adventures and sun-ripened genitals. It is a study of 20th-century Western cultural and social mores; a record of radical history and politics practised by those made radical by their refusal to get dressed; a heartfelt celebration of the simple joys of being alive; and a full-blooded war cry for reclaiming pride in our bodies and rejecting those who would make us ashamed.

Leseprobe

Naked at Lunch

Mark Haskell Smith is a novelist and non-fiction writer. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Vulture. He lives in Los Angeles.

Published in the United States of America in 2015 by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Mark Haskell Smith, 2015

The moral right of Mark Haskell Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 715 1

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 716 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For David L. Ulin and Tod Goldberg

You’re born naked and the rest is drag.

—RuPaul

Contents

I’m on a Boat

Interview with a Nudist

Skin in the Game

Gymnophobia

A Very Brief History of Early Nonsexual Social Nudism

I Left My Cock Ring in San Francisco

The Rise of Nudist Clubs in America

Vera Playa

The Man in the Fishnet Diaper

The Naked European Walking Tour

Sex and the Single Nudist

Trends in Genital Topiary

There’s a Reason Florida Is Shaped Like a Penis

Free Beaches

The Dark Secrets of Lisa Lutz

The Fall of Nudist Clubs

World Naked Whatever Day

Funwreckers

Fashionista

Brave Nude World

Caribbean Nakation

Naked at Lunch

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Notes

I’m on a Boat

“We are safely away and you can now enjoy a …”

There was a pause, as if the cruise director was having trouble choosing what, exactly, he should call what was about to happen. Finally he said, “… a carefree environment.”

The announcement was still reverberating through the ship when the scrotum airing began in earnest; shorts and shirts dropped to the ground and penises dangled in the South Florida sun. Permission had been granted. Now buttocks could swing from side to side without restriction, and breasts—finally released from the prison of blouse and brassiere—burst into the open, to be caressed by soft tropical breezes. We were on a boat. One thousand eight hundred and sixty-six nudists living the “anti-textile” dream.

Not that some of them weren’t almost nude before the cruise director gave the all clear. Many were in various states of undress, itching to toss their clothes aside. A skeletal man in his eighties wandered around the ship wearing only a fluorescent thong, his loose skin draped around his bones in cascades that looked like freckled frosting, and a gigantic, barrel-chested man—he looked like he’d eaten an actual barrel—lumbered around the lido deck on an industrial-strength cane wearing only a loincloth. A few people soaked in Jacuzzis, surreptitiously slipping out of their swimsuits, while the less rebellious sat by the pool, looking somewhat forlorn, waiting for the green light. These were nudists, after all. And they had paid big bucks to frolic in the buff. When the all clear was sounded, they didn’t hesitate.

I had never been on a cruise ship before—I’d never even been interested in being on a cruise ship—but this wasn’t just any cruise, this was the Big Nude Boat, a special charter offered by Bare Necessities, the premier “nakation”I travel agency. Not only that, the cruise was on board the Nieuw Amsterdam, one of the Holland America Line’s more luxurious ships, which meant this wasn’t a backwoods RV-park nudist resort or Hippie Hollow down by the lake; this was the deluxe version of nonsexual social nude recreation. Meaning nudism. Or naturism. Depending on who you ask. There are several theories floating around about which word means what— historically speaking there are some actual distinctions—but the reality was that I was on a boat with almost two thousand people who weren’t wearing clothes.

I am fascinated by subcultures: the Dead Heads and Juggalos who’ve built unique cultures out of following their favorite bands as they tour the country, the amateur mechanical engineers who build robots in their garages, the home brewers who experiment with beer in their kitchens, and the foodies who eat at illegal restaurants in people’s homes. People do strange things. They collect stamps and watch trains, they dress their pets to look like famous characters from movies, they dress themselves to look like anime characters, they go to conventions in woodland animal costumes and have group sex in “plushie piles.” All of these activities have their own culture, a network of people who speak a specific kind of lingo that outsiders don’t understand. I’m especially fascinated by subcultures that are deemed morally suspect or quasi-legal: the people who pursue their passion even if it means possible imprisonment or stigmatization by society. I can’t help it. I like the true believers. The fanatics.

