Editor's note: This essay is an updated version of a piece Andy first published on his own blog in July 2018.

I believe, deep down, that I am hard-wired to be a nudist. There are times, in nature, at a social gathering, or on a city street, when I think, “This moment would be perfect, if only I were naked.” Being dressed can actually make me somewhat claustrophobic. Society has trained me to overcome the urge to rip off my clothing in most situations, but the feeling is real.

When discussing the importance of nudity in my life, I prefer to be as clear as possible. I describe myself as a “nudist,” not as a “naturist.” There can be no misunderstanding that a nudist is one who likes being nude, whereas I think the word naturist is too often confused with “naturalist.” Even when correctly understood, it conveys an image of communing nude with nature in unspoiled surroundings. That may be an apt description of many who call themselves naturists, but I am a city dweller. I am most often naked at home or in other urban spaces: I am an urban, sometimes public, nudist. I’ve been called an exhibitionist. If I am, then so is anyone posting selfies on Facebook or Instagram. I consider myself an activist for our basic right to be non-sexually clothes-free when and where we choose.

Nudity is our default state. Putting on clothes is an action. To be ashamed of (or offended by) the human body is to be ashamed of (or offended by) simply being human. I don’t buy the argument that we should always defer to those who are offended by nudity. Most of us are frequently faced with behaviors we find objectionable, but seldom are we harmed by them.

I did not grow up in a nudist environment. I don’t remember seeing my mother naked, nor my siblings except during shared baths when we were very small, but as a child I was naked a lot and it was a non-issue. My earliest memories of nudity outside the home, and certainly of seeing nude adults, involve weekly skinny dips with my dad at a YMCA pool in Los Angeles when I was about eight. I had no direct interaction there with anyone except my father, but I felt a powerful spirit of belonging among those naked men and boys. Several other memories of boyhood nudity remain equally vivid. It’s undeniable that I now feel most alive when I am nude, and I think this was also true during my childhood.

Shortly before I started junior high (aka middle school), my family moved east to a suburb of New York City. Around that time I went from total comfort with my body to being intensely embarrassed by it. I can’t say anyone imposed shame on me, but going through puberty brought extreme self consciousness. Just telling my mother that I needed a jockstrap for gym class was difficult for me. In my teens I loved being naked more than ever, but I was furtive about it. I secretly began sleeping nude. Home alone, I wandered through the house with nothing on. Late at night I crept naked into our backyard to lie down on the grass or climb trees, marveling at the sensations of breezes, tree bark, and moonlight touching my skin.

I was sixteen at the time of Woodstock and the Summer of Love. Previously, non-sexual nudity had been virtually unheard of, except for snickering remarks about art models and “nudist colonies.” Suddenly, images of naked people were everywhere. Nudity in films became commonplace. I saw “Hair” on Broadway, with its famous nude scene. Comfort with nudity was a fixture of the era’s hippie culture. I admired and envied those confidently naked people in magazines and on stages. I yearned to unlearn my body shame and be like them. I wanted to stop hiding my nakedness and let it be seen, because without clothes I felt like my truest self. I still feel that way.

After graduating high school in 1970, I moved into my own tiny apartment in Manhattan hoping to pursue an acting career. I found work ushering at an Off Broadway play that featured a nude sequence involving most of the cast: this made me a wannabe on the fringes of both the theatrical community and the world of body freedom.

I soon began dating a man who introduced me to Riis Park, a [then] clothing optional beach near NYC. On hot days it was mobbed, with only narrow paths of exposed sand to walk on between “wall-to-wall” beach towels. The great majority of people wore swimsuits, but nudity was legal and accepted. It was my first opportunity to be naked outdoors without fear of being caught. I spent long happy days in the nude, body surfing, gathering shells, and sunning. Unlike my boyfriend, who nurtured his tan-line, I got brown all over. It was very public but also very anonymous; a liberating combination. Well, it was anonymous for the most part… I once recognized my former summer camp counselor, and one day I saw a retired couple who lived upstairs from me. All of them wore swimsuits. My first impulse in both cases was to turn away and hope that I had not been seen, but I pushed myself to say hello. We had friendly conversations. My nudity was neither acknowledged nor awkward. When I later encountered those neighbors in our apartment building, I realized that their having seen me naked changed nothing. That was a moment of growth.

I forayed into a different kind of social nudity later in that summer of 1970, when I attended a party given by a friend’s girlfriend. Among those dancing in the crowded living room was one naked (and very stoned) man. I was awed by how free he was, and by the fact that no one batted an eye. I could imagine how wonderful it must feel to move like that in the nude. Knowing I’d be disappointed in myself if I missed this chance when a braver soul had already cleared the path, I mustered the courage to take off my clothes… but then sat in a corner, pleased to have met the challenge but too self conscious even to cross the room for a drink, let alone dance.

When autumn came, I began working as a model for college art classes in Manhattan. Modeling was different from my previous nude experiments. At a beach or party, no one was necessarily even looking at me, and I had the option of getting dressed if I felt vulnerable. But a nude modeling gig was a commitment to three hours of being literally on display. At first I found it overwhelming. I got through it by imagining myself elsewhere or fully concentrating on whatever music was playing in the studio. After a few classes I was able to be more present. I could return the gazes of the students. It was interesting to listen to the instructors coaching them, often calling their attention to the particulars of my body: “See how he’s bow-legged?” At first I was mortified by such observations, though I knew them to be true. I came to understand that no one was criticizing my body; they were merely stating facts about it. In the long run, the experience bolstered my self-acceptance. I built up a callus on my body shame.

Meanwhile, I still had my job as an usher. I had watched the show dozens of times and knew it by heart. One desperate evening when several actors were out sick, I was asked to go on as an understudy with one quick rehearsal. I was mainly focused on being in the right place and getting my lines out, but in terms of nudity it was a watershed moment for me. There I was, eighteen years old, naked on the stage of a sold-out theater in New York City. Unlike the dimly lit nude scene in “Hair,” the all-white stage set was flooded with light. Previously, I had mostly kept quiet about my love of nakedness. Few people (except strangers) knew I went nude at the beach. I had talked with almost no one about being a nude model. But I was so proud to be in a professional play that I announced it to my family and friends without hesitation. There was no need to mention the notorious nude scene; everyone already knew about it and wondered how I dared. Their curiosity provided an opening for me to discuss my deepening convictions regarding body acceptance and shame. I came out as a person to whom being naked is both enjoyable and important. Since then it has been a facet of myself that I share pretty easily. I went on to act in dozens more plays and musicals, occasionally nude, more often not. Between acting jobs I held down a variety of “day jobs” where I managed to keep my clothes on (!) but seldom hid the fact that I was a nudist in my time off. I have continued to model nude for artists, including some well known photographers.

