The Wall

At Odds with Nudist Rhetoric

Polyphemus and Galatea, circa 50-79 CE, Pompeii

Reader, I keep hitting a wall. I keep hitting a wall, stumbling back, recentering myself, and then running straight back into it. I keep expecting the wall to be different this time, but it keeps being the same old wall and I keep feeling both bruised from the impact and disappointed in myself for not learning my lesson.

I have been writing this blog for nearly six years now, and throughout that time have been more or less engaged in the nudist community in a variety of ways, including on social media. For better or worse, the nudist social media sphere has come to represent an important gathering place for this community. Through it, I have met countless new nudist friends, some of whom I have even met in person thanks to getting to know each other virtually first. Through it, I have had a great many conversations, learned new things, collaborated on plans and strategies to help the nudist movement, and, I hope, contributed something thoughtful and positive to this community. I have also had my fair share of struggles, disagreements, hurt feelings, and disappointments, which is to be expected in any community. All of that aside, there has been this nagging, recurring, unmoving wall that I keep hitting, blocking my path forward whether I recognized it or not. But I see it now, and I think I can identify it for what it is.

Now that I have identified it, it’s probably about time for me to reassess my values, my beliefs, and my worldview and whether those are compatible the nudist and naturist community. Until then, though, let me let you in on what exactly this wall is.

This wall is the one that we have built around the nudist and naturist community, around nudist and naturist philosophy, between what is and is not nudist or naturist. It’s the wall between us and them, between our values and their values, and even at times between good and bad, between right and wrong as it pertains to how we view, use, describe, enjoy, and value our own and each others’ bodies. Despite being a community that embraces nudity and a way of life that eschews the shame associated with the human body, even nudists cannot escape a need to draw lines around what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t. Nudists and naturists, too, have a nuanced and burdened relationship with nudity, one that prioritizes celebrating the human body but one that also struggles with society’s tendency to conflate nudity with sex and struggles to adapt to an ever-changing world. Because of this perceived need to distance ourselves from the sexual side of nakedness, much of nudist philosophy and of our community values as a whole is colored by this negative relationship to sexuality. We cheerfully, eagerly, desperately claim to be able to enjoy nudity without all those societal hangups around sex! And yet we cannot stop talking about sex, about how glad we are to be free from its grips, how nice it is to enjoy nudity that isn’t sexualized, how wonderful it is to be lustless.

I am just not buying it. An enlightened people does not behave like this. This isn’t liberation from sex, it just feels like obsession with sex. And it’s seemingly everywhere in this community.

I have not been spending much time on nudist social media recently. I still check in to see what’s new, what people are talking about, what’s on everyone’s mind, what events are happening here or there. But I struggle to engage with it. Today when I logged into X (formerly Twitter), the first text post that came across my feed, wedged between a couple of pirated soft-core beach voyeur photos passed off as nudist content, was from a nudist exclaiming that “the body is NOT sexual!” That was pretty much the whole message, but it was followed by a host of other posts from nudists who similarly could not help but tie their enjoyment of nudity to a negative message about sex: Some passive aggressive comment about pornography; something about Only Fans; something about sinfulness; some other message describing nonsexual nudity as healthy and good and natural, things that I guess sexual nudity cannot be. Look, yeah, you don’t have to tell me because I already know that nonsexual nudity is cool and fun and perfectly healthy, and I know that this messaging is meant to persuade folks who see nudity as inherently dirty, folks who don't understand that nudity can be enjoyed without it being sexual. But, as someone who has been part of this community for years and years, I am starting to feel like this constant denigration of sex and sexuality is having a negative impact on my own enjoyment and appreciation for the sexual side of nudity. And it’s not healthy or cool or good. It’s making me feel disconnected from myself, from my body.