My first nonfiction book was about the culture of cannabis connoisseurs and the underground botanists who source heirloom varietals of marijuana from all over the world. Cannabis culture has a rich history filled with colorful characters. These are men and women who defy oppressive antidrug laws and good-naturedly don’t give a fuck about societal norms. It wasn’t much of a leap for me to become intrigued by the world of nudism. Or as my wife said, “First you’re stoned all the time and now you’re going to be naked? Why can’t you write a book about cheese? You like cheese.”

The loudspeaker on the ship crackled to life and the cruise director added a caveat: “I would like to remind you that you must wear a cover-up in the dining areas.”

Which didn’t really keep anyone from being naked in the dining areas. Or in the bars. Or anywhere for that matter. They were naked on deck and in the screening room, the library, the casino, and the buffet line. Nudists crowded around the piano bar and requested songs by Elton John and Billy Joel. The large theater where stage shows were presented was filled with naked men and women. They were in the elevators, walking down the corridors, playing Ping-Pong, lifting weights in the gym, and guzzling cocktails by the pool.

In the fitness center someone asked the ship’s in-house yoga teacher if people had to wear clothes in the yoga classes. The teacher gave her a curious look and then, as the true reality of the question sunk in—what I can only imagine was the image of a roomful of naked people doing down dog flashing through her head—her face bloomed in panic and she said, “Oh yeah. In the class. Clothes. You have to wear clothes.”

But other than the yoga class, everywhere you looked, testicles and breasts hung low and pendulous, swaying side to side as the boat rocked in the open ocean; billows of bulbous flesh spilling off torsos, flowing earthward like the goop inside a lava lamp. The entire human body presented in all its natural nature was unavoidably on display.

I was sitting at what was called the Ocean Bar that first evening when I overheard a man, a silver-haired smoothy, complain loudly that there were too many old people on the cruise.II “I’m guessing the median age is sixty-five,” he said. He was sixty-two.

When old people complain that there are too many old people, then you really know there are too many old people.

Most of the passengers were retirees and most of them were American. Which is to say that there were a lot of overweight people strutting around in their birthday suits. That they did so unself-consciously, without any hint of the neurotic body obsession that has created generations of diet-obsessed, bulimic, anorexic, or just plain miserable people, was something that I found almost inspirational. They weren’t ashamed of their bodies, they seemed to accept themselves and one another for who they are and what they were, and, best of all, they had fun doing it.

Not all of them were retired. I met a Harvard professor, a radiologist, a tool salesman, and a couple of people serving in the armed forces. There were pharmaceutical sales reps, retail clerks, photographers, scientists, doctors, corporate executives, teachers, lawyers, paralegals, and people who really didn’t want to talk about work while they were on vacation.

And of course not everyone was fat and saggy. There was a large LGBT contingent who were on the healthy end of the body mass index, and there were some actual bona fide young people, trim and tattooed men and women in their twenties who clung together as if the naked retirees were harbingers of some sort of terrifying apocalypse. The naked twentysomethings gazed at the naked seventysomethings as if they could suddenly see the future, like a portal had opened in the time-space continuum and revealed a dystopian world where gravity and a sedentary lifestyle conspired to make everyone expand and sag. It was heartbreakingly inevitable. Perhaps this glimpse into the abyss explained some of the uninhibited alcohol consumption among the younger set.

The guests on the nude cruise were predominantly Caucasian, although there were a few South Asians, East Asians, and African Americans in the clothes-free contingent. They came from all over. Some were trying to escape the polar vortex that was bringing freezing wind and record snowfalls to cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Boston; others were from warm climates like Tampa, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego; nudists from Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas represented the heartland. There were foreign nudists too: Canadians from Toronto and Quebec, and real outliers, people from far-flung countries like Finland, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. All these people, coming all this way, for the express purpose of standing around on the lido deck of a cruise ship and letting it all hang out.