In my thirties I left New York for San Francisco, a city with a reputation for tolerance, eccentricity, and freedom, and with a history of public nudity. Here I have been nude (and photographed) at more street fairs, parades, demonstrations, foot races, bicycle events, and parties, than I can count. I think being naked in public and online is beneficial in terms of advancing acceptance. Seeing bodies of various shapes and ages “normalizes” nudity by desensitizing viewers and resetting their expectations. Until San Francisco changed its public nudity laws in 2012, I could sit naked in a sunny little plaza near my home, sipping coffee, reading a paper, and chatting with friends.

I often stepped outdoors to bring in the mail or put out the trash bins without covering up. A neighbor once phoned, offering to send her husband over with some soup she had made. I asked her to delay for a few minutes because I had nothing on, and she replied “What else is new?” When a nude photo of me was published on the front page of a local newspaper during the political battle leading up to the city’s ban on public nudity, a dentist’s receptionist greeted my spouse with “We’ve been seeing a lot of Andy lately!” Even when clothed, I have frequently been recognized as one of the city’s Naked Guys. I accept that title with pride.

I find it easy to be nude around most people, no matter whether I am among fellow nudists or am the only one. I have always had non-nudist friends who are comfortable if I am clothesfree in social situations, and others who are not. I generally broach the subject early in a friendship. If a person reacts favorably I might disrobe on the spot or ask whether they would mind if I were naked during a future visit. This way, as a friendship develops, my nudity has already been established; I find it more difficult to introduce nudity once there is a pattern of always being clothed.

My family knows I am a social and public nudist. They have seen published photos of me. My sister and cousins seem to have a “so what?” attitude, but they live thousands of miles away and I have not spent time naked around them as an adult. When I went to Burning Man for the first time, my aunt asked to see photos “from the waist up.” I would guesstimate that ninety percent of people in my life are aware of my nudism and perhaps fifty percent have seen me in the flesh.

I prefer to let my freak flag fly rather than stifling myself in an attempt to appear “normal” …speaking of which, what could possibly be more normal than a human body? Each of us has one, and there are few surprises among them. 🪐

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I recently saw this picture from Tintin in Tibet, where he and his little friend were staring out into the immense Himalaya mountain range.

It brought me back to the time that we used to spend in the mountains, and what a profound effect it had on us. How it kind of detached us from the rest of reality. Away from the fast-moving world. Away from the day-to-day problems or worries. The intimidating vastness of the environment triggers you to put things in a much larger perspective.

Shedding my clothes gives me that same feeling of shedding the worries and problems of my normal day-to-day life. These worries and problems are as unnecessary as the clothes are on those moments that I cherish.

Back to basics, mentally. No more expressing yourself through what you are wearing. You can only express yourself through who you are. No pretending. The naked truth.

We are almost a year later than when we discovered nudism together. We’ve lived through a long winter, which feels like we got detached from ourselves again, from the real person that we discovered underneath the layers of clothes. As winter approached, we were forced to hide behind those clothes again, and it alienated us again from who we really are.

It felt like stress building up slowly but surely. After a couple of months I already started to struggle to remember or relive all of the emotions that we discovered last year, the happiness and joy that entered our lives and our relationship. And slowly we drifted back into the sadness of the ordinary clothed life, where superficiality rules over wellness, authenticity, and peace of mind.

I thought, feared, that I had lost the feeling, that it had been just a temporary thing. The joy and excitement of something new wearing off.

Until that day in April, when the sun came out again, and temperatures rose to very comfortable levels. We got out the sunbeds and took off our clothes again. It completely revived me, it lifted my spirits again as it did last summer. The freedom of running around naked in and outside of the house just makes one human again. Back to the essence of being.

All of a sudden I hear the voice of the woman next door very close to me, behind the not-so-covering hedge plants between our gardens. While she is explaining something to another woman next to her, I decide not to shock anyone and move discretely inside the house to get my bathrobe. Even though I wouldn’t really mind if she saw me, I hate to think that I imposed my nudity upon her, against her will.

That is not shame, but empathy and being considerate to others. Even though I really don’t know her point of view on this.

What could be her reaction, her perspective, as a non-nudist (I think) person?

Anger? Surprise? Embarrassment?

She could be angry. Because I imposed my nudity on her and her visitor.

A naked body doesn’t always induce a negative reaction in people; that depends on their upbringing, their experiences, their background. And the context of the nudity. If I were to confront her with any sexual activity of mine, that would be offensive in so many ways. Just like I was confronted once with a nudist man who started masturbating in plain view. There is nudity and there is sex.

Or when swinger couples invade nudist and naturist spaces. They impose their sexuality upon people who do not associate nudity with sex (except in their own privacy). Personally, they trigger my anger, as they feel like predators to me.

As opposed to anger, she could also just be surprised, or embarrassed. I can imagine one not having a real problem with nudity, but not knowing how to react when confronted with it unexpectedly.

Or she could just be surprised, without any further negative feeling or emotion.

I experienced this recently with the dermatologist, when I had her examine a dark spot on my areola, under my nipple. She reassured me that it was nothing harmful, and that she could freeze it if I wanted to get rid of it. She said that it couldn’t be exposed to the sun after this, “but that shouldn’t be a problem, right?” I contradicted this, and I was amused by her surprise about it. “Ok, then we’ll do this after summer.” I expected a different reaction there. Like, considering my lack of tan lines, a sermon about using sun lotion (I have never used that in my entire life, nor have my parents, grandparents, or in-laws, and there is no trace of any skin cancer in any of them). Or, when I mentioned that I had a wound there last summer, while working outside. (”How on earth do you wound your nipple?”) I did not expect a “meh” reaction. But she’s a doctor, I bet she’s heard wilder stories than this.

And then there’s the reaction of my friend, whom I called last summer to talk about my desire for nude recreation. She responded enthusiastically, saying that she has been doing that for ages and that she would love to have a friend join her.

Among nudists, there can only be one sort of reaction, because we share the same perspective about it.

Last Friday we went back to the nude beach, for the first time this year. Other nude visitors make eye contact, some say hello, some just smile and nod. One woman moved her things right next to us because there were children playing with jellyfish (yes, really) near her previous spot, and the screaming and yelling got to her. So you just engage in some friendly conversation with a naked woman, as if it really is the most normal thing in the world.

And those children — they didn’t have a care in the world. Their perspective was about jellyfish, and nothing else existed or mattered. How I miss and envy that innocence.

