The Ones Who Don’t Take Their Clothes Off
There is a particular kind of visitor to a nude beach who does not undress. I have watched them over the years—at Lady Bay, at Obelisk, at a few less formal spots along the coast. They arrive at the top of the steps or the edge of the cliff or the point where the path turns and reveals the beach, and they stop. They look. Sometimes they take out their phones. Sometimes they stand for a minute and leave. Sometimes they find a rock to sit on at the periphery, fully clothed, and stay for an hour.
I have noticed that this stops being interesting to the people on the beach fairly quickly. The people on the beach have usually made a decision, walked the distance, taken their clothes off, and committed to being there. The person on the cliff or at the top of the steps is doing something different, and after a while the beach stops registering them.
But I keep being curious about what they are doing.
I notice I am using the word curious rather than critical, which is deliberate. The gawker at the nude beach has been getting a bad press since the first nude beach attracted its first fully-clothed observer, and the bad press assumes we know what the observer is there for. I am not sure we do. What I have found, in working with men whose relationship to the unclothed body was various and complicated, is that the same external behaviour—standing at a distance, watching—can arise from almost opposite internal conditions.
A man standing at the edge of Obelisk fully clothed might be about to take his clothes off. He might be working up to it, doing the reconnaissance of a first-time visitor who needs to see what he is walking into before he commits. I have been that person, at different beaches in different decades. The moment before you undress in public for the first time is a particular kind of moment.
Or the man at the edge might be someone who finds the beach’s existence mildly scandalous and has come to confirm his own disapproval. I have met this man also, not at the beach exactly but in conversations about the beach—the man who mentions nude beaches in a tone that implies he considers them a symptom of something. He has usually not been to one. His information about what happens there is drawn from an image rather than an experience, and the image involves things that do not, on an ordinary afternoon at Obelisk, actually occur. I notice that this man tends to associate nudity with sexual activity in a way that suggests he has not thought about what the proposition actually requires. Nude bodies are aroused bodies are bodies engaged in sex: the sequence runs in his imagination as if it were a logical chain rather than a series of quite distinct conditions.
I have spent a considerable amount of time with men whose bodies were unclothed and whose experience of that uncovered state had no particular sexual component at the time. This is not remarkable if you have worked as I have. It becomes remarkable only in relation to the assumption the gawker brings. The assumption, as far as I can reconstruct it from conversations and from the cultural material I have read, is that the nude body is always already a sexual body—that the removal of clothing is an invitation extended to everyone within sight, that the beach is a kind of perpetual overture with the consummation always about to begin.
What I have found is that the nude body is a great many things, and sexual is one of them, and the others are not diminished versions of the sexual but simply different conditions. A man who has been on a table for an hour becomes, often, profoundly unsexual in his quality of presence—not because the erotic has been cancelled but because something else has taken the foreground. Something about the body simply being the body, without performance or assessment. What I observed there is harder to name than the erotic but not less present. On a beach, lying in the sun, something similar operates. The men at Obelisk who are there to sunbathe—and many of them are there primarily to sunbathe, to swim, to read, to talk to people they know—are not suspended in a state of pending desire. They are just there. Their bodies happen to be uncovered.
The gawker’s misreading is therefore a particular kind of projection. He places onto the bodies on the beach a charge they may or may not be carrying, and he looks for evidence of it, and when the evidence doesn’t arrive—when the orgy fails to materialise, when the bodies just keep lying there in the sun—I imagine he must feel something like disappointment, or perhaps a curious relief that seems to confirm the superiority he came with.
About this last possibility I find myself wanting to be precise, because I think it is genuinely one of the things some gawkers are doing. The person who arrives at the cliff edge to feel morally superior is not primarily there for titillation. He is there to have his position confirmed. The nude beach, in his framework, is a place where people have gone wrong—where they have done something that decent people do not do—and his presence at the edge, clothed, observing, is a performance of the alternative. He is showing himself, or the air around him, that he belongs to a different category. What he is looking at is not the bodies so much as the evidence that the bodies are the wrong kind of bodies, in the wrong kind of place, doing the wrong kind of thing. The nudity confirms his view rather than disturbing it.
I have some sympathy for another category, which I think is probably larger than the morally superior group, though harder to see because it is less certain of itself. This is the person who is afraid. Not of the bodies on the beach but of their own. What I observed is that a significant proportion of men carry their bodies as problems—as things that do not quite measure up, that would be exposed by exposure, that are better managed behind clothing than revealed to the open air. For these men, a nude beach is a place where the truth would come out. The gawking is the alternative to the undressing—they can have the experience of being near the unclothed body without the risk of the unclothed body being theirs.
I am speculating here, beyond what any particular man on a cliff told me. I hold it lightly. What I can say with more confidence is that I saw, very often, the relief that arrived when a man had been unclothed for long enough that the anxiety about the uncovering had dissipated. The anxiety was usually not about what I thought of the body. It was about what the body would reveal. And what it revealed, most of the time, was a body—ordinary, various, neither the thing the man feared nor the thing the gawker expected. Just a body, present in the room.
Skinny dipping has its own flavour, slightly different from the nude beach, and I find myself returning to the term because the term is doing something. Skinny is the word I notice. Not slim, not thin—skinny, which carries something slightly unflattering, slightly juvenile, slightly illicit. The compound has a quality of transgression attached to it that “swimming naked” does not. Swimming naked is just a description. Skinny dipping implies a story—usually a specific kind of story: the summer night, the group of young people, the decision that tips from ordinary into something else, the water and the dark and the absence of clothes and the presence of bodies.
What I have read about skinny dipping in cultural contexts confirms the impression. The term, which appears in American usage from the nineteenth century, accrued its associations over decades of being attached to a particular genre of story—the coming-of-age story, the summer romance, the adolescent encounter with risk and sensation and the bodies of peers. Those associations are so settled now that the term carries them automatically. When an adult says skinny dipping they are usually invoking the whole set, whether or not the actual experience they are describing bears any resemblance to it.
The gawker who finds skinny dipping sexually charged is therefore responding not to the act but to the word, or to the set of associations the word has imported. The young people swimming naked in the creek are not necessarily doing anything erotic. They are getting wet and feeling the water on their skin, which is one of the better experiences the body offers and is not improved by clothing. But the words “skinny dipping” have already told the gawker what is happening, and what is happening is the overture he keeps looking for.
I think about freedom, which is a word that comes up in naturist writing and in what men said to me more often than almost any other in this context. The freedom of swimming naked in the sea. The freedom of drying in the sun without fabric between the skin and the air. I have experienced this. It is exactly what it sounds like: a quality of the body being simply present in its environment without the mediation of cloth. Nothing about it is inherently sexual. Nothing about it is inherently innocent. It is just the body in contact with water and light, which is where the body has been for most of history and from which it was separated by a long series of decisions that seemed, at the time, to be about morality and were also, as I have tried to trace, about commerce and climate and power and the management of what the body might say if it were allowed to say it.
The gawker stands at the top of the steps. The beach is thirty metres below. The men on the beach have taken their clothes off and stopped thinking about it. The ships pass through the harbour. The sun moves. The gawker eventually leaves.
I am not sure he found what he came for, partly because I am not sure he knew what he came for. The bodies on the beach were just bodies. They were not an answer to the question he was carrying, because they were not the question. The question was his.
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