Some clutched their daily drink specials in fluorescent plastic cocktail glasses, some relaxed in chairs, others danced to the thumping sound system, a few cavorted in the hot tub, but most of them were just talking and laughing and being extremely friendly with one another.

And no one wore clothes.

What would make seemingly ordinary people spend thousands of dollars for the opportunity to waggle their penises around other waggling penises? What were they thinking? What’s the appeal? Were they getting some kind of exhibitionistic thrill? Or were they voyeurs? Did the topless women playing blackjack feel empowered? What was happening?

That’s what I was here to find out. The idea of eating a slice of pizza and drinking a beer naked on the deck of a cruise ship with hundreds of other naked people seemed bizarre to me. At the very least it made me uncomfortable; and I really like pizza and beer. But if I wanted to experience the culture of nudism, if I wanted to understand what made someone risk their job or their freedom or even their reputation to do this, well, I had to get naked like everybody else.

I “Nakation” is a portmanteau of “naked” and “vacation,” but you probably figured that out on your own.

II He had an alarming obsession with photographing women’s vulvas. To his credit, he always asked for permission.

Interview with a Nudist

Apparently, there are rules for being a nudist. It’s not enough to drop trou and waggle your genitals in the sunshine. That might be fun—or, depending where you are, get you arrested—but it’s not nudism. You can take off your clothes and run across a football field, but that’s not nudism, that’s streaking. Jump in a lake and frolic naked with several of your friends? That’s skinny-dipping. Fun, but not nudism. Even bathing in a Japanese onsen isn’t nudism. Sure you’re naked and with a bunch of other naked people in a hot spring, but after you’ve cleaned and soaked and refreshed in the cold plunge, you get dressed and go out for ramen. A nudist would eat noodles naked, with other naked people.

I am not a nudist. Except for a few occasions of teenage skinny-dipping, I have mostly kept my genitals covered. At least when I’m in public. I don’t practice “social nudism” or “backyard naturism” or any kind of nudism, really, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy being naked. I sleep in the nude, I take baths and showers in the nude, and I happily cavort au naturel in the privacy of my own bedroom. I’m not a prude; I just don’t hang around with other people without wearing some kind of clothing. Except for with my wife, but she’s used to me.

I have never felt an impulse to shed my clothes in public. In fact, I feel a strong compulsion to keep my clothes on and to be around other people who also keep their clothes on. I even try to wear a combination of clothing that approximates something I think of as style. You can blame it on social conditioning, but I know I’m not alone in this. The body image issues that advertising and media inoculated me with from an early age—those feelings of inadequacy, the fears of being ridiculed for being pudgy or hairy or circumcised or just, you know, uncool—are deeply embedded in my consciousness and shared by most of the people I know.

So what is a nudist? In his eccentric omnibus The Nudist Idea, historian Cec Cinder provides a kind of kitchen sink definition: “the nudist idea is the foundation of a distinct, entire and wholesome philosophy, one much, much larger in scope than simple collective nakedness, one that embraces sexual sanity, anti-militarism, good health, robust conditioning, inter-gender respect, political libertarianism, religious tolerance, animal rights, First Amendment political freedoms, population reduction and shrinking government and bureaucracies.”1

I’m not sure that nudism is about animal rights or population reduction or shrinking the size of the government— those sound like an author tacking on some political talking points—but then again, I’m just getting started looking at nudism; maybe it is all those things.

Social nudism came to the United States from Germany in 1929, and since that time various nudists and nudist groups have struggled to define what constitutes nudism. For some it’s a lifestyle choice that includes healthy eating habits, exercise, and an appreciation of nature. Others take a more philosophical view and look at nudism as a political stance against a repressive “textile-centric” society that promotes consumerism and rapacious capitalist growth at the expense of our environment and mental health. Some nudists like the fact that their bodies are accepted for how they really are and not what fashion and advertising say they should look like. Some folks just like the way it feels to relax in the sun without any clothes on.