Some passers-by who weren’t naked were the most amusing ones, as they obviously didn’t know how to not look at all these naked people nearby. They are the ones who are embarrassed, and have no reason to complain, as they were invading our territory. Some of them might even have envied us for the freedom that we enjoyed, for the pride we somehow exhibited in it. As if they don’t have that same freedom of choice. Because it is a choice to not dare to show and enjoy your body.

And then there was this other, clothed woman near the waterline. I was looking at the washed-up seashells on the ground, while I was nearing the textile part of the beach. My wife was doing the same thing, some ten meters behind me. When I looked up, I saw this elegant woman approaching in her white linen trousers and her long blonde hair. She had this wide smile on her face as she greeted me and crossed my path. She wasn’t shocked, she wasn’t baffled, she wasn’t surprised or overwhelmed, nor embarrassed. She just encountered another human being and was just being the nice person that she seemed to be.

I really felt sad not to have engaged in a conversation with her; that would have really been a wonderful experience. She didn’t seem to care about me being naked — we were just two human beings enjoying the seaside.

And that is the ultimate in perspectives to me. That is my perfect world. There is no right or wrong, there’s just us, people, human beings, enjoying our lives and respecting each other. No looking down upon, no talking down, understanding instead of judging. 🪐

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Catherina

Naturism is natural, as the term itself describes. Shed your clothes and really start connecting with people

“Are you part of the crew?” a man asked me, fully nude.

“Yes.”

“Great. I’m John. I’m a journalist working on an article about nudist resorts. Would you mind talking to me a bit?”

He told me that nudist resorts are closing all over the world due to low attendance. He wants to write about this and he thought our film production gave a unique and flashy edge to his piece. People do love movies.

We’re shooting a romantic comedy about a couple who struggle to bridge the gap between her nudist family and upbringing and his conventional and somewhat uptight personality.

A man in full clothes—a textile, they call them—just asked two people in the cast if they’ve ever been on a naked cruise. He told them that he stopped going (not a textile, after all. Only for today) because the nude cruises are two to three times more expensive than the clothed ones. You’d think with less weight, the ship might require less gas…? Seems strange to me.

When we arrived, we were asked to respect the “nudity required” designated areas, given stickers to cover our phone cameras, and asked which activities we were interested in. They included karaoke, yoga, swimming, hiking, and pickle ball.

This movie is a non-union project, precisely so that the cast and crew can be and remain fully naked if they so choose. As strangers being welcomed into others’ home, we are the intruders. Being fully clothed is something of an affront to the life so many seek when they move here or visit. The most respectful thing to do would be to require nudity for everyone all the time, but that also doesn’t feel quite right.

This is a curious job for me. I’m an intimacy coordinator for TV and film. Typically, my job is to help the director achieve their vision while staying within the actors’ boundaries and comfort. I find out what the actors are okay with showing as far as nudity, and doing as far as simulated sex, and then I help the shoot go smoothly, fully close the set so no non-essential personnel are present or viewing footage on monitors, I choreograph any simulated sex, make sure we don’t see any modesty garments nor body parts that weren’t pre-approved as we shoot, and so on. I help actors communicate with each other about touch and boundaries. Ideally, this allows shooting to go smoothly and efficiently.

I have to remain professional, a beacon of etiquette and propriety, while making everyone feel comfortable, especially talking about sometimes difficult and taboo topics like bodies, sex, sexuality, vanity, and shame. I do my best to be approachable and welcoming so that people feel free to come to me not just with concerns about their body and their comfort, but also with what they might fear are stupid questions, like, “Why would a nonbinary person need a tampon?”

Today I took off my clothes for the first time. This was more than a “When in Rome” moment. This was a show of respect. I wanted to respect the community I was a guest in, and I wanted to know what it’s like to be naked in front of lots of strangers in order to do a better job for the actors I’m supporting by having a somewhat deeper understanding of their experience. While I wasn’t needed on set, I read a book on a chaise by the pool and sunned bits of me that haven’t seen sunshine in years. I put sunscreen in places it’s never been. It almost felt like the sunlight was going inside me.

Being around this many naked people is so rare. And non-sexual nudity is also exceptionally rare, even in small doses. Other than the Korean spa, most of us don’t see naked people unless we’re sleeping with them or changing very quickly in a locker room.

The healing properties of nudity are clear here. Bodies are all so different, so varied. My impulse to compare my body to others’ strikes me acutely in the gut, again and again. The frequency gets me questioning my reasons for doing so. The noticing allows me to do it less. The judgment turns to appreciation, awe, admiration. I see evidence of babies born, of nipples suckled for milk, of injuries, of lives well lived. I don’t have a penis, but I kept thinking that seeing this many penises would be very healing for anyone insecure about the size of theirs.

And yet, it seems like what historically felt liberatory and radical now feels passé and like a feminism we’ve collectively outgrown. I’m an outsider here and not just because I’ve been mostly clothed. I’m under 60 and visibly queer. I only saw straight couples, as far as I could deduce. The whole place is also overwhelmingly white, and you can’t help but notice the American flags on quite a few of the trailers that belong to permanent residents. [Note: It’s terribly sad that the American flag has, in recent years, increasingly come to imply nationalism, white supremacy, and even homo- and transphobia as opposed to a love of this country. It’s tantamount to a “beware” sign, suggesting that the people inside are more likely to own a gun and use it. The flag instills fear in other American citizens, people who feel excluded from any kind of patriotism but call this country home.]

At one time, nudism, or more specifically naturism [Note: Definition via cottagelife.com/general/the-difference-between-nudist-and-naturist/] (“naturists believe that baring it all has physical and mental health benefits, including stress relief and improved self-esteem. Spirituality, harmony with nature and family participation are all key tenets of the practice — which yes, means it’s not just for adults. Naturism is a non-sexual activity and naturist parents encourage their kids to appreciate bodies as part of their natural environment,” while nudism can more broadly refer to people who simply prefer to be nude), offered a ‘fuck you’ to the status quo that I have to wonder if we’ve played out. It’s not feeling so revolutionary anymore.

I wonder if we’ll see a resurgence of naturism as our media and governments (in the US and globally) become more conservative, but with the advent of phone cameras and social media, this lifestyle that relies on privacy and trust may wither away entirely, at least in the public sphere. If resorts close, we may only see naturism within individual homes, not in open, designated spaces.

