Naked at Lunch (3 page)

I admit I was skeptical of this. I cocked an eyebrow. “Social nudity saves lives?”

Storey nodded. “I’ve seen them start crying. They can just feel this big release, because they feel alienated. I actually think that social nudity can reduce alienation, and to the degree we’re less alienated from one another, we’re able to flourish as human beings.”

I realized he was being totally serious. I tried to imagine a bunch of naked people sitting around sobbing—which just sounds like something ripped from my nightmares—while he continued. “Not that I need to be naked to flourish. That would be absurd. That’s kind of like broccoli. You don’t need broccoli for health, but it’s a contributing factor towards health, and I think that social nudity can be a contributing factor towards de-alienation.”

I’m not sure being naked with other people will make me feel less alienated, in fact I think it would make me feel even more alienated, so I ask him to clarify what he means.

“A lot of the makeup we wear, the clothes we put on, is just to hide who we are. We don’t like who we are so we have to hide things from other people.”

That reminded me of a convention I attended once in Philadelphia where I saw herds of men and women, all looking uniform and comfortably corporate in primary-colored polo shirts sporting identical logos. They had ceased to look like individuals and had become extensions of corporate branding strategies. Add in the penchant for khakis and cell phone holsters and suddenly a pod-people
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
scenario emerges.

Of course the flip side of logo wear is the label-spouting snobbery of fashionistas who define who they are by the cost of the clothes on their backs.

I found myself agreeing with Mark Storey about a lot of things. He is persuasive. People do hide themselves, their true selves, in the clothes they wear. Uniforms are a good example. They identify a person’s role in society, not as an individual, but as a police officer or firefighter or soldier or FedEx delivery woman.

I can see why clothing can be alienating or, at the very least, depersonalizing, but does shedding your clothes really de-alienate you?

“Certainly. If you just drop trou and walk a hundred yards out in the woods, you’ll feel closer to nature.”

Or closer to being arrested for indecent exposure.

Storey continued. “I believe it’s kind of grounded in our nature as social beings, that this openness to others, when it’s in a safe, comforting kind of context, it can kind of be life affirming. Whether people recognize it or not, I actually think that’s oftentimes what’s happening. Everyone who’s been skinny-dipping the first time says it’s absolutely fabulous.”

“I like to skinny-dip,” I said.

Which is a bit of an exaggeration, to be honest. What I really mean is that I enjoyed skinny-dipping with my high school girlfriend at a lake near where I grew up in Kansas City, but then I was seventeen and madly in lust and probably would’ve walked across hot coals or handled rattlesnakes if it meant I got to be naked with her. But I don’t tell this to Storey.

He leaned forward and looked at me. I could sense a philosophical inquiry coming on.

“Well, why do you like it?”

I started to answer, but he interrupted. “Yeah, there’s a kind of surface physicality. It’s sensuous, it’s pleasant. But there are a lot of things that are sensual and pleasant that we don’t put our jobs on the line for, or put friendships on the line for. Somehow this is more important to a lot of people. I’ve been trying for years to figure out what it is. Why do people actually do this kind of stuff and put that much on the line for it. You can go to jail. Montana can give you life imprisonment for skinny-dipping a third time.”

He’s not joking about Montana’s laws. A first offense can get you up to six months in jail, a second offense up to a year, and by the time you’ve been caught with your pants off a third time, the minimum sentence is five years, with the possibility of life in prison.

I took a sip of my coffee and looked around at all the twentysomething hipsters staring at their digital screens. They didn’t seem interested in connecting with other people, not in the flesh anyway. Their brows were furrowed in concentration, and it occurred to me that having two boisterous dudes talking about frolicking naked in the sunshine while they sat in the chill and gloom of a January afternoon in Seattle might have a disturbing effect on their ability to focus.

I turned back to Storey. “Humans are sensual beings, your skin is a sense organ, so isn’t nudism more of a kind of hedonism?” I am not ashamed to admit that I am a hedonist, not in a self-indulgent sense, but in the classic definition of hedonism as the belief that pleasure and happiness are the highest good. That means that I find as much or more happiness in a good cup of coffee or a fresh mango or a walk in the park as some people feel when they make a lot of money or their team wins the championship. Simple pleasure is underrated. In fact I’m considering joining Hedonist International.
³

I looked at Storey. “I mean that as a good thing.”

He nodded. “There can be that. It can be good or bad. It can go either way. But if what we truly are is rational, social beings, like Aristotle would say, then anything that is allowing me to develop my rational nature and develop my social nature is going to be prima facie good. Anything that keeps me from socializing with people in a good way would be alienating me from others.”

“So you’re saying the impulse to be naked is more of a social impulse, not a personal one?”

“If we do have an essential nature of being social, and clothing does do something towards alienating us from each other, nudity helps break down alienation. I think that’s why so many people like it. Whether they recognize that’s why they like it or not.”

He took a sip of coffee before he looked at me, almost apologetically.

“This isn’t a developed argument, but you asked. I don’t know of anybody else saying that. Usually you get the most naive, dingbat answers, like, ‘I’m doing this because it’s a sense of freedom.’ Freedom from what? To what?” He held out his hands and shrugged. “Usually it’s just a cliché people heard once.”

As I’ve begun to look into why people would want to take off their clothes and socialize with other people who want to take off their clothes, I’ve heard all the clichés. The freedom that nudism theoretically provides is freedom from the paradigm of body image worship that the culture has foisted on us, the bullshit that tells people that their worth as humans depends on how young, fit, and beautiful they are. Multibillion-dollar-a-year mega-industries that constantly remind us through carpet-bombing advertisements that we need to remove unwanted hair, bleach our teeth with laser beams, suck unwanted fat deposits out of our bodies with liposuction, insert saline pouches into our breasts, and go on the Paleo diet, the South Beach diet, the Atkins diet, and whatever new diet someone will invent next. The last thing the diet-industrial complex needs is a bunch of de-alienated people with positive body images. Maybe taking off your clothes and frolicking in the forest can dislodge the cultural brainwash that makes so many people so completely miserable.