But while various groups have different agendas and interpretations, they all pretty much agree that nudism is a social activity. If you’re alone without any clothes on, you’re just naked, but if you are in a mixed group of men and women engaged in the conscious practice of standing around in the buff, then you are a nudist practicing nudism.2

So why do some people like to get naked and hang out with other naked people? What’s the attraction? Is it some kind of primal urge? If society didn’t tell us we had to wear clothes, would we all just strip down and frolic in the fields?

My son Jules, when he was a toddler, used to race around the house wearing nothing but a small superhero cape made out of a counterfeit Hermès scarf. I would tie it around his neck and it seemed to propel him, like it gave him actual superpowers. He’d splutter rocket sounds as he ran, trying to go fast enough to make the scarf billow in his slipstream like a proper superhero’s cape. Sometimes he would turn his head to admire his cape as he ran, which was not always sensible, but the occasional collisions with furniture or walls or trees only seemed to make him more determined.

Naturally the cape was the only thing he wore and he refused to wear clothes when he was home. No shoes, no diaper, no T-shirt. It was hard to argue with him. We lived in Southern California and it wasn’t like he needed clothing to stay warm. So he ran and played and terrorized his older sister’s playdates and watched television wearing nothing more than his faux Hermès scarf. Was he just pretending to be a superhero? Or is it deeper than that? Is there some kind of innate impulse to be naked that society has shamed out of us?I Even in the Bible it says that Adam and Eve “were both naked, yet they felt no shame.” So, like, what happened? When did hanging out in the nude become illegal? When did it become something that only weirdos and hippies did?

I decided that a good place to start was to talk to a real red-blooded card-carrying American nudist, so I arranged an interview with prominent American naturist Mark Storey and bought a ticket to Seattle. Not only is Mark Storey a board member of the Naturist Action Committee and founding member of the Body Freedom Collaborative, a group that advocates for clothing-optional beaches and started World Naked Gardening Day, but he’s also an editor at N, The Magazine of Naturist Living, and author of the book Cinema Au Naturel: A History of Nudist Film and editor of Theatre au Naturel: A Collection of Naturist Plays. In addition to that, he’s written prolifically on the history of nudism, civil disobedience, and legal issues involving public nudity.

In other words: he’s a nudist’s nudist.

…

Seattle is, on a good day, a cool and drippy climate; a place where lichen grows abundantly, the flora is lush and verdant, and the light is tinged with a soft gray quality—one of those subtle, almost institutional colors, like something you might find on the walls of the Swedish Institute for Depression Studies. I used to live in Seattle so I came prepared for a certain amount of moisture. But an unusual cold front had moved in and temperatures had dropped to near freezing. I tightened my scarf and pulled my beanie down over my ears as I stood shivering in the drizzle at a bus stop, wondering how many days a nudist in the Pacific Northwest gets to be outdoors without developing hypothermia.

Storey had agreed to meet me at Bauhaus Books and Coffee, a groovy espresso bar stuck in a kind of no-man’s-land between Seattle’s downtown and the hip Capitol Hill neighborhood. To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect from this meeting. Would he be some kind of freaky evangelist for nudism? The Johnny Appleseed of skinny-dipping, the Che Guevara of weenie wagging? Would he be wearing clothes? Worse, would he insist I take my clothes off to interview him? It was way too cold for that.

I found the coffee shop without a problem; in fact I used to live a couple of blocks away, but that was years ago, when the word “barista” was just a twinkle in some marketing executive’s eye. Bauhaus has large windows that face the street and let in enough light to keep you from feeling that you’re going to get seasonal affective disorder and a wall of shelves that give the place a Goth library vibe. It also has a second floor, a loftlike space, which is where I found Mark Storey sitting at a table, surrounded by stylish young people sipping coffee and staring intently at digital devices.

Storey has a handsome, expressive face, and he shifts easily between open laughter and thoughtful introspection. He is also tall, six foot three, which makes him a large nudist. And for someone whose day job is teaching philosophy at a local college, he looks like he’s pretty athletic.

“I got into the cliché nudist volleyball, and started touring western states doing the nudist volleyball tournaments. That was fun.”

Apparently the bump, set, and spike used to be quite popular among nudists.