But this seems a little too simplistic to me. I think body positivity has expanded to include more—and require more—than simply shedding your clothes and exposing your naked body. It’s not only not enough, it’s almost a bit juvenile. It makes me think of the embroidered pillows and tattoos that say, “Empathy will save the world.” It reminds me of liberal bumper stickers like “Love is love” and “We’re all the same under our skin,” and the collective whine, “Can’t we all just get along?” Don’t get me wrong, to each their own. I enjoyed being naked for the 30 mins I spent reading by the pool when I wasn’t needed on set. I just find myself wanting more. If you just want to be naked, be naked! But if we’re talking in terms of political movements and change, it’s gonna take more than taking off your clothes in the new world we’ve found ourselves in in 2026.

Yet, perhaps I should hold my judgment. I do believe that sustainable change mostly comes from local action. I strongly believe we have to start with changing ourselves—how we think, talk, act, treat ourselves and then others, and so on—in order to change the world around us. I believe that personal growth positively impacts all those around that person. I even believe that no action is too small and we should take any opportunity to create change. And I can see how spending time around other naked people could have profound healing effects for those with eating disorders, insecurity specifically relating to body image or type (who among us doesn’t?), or those of us who need the lights off during sex so we don’t feel too seen.

One of the most striking phenomena I noticed at the resort was how respectful everyone was. No one really flirts. No one ogles or stares. No one cat-calls. Comfort is the priority and everyone is naked, so everyone takes great care to support each other in feeling at ease. I thought, “What would it look like to flirt if everyone were naked?” Feeling equally vulnerable and equally exposed, how would we engage in an expression of interest? Might we be more inclined to make our interest known in a subtle and thoughtful way, and then wait for the other person to initiate any further contact? Might we tip toe instead of bulldoze? Might we extend a hand and wait for the other to place theirs in ours as if to say, “Let’s dance?”

After a conversation with the director during which he was naked and I was clothed, I walked through naked karaoke to get back to my stuff. I myself had come a long way: At first I’d felt a duty to stay proverbially buttoned-up and professional while also feeling somewhat stunned to be surrounded by so many naked bodies. By the end, I felt that being at ease amongst naked coworkers was the most professional way to be.

I got home feeling a little strange to be clothed in my own home, and tacitly requiring my roommate and partner to be clothed as well. It doesn’t take long to subvert that expectation, that we’d all be clothed. I can’t say it’s radical, but I do feel a quiet shift in me towards something a little more open. Open to difference, open to acceptance, open to myself. 🪐

Editor’s note: Mia Schachter worked as the intimacy coordinator on Disrobed, the naturist romantic comedy filmed at Glen Eden Sun Club that Planet Nude documented in our production diary. This essay is their own account of that shoot, originally published on their Substack and republished here with permission.

Find more of Mia’s writing at consentwizardry.substack.com and consentwizardry.com.

Looking out over the gray Northeast Ohio landscape, I find respite in remembering last summer—delivering the keynote address at EDEN, held at the Forest Hills Club in Saranac, Michigan. The whole weekend of acceptance and affirmation in a nudist setting was a life-changing experience. I was invited because the organizers had read my essay for AANR, “Nudism and the LGBTQ Community.” I chose as my topic “Living Authentically Without Fear.” This is important if you are a nudist, but it becomes critical if you are both a nudist and a transgender woman.

My wife, Marilyn, and I have been nudists for nearly fifty years—a little over 70% of our lives. Many of our vacations over the years were spent at nudist resorts in America, Canada, and the Caribbean. However, I have been a transgender woman for only about eight of those years.

Several years ago, my therapist challenged me to do a self-portrait. I was intimidated and fearful of what I might discover and procrastinated for a very long time. Eventually, I ended up doing two. The first drawing was very abstract and just a little monster-like. In discussing it with my therapist, I realized that it depicted the way I see myself presented to the world. I am hiding behind a mask of self-doubt, low self-esteem, and imposter syndrome. I am fearful of showing my true self. Fearful of being rejected or of being found out. Fearful of love and acceptance. The second drawing was a contrast to the first one. While it was also somewhat abstract, my therapist described it as fierce. It reflected how I would like the world to see me. How I would like to see myself.

The most critical step on the journey to self-actualization is answering the universal question, “Who am I?” It took me a whole lifetime of living as someone that I wasn’t before discovering the answer to that question.

Answering that question depends largely on overcoming fear. Fear is an enormously powerful emotion and one that is difficult to analyze. Sometimes, we need to celebrate ourselves and our achievements and do things for ourselves without worrying about what others may think. I will admit that this is a very difficult concept for most people, including myself. I was scared of success and imposter syndrome. I wondered if the success that I was having as a writer was because I am somewhat of a novelty as a transgender woman who happens to write. Now I am kind of a novelty as a transgender woman who also happens to be a nudist. I am the only one at our club and not exactly universally accepted. Deciding that it did not really matter was a huge step toward self-acceptance. I was doing it all for myself and my wellbeing and self-care. Looking back, it amazes me how much fear I have overcome.

There are certain parallels between being a nudist and being part of the LGBTQ+ community. Both are often marginalized and misunderstood communities and targets of the conservative right and evangelical Christians. Ironically, one of the earliest advocates for social nudism was a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Her name was Helen Reitman. She was an out and open lesbian during the Comstock Era. She had experienced social nudism in her European travels, and she published On Going Naked in 1932 under the name Jan Gay with illustrations by her significant other, Zhenya. That same year, Jan produced the first known American documentary film on the nudist movement, called This Nude World. She served as camp director of the Fresh Air Club, one of the first and only official landed nudist clubs to exist in New York. She was also involved in the first assemblies of the International Nudist Conference, which eventually became the American Sunbathing Association.

I’ve lived two lifetimes. The first sixty years of my life were lived as someone that I wasn’t. Now, I’m living as the person that I was always truly meant to be. The only consistency between the two lifetimes was being a nudist. Maybe that was enough to allow me to persevere.

We all struggle at some point in our lives with fear and acceptance of our worth. However, if we are willing to step outside of our comfort zones and experience new things, we might be amazed to have discovered our true selves. 🪐

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Glen Eden Sun Club in California for the first time, as part of an article I was writing about the making of the film Disrobed and the future of nudist resorts. As a lifelong skinnydipper, it wasn’t a big leap for me, but it was my first time at an actual resort and first time chatting with so many devoted nudists.

Most people I spoke with had a general feeling that the nudist lifestyle was healthy, but they didn’t know about a new wave of research on the benefits of sun exposure, which turns out to be very good news for anyone who likes to get a little skin in the sun. So I’m here to spread the good news.

I’m a science writer. For the past decade, I’ve been researching the science of light and health for a new book coming out this month. My interest began after a series of studies upended the common belief that sun exposure was detrimental to health. One of the first was the Melanoma in Southern Sweden study, which tracked the sun habits of 40,000 Swedish women for 20 years. The goal was to establish the main risk factors for melanoma, and sure enough, the women who engaged in the most sun-seeking behaviors were more likely to contract melanoma. But unexpectedly, they were also much less likely to die than the sun-avoiders. They had lower rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and while they had a higher incidence of melanoma, they were actually less likely to die from that, too.

