The Word For It
For many years I massaged men privately, one at a time, in a room I controlled entirely, and those men took their clothes off when they arrived, and I worked with them, and then they dressed again and left. I have thought about those years at length—the men, the variety of what they brought into the room with them, the ordinariness and the strangeness of what I did—but one thing I keep returning to is not a man or a memory. It is a vocabulary problem.
English offers an extraordinary number of alternatives. They line up willingly, each with its own character, its own social weather. None of them, I have found, describes the thing I kept seeing, which was a man in a room, no clothes, no arrangement, the whole weight of himself simply present.
Unclothed is the word paperwork uses. It arrived in my world via the careful language men used in emails before they arrived: “I’m comfortable being unclothed.” The word performs a kind of hygiene. It lifts the condition out of the body and into the administrative. A man described as unclothed has been processed; the word has dealt with the nakedness by putting it behind glass. I used it sometimes in written communication because it was the word that asked least of the person reading, but I never used it in my head. In my head the language was always messier and more direct.
Undressed implies a process interrupted. The word belongs to transitions—you are dressed, then undressing, then undressed—as if the state is temporary, as if the clothes are about to go back on. Many men did treat their nakedness this way: transactional, bracketed, a condition entered and exited without lingering. They were undressed for the duration and then dressed again, and the word captures something true about how they experienced those hours. But other men settled into their nakedness quite differently, and for them undressed was wrong—it kept pointing at the clothes that weren’t there rather than the body that was.
Without clothes is the longest circumlocution and the most honest, in a way, about its own evasiveness. It names the absence. It defines the state by what it lacks, which means that somewhere in the logic of the phrase, the clothed body is the real body and this one is a deviation from it. I noticed this structure in the language before I noticed it in anything else, because I spent so much time with men for whom the clothed body was, in fact, the performance and the naked one was what remained when the performance stopped. For those men, without clothes was the wrong direction. They were not without anything. They had simply arrived.
In the buff, the altogether, starkers. These carry a specific atmosphere I recognise from the conversations men had with themselves before they arrived. Lightness. A decision to treat the whole thing as something a little funny, a little daring, something that a well-adjusted adult male does without making a fuss. “I’m fine in the buff,” they would say, or “I’ll be in the altogether, that’s fine with me.” The phrase put the speaking man in a category of easy men, unstuffy men, men who didn’t make a production of it. Sometimes this was entirely accurate—some men were genuinely easy, and their bodies carried that ease like a quality of light. But sometimes I noticed the phrase working as preparation, as something rehearsed to carry the man across a threshold he wasn’t quite sure about. Starkers was slightly different: younger men used it, men performing a particular kind of laddish unconcern. It was the word for a man who wanted you to know he wasn’t embarrassed even if he was.
Bare is a partial word. You are bare-chested, bare-legged, bare-armed—bare operates on sections and does not take the whole. When men used it they usually meant their torso, their skin under my hands, the texture and warmth of what I was working with. “I like being bare,” one man said to me, and I knew he meant something precise about sensation rather than about his whole condition. Bare is a tactile word, which made it accurate for some of what happened in that room. It just couldn’t carry the whole person.
Stripped carries performance or violence. In erotic language it is theatrical—a man is stripped, something is removed from him, there is a before and an after. In medical and forensic language it is something more alarming: stripped of clothing, stripped of dignity, stripped to the essentials. Neither meaning fits the ordinary reality of what I saw, which was men who simply took their clothes off and folded them or dropped them. One man always folded his clothes with extraordinary care, shirt and trousers squared and placed on the chair, and the precision of that ritual told me more about him than almost anything else. He was not stripped. He was doing something specific and deliberate. The word stripped would have taken all of that away.
Exposed is the one that caught me most often, because it was the one I could see men feeling without knowing they felt it. To be exposed is to have something revealed that was previously hidden, and many men—not all, but many—carried their nakedness in my room as a form of revelation rather than a neutral physical state. What showed, without the clothes, was various: the actual shape of a body different from how clothes suggested it, yes, but also something less nameable, a quality of presence or vulnerability or relief that the clothed body had been managing against. Some men were visibly eased by the removal of their clothes. Others visibly braced. Exposed did something none of the other words quite did—it acknowledged that nakedness could be an event rather than just a condition.
But exposed also implies an observer who causes the exposure, and that was where the word got complicated for me. I did not expose anyone. Men chose to come, chose to undress, controlled the whole event from their side. The word exposed risks making the naked body the passive party in a dynamic where, in my experience, agency was considerably more distributed than that.
Au naturel is French and carries with it the implication that the naked state is simply what nature intended, which is philosophically interesting and practically useless as a description of what I worked with. The men in that room were not in a state of nature. They were in a room in an English city, on a table with oil and towels, having made an appointment. Au naturel proposes an innocence that was almost never the actual atmosphere. What there was instead was something more textured: an agreement between two adults about what was going to happen, and the particular quality of attention that agreement produced.
Not properly dressed belongs to another era entirely, to a time when nakedness was a proprietary failure as much as a physical condition. The phrase gestures at clothing as the correct state and nakedness as a lapse from it. I heard versions of this in the language men used about themselves: “I hope you don’t mind me like this” or “I know this is a bit much.” That apology—and I heard it more than I might have expected—was the not-properly-dressed feeling in live form. The man apologising for his body as if it were a social error. As if by removing his clothes he had committed a minor transgression against the norms of decent company. I never knew quite how to respond to those apologies, because acknowledging them seemed to confirm the transgression, and dismissing them too briskly seemed to dismiss what the man was actually telling me about how he felt.
Wearing nothing. The most literal of all, and in its literalness, somehow almost poetic. Nothing is the word that sits at the end of the phrase and refuses to pretend it’s anything else. I find I can use it now, in this kind of writing, in a way I couldn’t use it then. Then I needed a word that would let the man in the room feel that his condition was ordinary, professional, managed. Wearing nothing has no professional register whatsoever. It is just the fact, standing there, unmediated.
What I needed was a word that could hold ordinariness and significance in the same space, that could acknowledge that a man without his clothes is simply a man without his clothes and also that this is not a simple thing. The body there, just the body, neither performing nor apologising, neither arranged for the eye nor collapsing under scrutiny. I spent years working with this condition and I never found that word, and I don’t think the language contains it.
What I found instead was that I calibrated my vocabulary to the man in the room. The man who came in brisk and businesslike got a brisk and businesslike word, if a word was needed at all. The man who came in nervous and stayed nervous got something softer, something that didn’t land too hard. The man who had never done anything like this before and seemed amazed by his own presence there—he got something different again, some care taken with whatever I said. The words I used were chosen for what they would do to the man, not for their accuracy.
Which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about this problem: that the language for a man without his clothes is not a language that describes the man. It is a language that manages the room.
Every one of those words—unclothed, undressed, bare, stripped, exposed, in the buff, starkers, au naturel, wearing nothing, not properly dressed—describes not what I was looking at but what kind of social atmosphere I was trying to maintain around what I was looking at.
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