“Oh yeah. I have gotten to referee the National Nudist Women’s Volleyball Tournament. That is something no one can take away from me. That was an amazing thing.”

I can’t tell if he’s joking or serious, until I realize he’s both. Although being a nude volleyball player is not without perils, as illustrated when Storey described the hiring process for his current teaching position.

“The very week that I’m going through the interview process, getting my first full-time job at a school I really wanted to teach at, the magazine I work for decided at that time to put me on the cover, full frontal, blocking the volleyball. It was the volleyball issue. I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to screw me up so bad.’”

“Maybe they didn’t look at your face,” I suggested.

He shrugged. “Later, I’m chair of the department and I’m having to deal with an adjunct instructor. I take him out to lunch, we’re chatting. He tells me his tale of woe or whatever. It was all academic stuff. And then he said, ‘Well, it’s nothing like your story.’ I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘Well, the magazine. You with the volleyball cover.’ I said, ‘You know about that?’ And he says, ‘Everybody knew about that!’”

“Maybe that kind of thing is expected from philosophers.”

He smiled. “I work with some cool people.”

We paused and sipped our coffees. I had to admit that Bauhaus made a pretty good cup. Fortified with a jolt of caffeine, I cut to the chase.

“So how did you get into naturism? I’m assuming you didn’t wake up one morning and decide to stop wearing clothes.”

Storey laughed. “Everybody’s got their own story, but for me, my dad would take my brother and me fishing in the Sierra mountains. My dad was totally cheap. If we hooked a lure on a log in the stream, we had to go get it. For the first few years, I would do it, but I’d be all wet the rest of the day.” He paused and took another sip of coffee. “We were out in the boondocks, there was nobody around. And one time I decided I’m going to take my jeans and shirt off to go in. As soon as I got in the water, because I’m in sixth, seventh grade, I’m thinking, ‘This is the coolest thing in the world.’ I started hooking lures like crazy thereafter, just so I could go in there and go capture them. My dad could not figure out why I was snagging lures all the time. Then, of course, I got to sit out and dry off. ‘While I’m sitting here drying off, might as well go explore the forest.’” He sipped his coffee. “This is as a teenager.”

“You just did it because it felt good?”

He nodded. “Then I think when I was about twenty, I remember this vividly. I was laying in bed on a Saturday morning, thinking, ‘I want to do something I’ve never done before.’ Don’t have a clue what it would be. Wash the dishes, anything. Then I thought, ‘I’ll go to a nudist camp.’”

His early lure retrieval sounds a lot like my son’s cape wearing. “Do you think there’s kind of an innate impulse in people to be naked?” I asked.

He paused, shifting in his seat before answering. “I do, but I haven’t seen it written anywhere and I haven’t written it myself yet. But I do. I have come to believe this. This just comes out of my Aristotelian totalism, if you will. I just love Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Confucius. These guys would say that we’re fundamentally, essentially social beings. Natural beings. I think once people start skinny-dipping, particularly with others—I’m not talking about sexual situations, but particularly with nonsexualized social nudity—I think people are opening themselves to each other in a way that is incredibly, almost lifesaving for some.”

I admit I was skeptical of this. I cocked an eyebrow. “Social nudity saves lives?”

Storey nodded. “I’ve seen them start crying. They can just feel this big release, because they feel alienated. I actually think that social nudity can reduce alienation, and to the degree we’re less alienated from one another, we’re able to flourish as human beings.”

I realized he was being totally serious. I tried to imagine a bunch of naked people sitting around sobbing—which just sounds like something ripped from my nightmares—while he continued. “Not that I need to be naked to flourish. That would be absurd. That’s kind of like broccoli. You don’t need broccoli for health, but it’s a contributing factor towards health, and I think that social nudity can be a contributing factor towards de-alienation.”

I’m not sure being naked with other people will make me feel less alienated, in fact I think it would make me feel even more alienated, so I ask him to clarify what he means.

“A lot of the makeup we wear, the clothes we put on, is just to hide who we are. We don’t like who we are so we have to hide things from other people.”