Other studies have found similar effects. In the UK, researchers attached light-sensing watches to 89,000 volunteers to gauge how much light exposure they received, then tracked their survival over the following eight years. Those exposed to the most light during the day were much less likely to die. (Importantly, those exposed to the most light at night were more likely to die—bright days and dark nights seem to be equally important to good health.) In the U.S., people living in the sunniest regions are far less likely to die from cardiovascular disease or cancer than people living in darker places.

Those patterns were actually noticed a century ago, when scientists began noting that rates of many diseases rose with latitude. That fit well with earlier discoveries that sunlight could cure rickets and cutaneous tuberculosis, and a general consensus arose among doctors that the sun was the foundation of good health. That fed into the sanatorium movement, when patients would head to the Alps or California for the light cure, and it also helped boost the nudist movement.

By the 1980s, scientists were convinced that vitamin D was the key to these benefits. When sun hit skin, it produced vitamin D, which could cure rickets and perhaps a lot more. People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood had higher rates of more than 100 different conditions.

The easiest way to raise your D levels is through sun exposure, but by the 1980s doctors were increasingly concerned about sun-induced skin cancer, so they instead counseled sun avoidance combined with vitamin D supplements. But it didn’t work. In massive clinical trials, D pills failed to reduce the risk of any illness in any meaningful way, and the supplements are now considered unnecessary for any but the most severely deficient.

But that meant that the good health of the people with naturally high levels of vitamin D was due to the sun, not D itself. And indeed, over the past decade, we’ve figured out some of the reasons why. Sunlight hitting skin produces dozens of different molecules that can improve health. They lower blood pressure and reduce inflammation throughout the body, which is one of the keys to healthy aging. They enhance cognition, improve sleep, and flood the brain with mood-boosting endorphins. Perhaps most importantly, the skin acts as an observatory, sending a constant stream of signaling molecules to the rest of the body to tell it what’s happening in the world.

What about skin cancer? Yes, sun exposure definitely seems to raise your risk. But that has a smaller impact on public health than you might think. While skin cancer is very common, and unpleasant, most cases have few serious health consequences. The type of skin cancer that is most dangerous, melanoma, accounts for a tiny percentage of cases, and it isn’t strongly associated with cumulative sun exposure. It’s more closely connected to intermittent exposure, especially sunburns, and with very fair-skinned people, who are the ones who need to be the most cautious about the sun. People with darker skin have much less risk.

In fact, for most people, regular, nonburning sun exposure is actually associated with better outcomes for melanoma. That may be because vitamin D and its related compounds are actually produced by the skin to protect it from sun damage and skin cancer. It’s an incredibly elegant system in which the epidermis produces the solution to the problem in direct proportion to the extent of the problem. When skin receives moderate daily doses of sunshine, it becomes stocked with vitamin D, preparing it for the next day’s dose. (It also makes more melanin, of course, to create a protective tan.) Vitamin D taken orally gets into the bloodstream but not effectively into those outer skin cells, which aren’t connected to the blood supply.

The upshot of all this new science is that it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the best plan for optimal health is a steady diet of moderate, nonburning sun exposure. The nonburning part is important. Every scientist I’ve spoken with agrees that burns are bad news and we should get out of the sun well before they occur. They also agree that trying to get your D and other benefits through nothing but the skin on your face, hands, and arms is a mistake, as that will invariably visit too much sun damage on those parts. Instead, it’s better to spread that job across as much skin as possible for as little time as necessary, so no one section gets overwhelmed.

And that leads us right back to the nudist community, which has been doing a stellar job of this for decades. It turns out that sneaking in small amounts of light exposure outside of the classic beach moments—shade, sunset, whenever—makes a great practice. In fact, once you understand the skin’s role as an observatory, coordinating homeostasis with the brain, immune system, and endocrine system, it calls into question the use of clothes entirely. If you keep your body in the dark…well, you keep it in the dark. 🪐

Editor’s note

Rowan Jacobsen is a James Beard Award–winning science journalist whose work appears in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Outside, Scientific American, and the New York Times, among others. He’s written nine books, and his latest — In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure (Scribner) — is out today, June 16. The essay below grew out of his reporting for that book, and I think it’s essential reading for anyone in this community. We’re lucky to have him here.

—Evan Nix, editor

Buy In Defense of Sunlight Today

A couple of years ago I moved from Southern California to back to Las Vegas, the city of my youth. With the move, I went from a fairly robust naturist scene—clubs, beaches, community—to a city with no formal outlet for naturism. No clubs, no beaches. Just desert.

I knew about the Vegas Bares, a nonlanded group I’d heard of vaguely through word of mouth and their website. They seemed mostly dormant after Covid, their events and parties having evaporated along with everyone else’s, but I signed up as a member anyway—to support them, to see if I could make a connection. It did form one connection, by text, with a phone number entered into my contacts simply as “John.”

From time to time I have heard from John—usually in the friendlier weather months which are few and fleeting in Las Vegas. The texts usually serve as short-notice notifications of planned hikes or paddleboarding along the lower Colorado river or Lake Mead. Often, I was interested in joining, intellectually at least. My primary naturist recreation since moving here has largely been solo nude hiking in the deserts around me—but I have generally kept those hikes on the milder side because I am usually alone and don’t want to get stuck anywhere. The desert is deadly; you are taught that when you grow up here, as I did.

So for many of John’s invitations, I either couldn’t make it work or shied away from committing to something where I’d be out-leagued or feel out of place. I’d been mourning the naturist community I left in Southern California for two years, and my practice here had become a solitary thing—protected from falling out of practice entirely, but longing for some community, and some culture.

And then a text from John came with an invitation that I couldn’t reasonably turn down. A “full moon” hike to the Arizona Hot Springs. Saturday night. The trailhead, by car, is not twenty minutes from my house. I really had no excuses.

Well, not none. The desert is brutal, and this is a serious trail for a beginning-to-moderate hiker like I am. It closes from May to September because of extreme heat. Every year people require emergency rescue out there, and it’s not unheard of for people to perish, a fact hikers are reminded of by a memorial at the trailhead for a woman who recently died from exposure. There was also a story in the news last year about a field trip of kids that all had to be rescued from the trail because they hadn’t brought enough water and couldn’t make it back. It’s recommended each person carries at least three liters down to the Springs. These kids had brought a 12 oz bottle each.

