Step One: Remove Your Clothes
Men asked me this question more often than I expected. Not all men, not even most, but enough across thirty years that I stopped being surprised by it. They would be on the table, or occasionally in the conversation before or after, and something in the preceding discussion—a mention of a beach, a reference to where I spent my own time—would bring them to it.
The question took various forms but was always essentially the same question: how do you become a nudist?
What I noticed about the question was not the content but the posture. The men who asked it were not young. They were adults, often middle-aged, sometimes older. They were men who had managed complex professional lives, who navigated organisations and relationships and the ordinary difficulties of being a person in the world. And they were asking me, with a genuine quality of uncertainty, how to undertake the process of removing their clothes in a semi-public place and leaving them off. As if there were a procedure that needed to be learned before the activity could begin. A form to be completed, an interview to be passed.
I got used to the question. I learned not to make it smaller than it was by answering too quickly. What the question was doing, I think, was not actually requesting information—the information was not complicated—but requesting permission, or perhaps solidarity. The man was not ignorant of how to undress. He was uncertain whether someone like him was entitled to do the thing in question, and in a particular kind of social setting, and what it would mean about him if he did.
I became aware, after a while, that I could not easily answer the real question because the real question was not the one being asked. What was being asked was: is this a thing that people like me do? And I could not entirely answer that because I did not always know what kind of person the man thought he was. So I answered the logistical question, which at least addressed the surface and occasionally provided a handy ladder down to the actual one.
I wrote an article for my website about it eventually. I listed it under resources, between information about the work itself and some thoughts about what to expect on a first visit. The article was short. I was not trying to write about the philosophy of naturism, and I was not trying to address the anxiety that produced the question in the first place—that seemed to me something that needed to be arrived at by a different route. I was just trying to clear the logistical confusion, on the grounds that the man who knew the logistics had one fewer obstacle between himself and the decision.
The entire article read:
“Looking for a unique way to relax? Spend a whole day without your clothes! Nudity—social or alone at home—is a great way to release stress. Apart from the freedom of not wearing clothes that are tight or weigh one down, nudity allows you to see and feel more of your body. Getting naked the first time is not very difficult.
Here’s what you need to do:
Step 1: Remove all your clothes.
Step 2: Don’t put them back on.
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Really, that’s all there is to it. Feels good, doesn’t it? Once you’ve had a chance to practise at home, you may decide to join a nudist club, go to a nudist beach—Lady Bay, Obelisk or La Perouse in Sydney—or visit one of the growing number of resorts catering to nudists.”
I then listed the clubs with links.
What I intended by the two-step structure was not comedy, or at least not primarily. I wanted to collapse the gap between the complexity that the question seemed to assume and the simplicity of what was actually being proposed. A man who asks how to become a nudist is, in a precise sense, asking how to perform an act that he is already technically capable of performing and has been performing several times daily since he was born. He knows how to remove clothing. What he does not know—and what no practical instruction could tell him—is how to place himself in a situation where the removal is social and deliberate and uncontested, and how to stay there without the situation requiring a frame he does not yet have.
The step structure said: the frame you need is simpler than you think. It said: the procedure exists, and it has two steps, and you already know both of them.
But I notice, having read it back over the years, that the article also assumed something it did not state. It assumed that the removal of clothing would feel good, would feel like release, would feel—as I wrote—like something. The rhetorical question at the end, “Feels good, doesn’t it?”, was addressed to a body that had just done the thing. But it would only feel like I said it felt if the man had actually arrived in his body when he took the clothes off, rather than arriving in the monitoring position I described elsewhere. The man for whom the body is primarily an object of assessment was not going to find the advice sufficient, not because the steps were wrong but because what prevented him from taking them was not ignorance of the process but a relationship to his own physical existence that two steps could not reorient.
The men who came back to tell me they had tried it—and some did, occasionally, months later—divided roughly into the categories I would have predicted. Some said: I tried Lady Bay and I just sat there and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Others said: I went to Obelisk and it was nothing, honestly, it was just a beach. And a handful said things that were harder to categorise—things like: I stayed for four hours and I didn’t want to leave. Or: I felt ridiculous for the first ten minutes and then I forgot about it.
The man who forgot about it is the man the article was written for, though I did not know that clearly when I wrote it. The forgetting is the thing. The forgetting is what the two steps were trying to achieve—not the removal of clothing, which is easy, but the eventual disappearance of the removal as an event. The beach is a beach. The body is the body. The absence of clothing stops being a condition to be managed and becomes simply the situation, unremarkable, present, not requiring attention.
I have wondered why this is so difficult for so many men when it seems, on the face of it, not to be difficult at all. Removing clothing in private is something men do every day without ceremony. The shower. The bed. The moment between rooms when no one is present. The body without clothes is not an unfamiliar experience. What is unfamiliar is the body without clothes as a social fact—as something that happens in the presence of others who have also made the same decision, or in a space where that decision has been made collectively, or in a place where the decision has been legitimised by legislation or convention or both.
What I read in the history of naturism is that the movement spent considerable energy attempting to provide exactly this legitimisation. The clubs, the magazines, the health ideology, the philosophers who wrote about the body and sunlight and civic virtue—all of them were, in part, building the frame that the individual man had not been given by his culture. The frame said: this is what certain kinds of people do, in certain kinds of places, and here is the philosophy that makes it reasonable. The frame was useful. Without it, the question “how do you become a nudist?” would have had even fewer resources to draw on.
But what I have also noticed, both in the men who asked the question and in what the history of naturism reveals, is that the frame sometimes became its own obstacle. A man who needed to understand the philosophy of natural living before he could take his clothes off on a beach was a man who had added a step. The real sequence—remove clothes, don’t put them back on—had been preceded by a lengthy process of ideological preparation that was, in some cases, simply the anxiety finding a more acceptable form. The anxiety was real. The naturalising philosophy was one way of managing it. But the anxiety was not always about the content of the philosophy. It was about the act.
I received, from one man who had read the article, a message that said: “I showed this to my partner and he said ‘that’s it?’ I thought there must be more to it.” The “that’s it?” is the thing I find most revealing in that response. It was not scepticism. It was the surprised recognition that the obstacle he had been constructing was largely internal. The actual procedure was, as I had claimed, two steps. The preceding construction—the imagined complexity, the sense that a secret was being withheld, the question asked with the tone of a man who expected a more elaborate answer—was the real subject of the article, and the article could only gesture at it by refusing to engage with it.
I do not know if any man became a nudist specifically because of the article. I know some of them came back to tell me they had gone to Obelisk or Lady Bay, and that the experience had been different from what they had expected, in both directions. Less dramatic than feared. More physical than anticipated. The sun on the back. The water against skin without the interference of fabric. The unremarkable presence of other bodies nearby, doing the same thing.
The unremarkable is the destination the article was trying to point toward. Not the philosophy. Not the membership. Not the frame. Just the eventual ordinariness of a body at a beach, in the sun, without its usual covering, having forgotten for a while what it was supposed to be managing.
Step one: remove all your clothes. Step two: don’t put them back on.
I still think that is essentially correct. I notice it remains, in practice, harder than it sounds. The steps are simple. The distance between knowing the steps and taking them is where everything lives.
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