That reminded me of a convention I attended once in Philadelphia where I saw herds of men and women, all looking uniform and comfortably corporate in primary-colored polo shirts sporting identical logos. They had ceased to look like individuals and had become extensions of corporate branding strategies. Add in the penchant for khakis and cell phone holsters and suddenly a pod-people Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario emerges.

Of course the flip side of logo wear is the label-spouting snobbery of fashionistas who define who they are by the cost of the clothes on their backs.

I found myself agreeing with Mark Storey about a lot of things. He is persuasive. People do hide themselves, their true selves, in the clothes they wear. Uniforms are a good example. They identify a person’s role in society, not as an individual, but as a police officer or firefighter or soldier or FedEx delivery woman.

I can see why clothing can be alienating or, at the very least, depersonalizing, but does shedding your clothes really de-alienate you?

“Certainly. If you just drop trou and walk a hundred yards out in the woods, you’ll feel closer to nature.”

Or closer to being arrested for indecent exposure.

Storey continued. “I believe it’s kind of grounded in our nature as social beings, that this openness to others, when it’s in a safe, comforting kind of context, it can kind of be life affirming. Whether people recognize it or not, I actually think that’s oftentimes what’s happening. Everyone who’s been skinny-dipping the first time says it’s absolutely fabulous.”

“I like to skinny-dip,” I said.

Which is a bit of an exaggeration, to be honest. What I really mean is that I enjoyed skinny-dipping with my high school girlfriend at a lake near where I grew up in Kansas City, but then I was seventeen and madly in lust and probably would’ve walked across hot coals or handled rattlesnakes if it meant I got to be naked with her. But I don’t tell this to Storey.

He leaned forward and looked at me. I could sense a philosophical inquiry coming on.

“Well, why do you like it?”

I started to answer, but he interrupted. “Yeah, there’s a kind of surface physicality. It’s sensuous, it’s pleasant. But there are a lot of things that are sensual and pleasant that we don’t put our jobs on the line for, or put friendships on the line for. Somehow this is more important to a lot of people. I’ve been trying for years to figure out what it is. Why do people actually do this kind of stuff and put that much on the line for it. You can go to jail. Montana can give you life imprisonment for skinny-dipping a third time.”

He’s not joking about Montana’s laws. A first offense can get you up to six months in jail, a second offense up to a year, and by the time you’ve been caught with your pants off a third time, the minimum sentence is five years, with the possibility of life in prison.

I took a sip of my coffee and looked around at all the twentysomething hipsters staring at their digital screens. They didn’t seem interested in connecting with other people, not in the flesh anyway. Their brows were furrowed in concentration, and it occurred to me that having two boisterous dudes talking about frolicking naked in the sunshine while they sat in the chill and gloom of a January afternoon in Seattle might have a disturbing effect on their ability to focus.

I turned back to Storey. “Humans are sensual beings, your skin is a sense organ, so isn’t nudism more of a kind of hedonism?” I am not ashamed to admit that I am a hedonist, not in a self-indulgent sense, but in the classic definition of hedonism as the belief that pleasure and happiness are the highest good. That means that I find as much or more happiness in a good cup of coffee or a fresh mango or a walk in the park as some people feel when they make a lot of money or their team wins the championship. Simple pleasure is underrated. In fact I’m considering joining Hedonist International.3

I looked at Storey. “I mean that as a good thing.”

He nodded. “There can be that. It can be good or bad. It can go either way. But if what we truly are is rational, social beings, like Aristotle would say, then anything that is allowing me to develop my rational nature and develop my social nature is going to be prima facie good. Anything that keeps me from socializing with people in a good way would be alienating me from others.”

“So you’re saying the impulse to be naked is more of a social impulse, not a personal one?”

“If we do have an essential nature of being social, and clothing does do something towards alienating us from each other, nudity helps break down alienation. I think that’s why so many people like it. Whether they recognize that’s why they like it or not.”

He took a sip of coffee before he looked at me, almost apologetically.

“This isn’t a developed argument, but you asked. I don’t know of anybody else saying that. Usually you get the most naive, dingbat answers, like, ‘I’m doing this because it’s a sense of freedom.’ Freedom from what? To what?” He held out his hands and shrugged. “Usually it’s just a cliché people heard once.”