I also, being honest with myself, had no idea what to expect from this group. What if it’s just one other guy and we’re halfway down into the canyon before I lose cell signal and he starts talking about his collection of animal teeth? Would I turn back? The nerves started to set in and, like I had many times before, I considered backing out.

I reminded myself that I'd been texting with John for a couple of years—which would be an extraordinary commitment if he was just a creep who wanted to talk about animal teeth. I knew they organized hikes on this trail a few times before, so presumably they were somewhat legitimate, or at least knew it better than I did. The internet told me we were in for a bright full moon, lows around 70, low wind—favorable conditions, notwithstanding the inclines and rock scrambling I'd read about. I decided to face my nerves and go.

I arrive at the trailhead right at 4:30pm. Two men are gearing up by their cars. Greg is a small, extremely tan guy with salt-and-pepper hair and the voice and Appalachian accent of Billy Bob Thornton. He was just out on this trail yesterday, he tells me—it was hotter then, so that’s good for us. Keith has a serious hiking pack, walking sticks, boots he’s still lacing up. I learn he does this hike weekly, sometimes daily, and takes great care to help maintain the trail and springs during the open season. I look down at my string backpack and low-top trail shoes and wonder briefly if I’m in over my head.

Soon John and Mark pull up in a white Tesla. Mark is shorter, a bit barrel-shaped and bald on top with large dark sunglasses—he looks enough like Arizona Senator Mark Kelly that when I hear his first name, I do a double take, but he takes off his sunglasses and I see he has very different eyes. John is thin, athletic, younger than I pictured, maybe early 50s, if I had to guess. Within a few minutes it’s clear that all four of them are regulars on this trail, and that I’ve accidentally assembled the best possible guides for an after-dark excursion through the killer desert.

The sun is still high as we head down the 2.5-mile trail. We don’t get far past the trailhead before we stop and disrobe. Keith suggests we carry wraps just in case, but says if we encounter someone, don’t rush to cover up—just act normal and friendly. The whole way in, the guys track who they see hiking out against how many cars they counted in the lot at the trailhead, apparently noting how many people are still somewhere down the trail. I realize later this isn’t curiosity—it’s an informal safety system. They’re keeping an eye out.

It’s over a mile before we have our first encounter. This trail is popular with day-hikers who come down on a Saturday to hang in the hot springs, jump in the Colorado, and hike back out in the afternoon. The whole way in, the guys are amazed we haven’t seen more people.

The first group we come across includes some young adults and an older woman who looks like the afternoon got longer than she planned. The young adults look a little weirded out to find five naked men in the desert, but the older woman doesn’t bat an eyelash. “Do you know if it’s this hot all the way up?” “It is,” Keith says, “but make sure you go straight at the fork—don’t go left or you’re in for a much more intense climb out. Do you have enough water?” They say they do, thank us and head up.

A few minutes later we pass a couple young guys hiking out who look a little faded—not an unexpected sight on this hike out to the lakeside. A lot of people come to party. Mark asks them if they have enough water. “Yeah we’re good,” they reply. “Thanks, man.” I don’t know if they even noticed we were naked.

As we walk, John fills me in on the Vegas Bares. They’ve been around in various forms for more than twenty years, throwing parties and organizing events under different leaders at different times. Their most recent era has seen a lot of change. Covid took their event spaces and their membership bled out slowly after that. What was left constricted, and the core group found their place and focus around the areas’ hot springs. Not long ago, they lost their charter with the American Association for Nude Recreation because they couldn’t meet the minimum membership requirement of twenty.

The trail descends into a canyon, and I can tell by the mountains ahead that we’re nearing the Colorado—but that could still mean more than a mile from our destination. Some light cloud cover is coming in. The sun is still pretty high but it’s cooling off.

As we wind through the canyon I start seeing messages chalked on the stone walls and on large rocks:

NO GLASS.

FAMILY-FRIENDLY NUDITY IS A TRADITION AT ARIZONA HOT SPRINGS.

YOU MAY ENCOUNTER NUDITY BEYOND THIS POINT.

I soon find out these were written by Keith.

As we hike, he tells me about a confrontation at the springs earlier that week. A female river guide had brought clients up to the pools and insisted everyone should cover up around them. One of the nude moms camping there pushed back immediately. “These springs have always been clothing optional,” Keith recalls her saying. “If your clients want everybody dressed, that’s your problem.”

What really stayed with him, though, was one of the kids asking: “Don’t they like my birthday suit?” I learn Keith’s a dad and we bond over that.

Before long we hit a corner where everyone stops to pee. “After this curve the water all feeds into the pools,” someone says, “so this is your last chance without hiking back up or down a little further.” We shake it out and move on, and within a couple of minutes we’re at the mouth of the first pool. Before us is a spring in the canyon wall providing a constant run of fresh water. Keith points out that you can refill your bottles from this if you need to, though the water runs at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

John gives me the rundown. There are three main pools formed from sandbags and the natural canyon walls. The top pool, fed directly from the source, runs around 120 degrees—an uncomfortable temperature to even stand still in for long let alone soak in. You trudge through fast and climb out the other side. Pivot around a canyon corner and you reach the second pool, which usually sits around 105. You can sit in this one for a few minutes but it’s not advised that you push it for long. There’s a story about a guy just last week who wouldn’t get out despite warnings and sure enough, he passed out for ninety minutes before finally coming to, narrowly avoiding an emergency extraction.

The third pool—the Cinderella pool, they call it—runs at a perfect 99 degrees and spills over a 20-foot warm waterfall into the canyon below. The waterfall is straddled by a metal stairway you can take to hike down to the Colorado River, just a few miles downstream from the Hoover Dam.

Some people are in the pools in bathing suits when we arrive. We’re the only nude group. Nobody seems particularly bothered, but one group packs it in quickly and heads down the stairway back to their camp on the cove. We settle into the Cinderella pool, feeling a little like we might have chased them off, but not feeling too too bad about it. I find a wedge of the pool where I can stretch out a little and find I can recline perfectly on a long flat rock so that I’m nicely submerged and also comfortably above full submersion.

The ancient water is just over body temperature and holds me comfortably supine. I look up at the canyon walls above me, stretching maybe eighty or ninety feet before they open to a yellowing sky—the same view people have soaked under here for generations. It’s quiet, and I can hear bats hunting in the evening light. I’m starting to see the appeal of this place.

After an hour or so a few of us decide to take the metal stairway down from the Cinderella pool and follow the canyon to the river. The Colorado here runs cold and clear through Black Canyon, moving semi-naturally—one of the few stretches in this whole system that still does. The dam is a few miles upstream. On the far bank the cliffs rise sheer and dark, volcanic. The canyon walls absorb heat all day and hold it into the evening.