“The body is NOT sexual!” that post read. But I must protest. Because I cannot follow this path if that is truly the guiding philosophy of the nudist movement, if that’s the main message we’re hitching ourselves to. The human body is sexual. Like every other mammalian body, the human body has whole organs dedicated to sex. Millions of years of evolution—or, depending on your beliefs, God Himself—gave us bodies that other humans would find desirable; gave us minds that desired the bodies of others; hard-wired us to seek out sex, lots and lots of sex; and made sex highly pleasurable so that we could and would enjoy it even when procreation was not the goal. We’re not even unique in the animal kingdom, as it turns out a great many other animals also are biologically designed to enjoy having sex. Pair that enjoyment of sex with our big old brains and our ability to use tools and it’s no surprise we’ve been engraving vulvas into cave walls, carving sexy little statuettes out of stone, painting orgies onto plates, and drawing penises on bathroom stall walls for tens of thousands of years—or more, who knows? Too bad those prehistoric cave people didn’t have any nudists around to tell them how dirty and wrong it is to view the human body in a sexual way. Too bad the Ancient Greeks didn’t know about the rules of nudism, or they could have spared us their porn vases. But it’s a good thing we have nudism now, to remind us that sexuality is bad. Whew!

Vulva carved into a cave wall, Southern France, circa 35000 BCE

In all seriousness, by now we should all be mature enough and educated enough to admit that pornography is in our nature, just as much as sex is. I am growing very weary of nudists picking this anti-pornography, anti-sexuality crusade as the hill they want to die on, instead of just enjoying themselves and minding their business. I am tired of those nudists who defend these stances as being necessary for the protection of nudist spaces. That’s just not true. Though previous experience has demonstrated otherwise, I am just going to reluctantly hope that you will receive these next words in good faith and not interpret them to mean that I think nudist clubs should start hosting orgies and turning a blind eye to sexual behavior: Nudists do not need to hold and recite unhealthy attitudes about sex and sexuality in order to maintain peace, order, and a non-sexual atmosphere within their own gatherings. It does not need to be this complicated.

By now you’re probably thinking, “Wait, haven’t I heard this guy gripe about nudist attitudes about sex before?” To which I can gleefully respond, yes! You have! I’ve written about it quite a bit actually! In my piece called, “But Is It Naturism?” I called attention to nudists’ weird prudery when it comes to discussing LGBTQ nudists and shed light on nudists’ difficulty distinguishing between sexuality, nudity, and nudism. In “A Sexless Paradise*” I looked at the ways that the words nudists use to describe sex and sexuality can be off-putting and how the insistence on distancing the nudist movement from the sexual liberation movement is counterproductive. On a more historical note, my piece called, “Scapegoating the Nude Beach” takes a look at how anti-sex and anti-nudity views have harmed the nudist community, including those anti-sex views held within the nudist community. And yet, this is the wall I keep running into: A nudist movement that has not figured out how to maturely reconcile its righteous advocacy for the acceptance and celebration of nonsexual, social nudity with the simple truth that sex and sexuality are parts of human nature that can also be healthy, can also be good, can also be cool and fun and worth celebrating… that these two things do not need to be at odds with one another, that there is room for both and more.

This wall has been a recurring theme in my writing, in my social media rants, and in my private message frustrations. Looking back at these old posts now, I can see myself running headfirst into it over and over and over, wishing it would budge, wishing we could collectively take a wiser and more worldly approach.

Bodies are made to be sexual, among many other things. And nudists are right to point out all of those other things, because we as a society need the reminder. Bodies are also made to run, made to swim, made to paint and play and climb and sing and embrace and hunt and cook and eat. They are made to lie around all day, made to dream, made to sit by a fire, made to tell stories. But, yeah, they’re also made to make babies, made to make love, made to feel pleasure of all kinds. It’s weird to pretend otherwise. It’s weird to have such a narrow view of the world and of humanity, especially while touting a philosophy of enlightenment and community.

If the goal of the nudist movement is to imagine a world where people could develop a healthy view of the human body, one where they do not have to feel objectified or sexualized, where they could feel empowered to get to know one another without the stigmas and rules of society dividing us, then I hope that this righteous vision does not necessarily come at the cost of another important piece of our humanity, that it does not ask us to sacrifice our sexuality as payment for breaking social boundaries. That’s not a payment I am willing to make, but it’s one I now realize that I have been paying—a hidden toll on this road, so to speak. The core tenets of the nudist philosophy are indeed worthwhile and I hold them dearly, but I strongly believe that connection with nature, with oneself, and with one another can and must be achieved without pushing sex negativity, without touting the delusional, harmful trope that sex is at odds with health or goodness, without giving into the narrative that sexuality is a menace to society. If that’s the only path that the nudist community today has to offer, then I am struggling to see a place for myself on that path.

At the moment, I am not feeling liberated by the nudist movement, just bound by some new restraint. On my nudist path, I just… see a wall.