As I’ve begun to look into why people would want to take off their clothes and socialize with other people who want to take off their clothes, I’ve heard all the clichés. The freedom that nudism theoretically provides is freedom from the paradigm of body image worship that the culture has foisted on us, the bullshit that tells people that their worth as humans depends on how young, fit, and beautiful they are. Multibillion-dollar-a-year mega-industries that constantly remind us through carpet-bombing advertisements that we need to remove unwanted hair, bleach our teeth with laser beams, suck unwanted fat deposits out of our bodies with liposuction, insert saline pouches into our breasts, and go on the Paleo diet, the South Beach diet, the Atkins diet, and whatever new diet someone will invent next. The last thing the diet-industrial complex needs is a bunch of de-alienated people with positive body images. Maybe taking off your clothes and frolicking in the forest can dislodge the cultural brainwash that makes so many people so completely miserable.

I looked at Storey. “I don’t want to sound cynical but do you think that’s really the reason people enjoy being naked?”

He shrugged. “The answer could be rich. It could be different for different people.”

I Even though he now lives in San Francisco, Jules no longer runs naked through the streets in a superhero cape. At least, not to my knowledge.

Skin in the Game

I don’t know where the expression “skin in the game” comes from, but if I was going to get an understanding of nudist culture I’d have to be willing to visit nudist resorts and clothing-optional beaches in my birthday suit. Despite whatever awkwardness I might feel being naked in front of other naked people and then doing whatever it is that naked people do when they’re naked together, I was also going to be exposed in another way; I’d be putting some skin in the game. Specifically, my pasty-pink, easily sunburned skin.

There’s a reason why I slather on sunscreen before driving to the grocery store and why I prefer to go to the beach and watch a sunset rather than go in the middle of the day. The old Coppertone ad that said, “Tan … don’t burn,” doesn’t seem to apply to me. All I do is burn.

I wondered if I had any kind of genetic disposition, any built-in protection, against chronic sunburn, so I drooled into a tube provided by the recreational genetic testing company 23andMe and sent the saliva to a lab. Despite a promising start—I was 0.7 percent Native American and in a subgroup of E1b1b1a, which meant I had a distant connection to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula—it turned out that my ancestors were predominantly British, Irish, and “non-specific Northern European.” Which meant I needed some professional advice before I dropped trou in broad daylight.

I live in northeast Los Angeles, not far from downtown and the hipster enclave of Highland Park. My dermatologist used to have her office in Pasadena, just a quick ten-minute drive from my house, but she’s since moved, so I made an appointment to see her and schlepped across town, toward the ocean and her office in Pacific Palisades.

I’m not a huge fan of doctors, I have to say—I typically go to a Chinese doctor, an acupuncturist, for any medical issues—but I really like my dermatologist. Dr. Dana Jo Grenier has a wry sense of humor, she’s funny and fun to talk to, but she also has the kind of detail-obsessed personality that you often find with people who run long distances as fast as they can for fun. Which she used to do. She still looks like a long-distance runner, she’s lean and wiry, and when she puts on her magnifying glasses to examine your skin, she looks a bit like a praying mantis.

As I took off my clothes for the exam—I didn’t know at the time that this would mark the beginning of a year of undressing in front of people—I explained what I was planning to do. She laughed and shook her head.

“When I was first starting out we had a patient who was a nudist and he liked to do headstands in his backyard.”

She began examining me, putting her face a few inches from my body, slowly scrutinizing my dermis like a Belgian diamond appraiser examining a stone.

“How long can someone stand on their head in the sun?”

She lifted my arm and stared at it.

“Long enough to develop squamous cell carcinoma on the underside of his scrotum.”

She said this matter-of-factly, as if it’s information she’s just passing along and not some kind of freaky cautionary tale. I wondered how someone could get a sunburn on the underside of his scrotum and then go out the next day and do it again and again. Isn’t once enough? Isn’t a toasted nutsack a warning sign?