This is land that was once inhabited by Southern Paiute and Hualapai, who lived along this river and throughout this desert for centuries before anyone built anything here. The springs themselves are older still: water working its way down through fault lines in the earth, picking up geothermal heat for thousands of years before finding its way back to the surface in this slot canyon at a reliable 120F. The infrastructure around it—the sandbags, the trail, the chalk on the walls—is seasonal. The spring is not.

There are kayakers pulled up on a gravel bar downstream, a couple of campers with a game of cards going. They wave. Later some of them will make their way up to the pools. It’s that kind of place. It has always drawn people in.

We get back up to the pools and settle in as the sun starts to drop. The conversation loosens the way it does when people are warm and unhurried.

I start to get to know these guys a little. Greg, it turns out, is only here because his wife is out of town. She’s joined him on nude beaches over the years—they’ve been married thirty-five years—but she draws the line at the hot springs, for reasons that seem to genuinely baffle everyone in the pool. Keith has four adult kids and his dad energy extends naturally to these springs. Mark has been a naturist since he was eighteen and makes no secret of the fact that he considers this the pinnacle of the practice. John is mild-mannered and observant, with a boylike humor that surfaces at surprising times.

I also learn about others. There’s a story about a regular named Maintenance Mike, who spent years keeping the pools until the park service banned him—for reasons nobody can quite articulate to my satisfaction, though I come to understand it as the natural politics of any shared space, even an ancient and public one out in the middle of the desert. Maintenance Mike’s absence is still felt, apparently. The pools have more gravel in them than they used to, I’m told.

As the sun drops, a guy named Dan climbs up from the river side. He’s introduced to me as a serious hot springer—someone who has camped at springs all over the world—and his arrival shifts the conversation. They trade destinations the way other people trade restaurants: Deep Creek up in the San Bernardinos, Gold Strike just up the road, a spring in Niger, another in New Zealand, Wyoming. Then the war stories start. Pseudomonas rashes, cercarial dermatitis from parasitic larvae, a cautionary tale involving Naegleria fowleri—the brain-eating amoeba whose name I recognize from the warning signs I’d seen posted in this very canyon on the way in. I sit and listen, a little on the outside of it, trying to absorb the geography and the lore of a subculture I didn’t know had this much territory.

I’m the new guy, so they are sure to remind me that hot water dehydrates you, an unsubtle hint that I should keep drinking. I step out of the pool and squint to find my hike bag in the dark. I take a long refreshing drink. I look back and what I see is group of people in a hot tub in the moonlight, talking and sharing stories, laughter occasionally reverberating up off the canyon walls. As an active nudist I’ve been in my fair share of hot tubs, and this is not an unfamiliar scene.

It’s in this moment, in the dark, that it hits me. I’ve spent two years hiking alone in this desert, wondering where the naturists were. They were here.

On the way back up we don headlamps and climb out of the canyon single file. After a mile or more we’re in open desert again. The moon is full and bright enough that we kill the lamps and walk the rest of the way in moonlight. It’s beautiful, but a significant incline up from the river banks, and my legs are burning more with each step.

Over a hour of walking and it’s nearly midnight by the time we reach the highway. I’m running on fumes, and I assume it will take me at least a day or three to bounce back from both the hike and the late night. But as we’re packing up to say our goodbyes, these guys—all of them at least a decade older than me—are already talking about coming back tomorrow.

As I mentioned, the Vegas Bares lost their AANR charter not long ago. The Bares, at this point, are not twenty people. But the ones who are left have been hiking into this canyon together for years, maintaining these pools, looking out for strangers on the trail. The parties and events that used to define the group never came back after Covid, and what remained evolved. But they didn’t stop being naturists. If anything they became more committed to it than anyone I’d encountered in years. Think about it, when was the last time you hiked over an hour through scorching, craggy rocks and desert to be nude with friends?

I keep thinking about the chalk-written nudity rules on the canyon walls. Every season, sometimes week by week, someone comes back down here and writes the rules again. They shift the sandbags and remove gravel from the pools. These pools change shape. There are no resort pools here, no golf cart tours, no welcome packets. There’s no permanent record, no charter, no minimum membership. You get here by hiking two and a half miles through terrain that can kill you. The people here have earned this. They show up, they maintain it, they look after each other and the strangers they pass on the way out. Keith picks up garbage and chalks notices on canyon walls. The group tracks cars so everyone gets home. This is their practice.

Summer nudist events around the country are just getting started, but here the season is just about to end. Every year, either on May 15th or earlier if the temperature forecast at a nearby weather station hits a threshold for five consecutive days, NPS closes the trail. Keith has been watching the forecast. It could be this week.

You hike every day you can, because you don’t know which day is the last one for a while.

Not a week after my trip, the trail closed until fall arrives. I’m sad I’ll have to wait that long, but after a couple years of feeling alone out in this desert, I’ve finally found what I have been looking for, and you bet I’ll be back. 🪐

I am a long-standing practicing nudist and have been pleased to see that some of my family members have discovered the benefits of naturism. I was therefore surprised when a family FaceTime call—during which our toddler was happily running about nude—was flagged as “sensitive content” and blurred. While I understand the protective rationale and that users can choose to view the content, the automatic conflation of all nudity as potentially harmful was distressing. I was also concerned about the loss of user autonomy when such features are imposed rather than allowing for an opt-in.

To understand how this occurred, I examined the evolution of Apple’s Sensitive Content Warning technology. Its origins lie in child-protection measures introduced in iOS 17 under the Communication Safety framework. Initially designed to shield minors from explicit imagery shared through apps such as Messages, the system automatically blurred nude photos and provided age-appropriate guidance before viewing. Crucially, all image analysis occurred on-device, ensuring that no content was transmitted to or stored by Apple.

Over time, this narrowly focused child-safety feature expanded into a broader content-moderation tool for all users. Subsequent updates extended detection beyond static images to videos and, most recently in iOS 26, to real-time FaceTime interactions. The system now uses on-device machine learning to detect nudity during live communication, automatically pausing video and audio streams and presenting users with the choice to end or continue the interaction.

This progression reflects a consistent emphasis on protection and privacy-preserving design. However, it also marks a significant conceptual shift: from protecting minors against exploitative content to categorizing and intervening in any instance of nudity, regardless of context. Such expansion raises important questions about the appropriate boundaries of technological mediation in private communication.