I looked at Storey. “I don’t want to sound cynical but do you think that’s really the reason people enjoy being naked?”

He shrugged. “The answer could be rich. It could be different for different people.”

***
Even though he now lives in San Francisco, Jules no longer runs naked through the streets in a superhero cape. At least, not to my knowledge.

Skin in the Game

I
don’t know where the expression “skin in the game” comes from, but if I was going to get an understanding of nudist culture I’d have to be willing to visit nudist resorts and clothing-optional beaches in my birthday suit. Despite whatever awkwardness I might feel being naked in front of other naked people and then doing whatever it is that naked people do when they’re naked together, I was also going to be exposed in another way; I’d be putting some skin in the game. Specifically, my pasty-pink, easily sunburned skin.

There’s a reason why I slather on sunscreen before driving to the grocery store and why I prefer to go to the beach and watch a sunset rather than go in the middle of the day. The old Coppertone ad that said, “Tan . . . don’t burn,” doesn’t seem to apply to me. All I do is burn.

I wondered if I had any kind of genetic disposition, any built-in protection, against chronic sunburn, so I drooled into a tube provided by the recreational genetic testing company 23andMe and sent the saliva to a lab. Despite a promising start—I was 0.7 percent Native American and in a subgroup of E1b1b1a, which meant I had a distant connection to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula—it turned out that my ancestors were predominantly British, Irish, and “non-specific Northern European.” Which meant I needed some professional advice before I dropped trou in broad daylight.

I live in northeast Los Angeles, not far from downtown and the hipster enclave of Highland Park. My dermatologist used to have her office in Pasadena, just a quick ten-minute drive from my house, but she’s since moved, so I made an appointment to see her and schlepped across town, toward the ocean and her office in Pacific Palisades.

I’m not a huge fan of doctors, I have to say—I typically go to a Chinese doctor, an acupuncturist, for any medical issues—but I really like my dermatologist. Dr. Dana Jo Grenier has a wry sense of humor, she’s funny and fun to talk to, but she also has the kind of detail-obsessed personality that you often find with people who run long distances as fast as they can for fun. Which she used to do. She still looks like a long-distance runner, she’s lean and wiry, and when she puts on her magnifying glasses to examine your skin, she looks a bit like a praying mantis.

As I took off my clothes for the exam—I didn’t know at the time that this would mark the beginning of a year of undressing in front of people—I explained what I was planning to do. She laughed and shook her head.

“When I was first starting out we had a patient who was a nudist and he liked to do headstands in his backyard.”

She began examining me, putting her face a few inches from my body, slowly scrutinizing my dermis like a Belgian diamond appraiser examining a stone.

“How long can someone stand on their head in the sun?”

She lifted my arm and stared at it.

“Long enough to develop squamous cell carcinoma on the underside of his scrotum.”

She said this matter-of-factly, as if it’s information she’s just passing along and not some kind of freaky cautionary tale. I wondered how someone could get a sunburn on the underside of his scrotum and then go out the next day and do it again and again. Isn’t once enough? Isn’t a toasted nutsack a warning sign?

I tried to remain calm. “I’m not planning on doing any inversions in the sun. I’m not even planning on laying out in the sun.”

She lifted her magnifying goggles and gave me a twisted smile that was a mix of bemusement and genuine concern. “That’s good because genital skin is extremely sensitive.”

Which is sort of the point of genital skin, am I right? But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “I’ve got that spray-on sunscreen. I can cover all sensitive areas.”

She nodded. “Remember the spray comes out as particles. You’ve got to rub it on. And you need at least SPF 30.”

She made a note in my file, which I’m guessing recommended I seek psychiatric help, and then looked at me. “And reapply every two hours.”

…

In my personal hierarchy of the arbitrary importance of organs, I usually think of the brain or heart or genitals as my most important organ depending on what I’m doing at the time. But if I really think about it, skin is the most interesting organ. It’s the biggest and, no offense to the spleen, most aesthetically pleasing. Skin function is complex: it’s relatively durable and protects us from germs and infection, it holds our guts inside our skeleton, it stretches to accommodate us through our daily grind of bends and twists and exertions, and it’s a profoundly acute sense organ.

While the collective attributes of skin are important—most people would say that keeping our organs inside our body was enough—it’s our sense of touch that gives meaning and value to the world. We are sensual animals. We like textures. We place a premium on things that feel good. Cashmere, silk, and Egyptian cotton are valuable commodities not because they smell nice or taste good, but because of how soft they feel against our skin. Pressing your skin against someone else’s skin generally feels good and our brain takes this sensation and gives it emotion. Touch creates intimacy. It’s how babies bond with their parents.

Which makes it kind of weird that we spend so much of our lives keeping our skin covered. We are born naked and before we even take our first breath we are swaddled, bound up in cloth as if our skin might somehow peel off if it makes contact with air. It’s our first barrier to intimacy and connection, and it sets in motion a progression of textiles, through diapers and jumpers to dresses and jeans, until we attain adulthood and proudly hang the symbols of modern civilization, Coco Chanel’s Little Black Dress or a classic Navy Blazer, in our closet. Then comes a series of jeans and khakis and skirts and capris and pajamas and bathrobes until we finally get around to kicking the bucket and are laid to rest in our Sunday best or wrapped in a shroud and immolated.