Nakedness

There's a kind of animal self-consciousness and embarrassment about nakedness that seems to appear more or less spontaneously in human children around the age of 5 or 6, and that usually wanes and disappears in the teenage years. 

For some people, though, especially in American culture, this fear of nakedness persists into adulthood — all too many American adults would be mortified at the thought of appearing naked at a nude beach, for example.  In Europe, by contrast, you can see often whole families going naked on a beach, and they don't seem any more or less sexual than they would if dressed in the skimpy bathing suits you'd see on American beaches.

I remember a time when I was a child when you could be put in jail for displaying a frontal picture of a naked person — it was a terrible crime!  The idea of visible genitalia really scared a lot of people, and still does, although now, thank goodness, most people growing up have the opportunity to see pictures of naked bodies.  At least our anatomy is no longer considered a mystery or a state secret that you need a security clearance to get access to. 

Americans still have a classic primitive taboo against nudity, though — it may be completely irrational, but it's very strong.  Plenty of us would literally be terrified to take our clothes off in public, without being able to tell you why.  At the same time, plenty of the same people are quite willing to be seen in public in bathing suits that reveal their bodies almost completely.

How about you — have you ever been naked with a large group of people?  If not, how do you think it would feel?  Would people be looking at you funny?  Would people be assuming you were open to sex just because you were nude?  Would it be humiliating?  Would you feel less attractive than other people, or more timid and less cool? 

These are the kinds of fears that keep us from trying it.  And yet, many people have become annoyed at the artificial restriction and have gone to quite a lot of trouble to step outside it.  In the past, that required setting up special "nudist" or "naturist" communities to provide safe environments for people to experiment with going naked whenever and wherever they chose.  I've known a number of people, some of them quite conservative, who have found attending a naturist event amazingly, shockingly liberating and eye-opening. 

The funny thing is, of course, it's completely different than you expect and fear.  I've seen a lot of naked people (real people, not pictures or models or movie stars), and they have all looked just as nice with their clothes off as on, or nicer.  For one thing, men and women seem much more alike when naked than when clothed — you realize that we accentuate differences in gender in artifical ways using clothing, even skimpy bathing suits.  This is also true of subtle and not-so-subtle class markers which vanish when we take our clothes off. 

For another thing, when you see people together of all different ages, heights, weights, proportions and genders, you realize there really isn't one perfect way to look — everyone looks good in different ways.  You'd think that a person with a "great body" might look much better naked than a person who was overweight, but without clothes every body reveals its own logic, and tends to look sort of right.  A great body tends to blend in with the rest much more than when clothed. 

Also, being naked together is not erotic in the way you might suppose.  You kind of realize in your gut (as opposed to in your head) that people are physical wholes.  All those individual parts of the body that we tend to get obsessed about — cocks, breasts, balls, nipples, labia, butts or whatever — are all seamlessly connected to the rest of a person, and they seem strangely less important than you ever realize when they're covered up and fetishized. 

You might think, for example, that a horny boy talking to an attractive naked girl would have a very hard time taking his eyes off her nipples bobbing around in front of him.  Initially, that does seem to be the case, but after a while, even the horniest of boys seem to comprehend on a visceral level that what's going on in a girl's face is much sexier and more important than anything about her breasts, no matter how beautiful they may be.  When they're all covered up and teasing you, everyone seems to want to steal peek after peek, but when they're right there in front of you, it seems to become clear to most people that once you've seen them, you don't have to keep checking back. 

This kind of experience is liberating to both women and men.  Women realize that they can be naked without being any more vulnerable to male aggression than if they were clothed, and possibly even less.  Being female is not as hazardous as the patriarchs would have you believe.  Some people with body issues finally really begin to understand that their own bodies are not deformed or unattractive by admiring the beauty of other people's bodies. 

Men are generally relieved to discover that they haven't been missing out on some essential mystery all their lives by not being able to see lots of women naked. 

And everyone has the opportunity to grasp how much we all resemble each other, how amazingly superficial our differences in age, gender, shape and race really are. 

Group nakedness is lovely, so if you're drawn to explore it, seek out a nude beach or naturist facility near you, or if you're pagan, attend one of the large festivals at which reputable groups lead large public "skyclad" rituals.