I tried to remain calm. “I’m not planning on doing any inversions in the sun. I’m not even planning on laying out in the sun.”

She lifted her magnifying goggles and gave me a twisted smile that was a mix of bemusement and genuine concern. “That’s good because genital skin is extremely sensitive.”

Which is sort of the point of genital skin, am I right? But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “I’ve got that spray-on sunscreen. I can cover all sensitive areas.”

She nodded. “Remember the spray comes out as particles. You’ve got to rub it on. And you need at least SPF 30.”

She made a note in my file, which I’m guessing recommended I seek psychiatric help, and then looked at me. “And reapply every two hours.”

…

In my personal hierarchy of the arbitrary importance of organs, I usually think of the brain or heart or genitals as my most important organ depending on what I’m doing at the time. But if I really think about it, skin is the most interesting organ. It’s the biggest and, no offense to the spleen, most aesthetically pleasing. Skin function is complex: it’s relatively durable and protects us from germs and infection, it holds our guts inside our skeleton, it stretches to accommodate us through our daily grind of bends and twists and exertions, and it’s a profoundly acute sense organ.

While the collective attributes of skin are important— most people would say that keeping our organs inside our body was enough—it’s our sense of touch that gives meaning and value to the world. We are sensual animals. We like textures. We place a premium on things that feel good. Cashmere, silk, and Egyptian cotton are valuable commodities not because they smell nice or taste good, but because of how soft they feel against our skin. Pressing your skin against someone else’s skin generally feels good and our brain takes this sensation and gives it emotion. Touch creates intimacy. It’s how babies bond with their parents.

Which makes it kind of weird that we spend so much of our lives keeping our skin covered. We are born naked and before we even take our first breath we are swaddled, bound up in cloth as if our skin might somehow peel off if it makes contact with air. It’s our first barrier to intimacy and connection, and it sets in motion a progression of textiles, through diapers and jumpers to dresses and jeans, until we attain adulthood and proudly hang the symbols of modern civilization, Coco Chanel’s Little Black Dress or a classic Navy Blazer, in our closet. Then comes a series of jeans and khakis and skirts and capris and pajamas and bathrobes until we finally get around to kicking the bucket and are laid to rest in our Sunday best or wrapped in a shroud and immolated.

No wonder babies are born screaming.

No wonder we are obsessed with skin.

Western society equates skin with sex. When we’re consciously trying to be sexy, we wear clothes that “hug our bodies” and “show some skin.” Plunging necklines, backless dresses, miniskirts, and fishnet stockings all reveal ample amounts of skin and are considered evocative of sexuality. Our celebrity culture feeds on flesh; hemlines and cleavage and nipple slips are analyzed and dissected by pundits on television and in magazines. People are judged by how much skin they show and how they show it. And in Los Angeles, people are judged by their tattoos and how they show them. It’s skin as mobile art gallery.

The dark side of this is when a woman who is “showing some skin” is sexually assaulted and then accused of “asking for it” because of the way she was dressed. On January 24, 2011, a law enforcement officer in Toronto, Canada, famously advised victims of sexual assault to “avoid dressing like sluts.” Which is a stupid thing to say, obviously, and launched a wave of protests called “slut walks,” where women march against victim blaming and “slut shaming” by dressing however the hell they want. If you listen to what the fashion industry says, what the media tells us, what the obsession with self-portraits plastered on social media reveals, then you could be brainwashed into believing that looking sexy is the ultimate achievement of a human being alive in the twenty-first century. But if something bad happens to you, it’s your fault because of the way you were dressed. That is a fucked-up kind of thinking.

Strip away the marketing campaigns designed to sell you stuff for your skin, ignore the television ads and reality programs where showing skin is a sign of sexuality, and look at skin as the simple sense organ it is, and you quickly realize that skin is the gateway to hedonism. Of course it is. Skin looks good, it feels good; you want to touch it, you want to be touched. Which explains why some societies find it threatening; too much skin is too much connection, too much intimacy, too much sex. I think of the burka and niqab as examples of extreme anti-skin apparel, though to be fair, every culture has dress codes.