These concerns are particularly relevant for communities grounded in social nudism and naturism. Naturism is a holistic philosophy emphasizing body acceptance, non-sexualized nudity, and respectful connection to self, others, and the environment. In contrast, automated detection systems are inherently reductionist: they classify nudity as a single category of potentially harmful content, without the capacity to interpret context, intent, or cultural meaning. As a result, they conflate wholesome, non-sexual nudity with explicit material and negatively shape cultural perceptions.

Although Apple’s implementation maintains user privacy and is framed as a protective option, the automatic pausing of live communication based solely on the presence of nudity introduces a form of algorithmic gatekeeping. This can inadvertently stigmatize naturist expression and reinforce the societal narrative that all nudity is problematic. In doing so, it undermines efforts to normalize and destigmatize body-positive, non-exploitative representations of the human form.

The expansion of sensitive content monitoring into real-time platforms does more than safeguard against unwanted exposure; it shapes cultural perception. For the naturist community, it prompts critical reflection on how emerging technologies may constrain authentic self-expression and underscores the continuing challenge to educate the public about what constitutes appropriate human embodiment. 🪐

More from Ronna:

The sauna, inside a log cabin building meant to resemble a banya in Siberia, is dimly lit. Two saunameisters are dancing, waving flags and towels to popular music as the dozens of people inside sweat, clap and gyrate on the benches. The saunameisters are clothed, but everyone else—most in their 20s and 30s—are totally naked.

Such is the scene during an aufguss—infusion ceremony—at Therme Erding outside Munich, which calls itself the world’s largest spa. It is indeed enormous. The textilfrei section is just one of four areas, and includes about 20 saunas, a huge resort-style spring-water pool with a lazy river and two swim-up bars, and two restaurants. I was able to spend a few days there in April, tacked onto the end of a family vacation to Italy.

The textilfrei section holds thousands of people. The clientele includes mixed genders, ages 16 and up, and all shapes and sizes. The number of people from ages 20 to 40 might make U.S. nudist resorts envious, however. American nudist resorts, with membership skewing 60 and up, worry about the lack of younger members.

Therme Erding, like other facilities I have visited such as Archimedes Banya and Harbin Hot Springs in Northern California that allow nudity and attract a fair number of younger people, does not consider itself a naturist or nudist resort. In the textilfrei section, nudity is required in the saunas and pools, but guests are expected to cover up with a robe or towel when moving between them. German saunas, in general, require nudity for hygienic reasons. Therme Erding guests seem to conform to the covering-up etiquette, although there didn’t appear to be active enforcement.

One feature that I’m sure attracts people of all ages is the ability to lounge in chairs under palm trees in a warm, tropical environment during often-chilly German weather. Many guests were sunbathing inside, nude. A large portion of the textilfrei section is covered by a clear, retractable roof. One can also swim through a plastic covering to a fully outdoor section that includes the banya, the lazy river, one of the swim-up bars, and even a sandy beach with a volleyball court.

For a very different, more traditional German sauna experience, I visited Müller’sches Volksbad on the Isar River in central Munich. Again, there were quite a few younger people during the one evening I was there. Housed in a beautiful art nouveau building that dates from 1901, it includes three sauna rooms in a row featuring progressively hotter temperatures, a separate modern hot sauna, a steam room, a large warm pool, and a cold plunge. The clientele numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands, but included a mix of young and older people. Nudity was required in the sauna area; the two swimming pools in another section required swimwear. Müller’sches Volksbad was a nice, quieter change of pace from the giant Therme Erding.

The graying of nudism is one of the most discussed issues facing U.S. naturist clubs and resorts today. Even the thriving club where I am a member, Glen Eden in Southern California, has an average membership age of more than 60. Therme Erding and other non-explicitly-nudist facilities draw plenty of younger people, however. I don’t know why this is the case, but all these facilities share a connection with wellness, a growing industry worldwide. U.S. naturist organizations can perhaps glean lessons by looking at Therme Erding, Müller’sches Volksbad, Archimedes Banya, Harbin Hot Springs and other non-explicitly-nudist facilities. 🪐

Editor’s note: The author of this piece recently appeared on a podcast exploring Archimedes Banya—coincidentally released just as this article was going to press. Worth a listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ducking-realitea/id1589320878

In the naturist world, body painting is a fairly common activity—which makes a certain kind of sense. What could be more ideal than a naked body for spreading paint on skin?

Most body painters work with brushes and sponges, covering the body completely from hair to toes, without omitting a single square centimeter. Sometimes to create abstraction, an animal likeness—or to blend a body into a natural landscape and create a sort of trompe-l’œil. In naturist spaces, the approach is often looser: buckets of water-based acrylics, big sponges, all left out for self-service. Fun and festive, without always being highly artistic—but that’s not always the goal.

My approach to body painting is very different. At the root of my art, I mostly love drawing on paper and canvas. I almost never use brushes, always markers. Initially, I didn’t envision using some of my equipment (Poscas, the only markers that are non-toxic for the skin) on bodies. To me, body painting was strictly about brushes!

Then I came across artists who only used markers at various festivals and public events. Since I regularly visit naturist campsites, it was only natural that I started drawing on people who wanted me to.

The approach of drawing with a marker is radically different from that of a brush. It’s a much finer and more angular tool, designed to create lines, lettering, symbols—and not large solid blocks of color. With this medium, you never cover the entire body.

This suits me very well. The “erased body” aspect of most body painting had always bothered me. From my very first attempts, other differences emerged: never anything on the genitals, and above all, I didn’t develop the same style as I did for my drawings on paper and canvas. Nor the same style as other body painters. So much the better—in art, the less conventional the approach, the more interesting.

On a traditional surface, I generally depict deformed, imaginary characters. That’s my thing! In a cubist and street-art style. On bodies, however, nothing figurative. Because the human form isn’t just another canvas: you have to follow its curves, its color, its presence. The drawing must serve the person, not the other way around.

This approach was quickly understood and appreciated in the naturist community, undoubtedly because it aligns with a certain philosophy. Since 2025, I have been wandering through naturist centers offering body painting sessions, followed by a photo shoot—not for simple souvenir photos: we are there to create art, even with amateur models. It is actually surprising to see how many people who have never particularly posed before do an excellent job.

Currently, nearly fifteen centers have been explored—and many more to come! For now, only in France, but perhaps one day in other countries too. The most exciting part is that every new encounter is unique. Unlike professional experiences, there are no real strict rules; quite the opposite, because the subject must feel entirely free at all times, and never constrained. There is simply an ethic: respecting everyone’s wishes, proposing rather than imposing, taking into account any potential restrictions.

The other unique aspects of the approach are brought about by the naturist setting. It wasn’t even necessary to add anything to the concept—the rest came naturally!

When I run my booth, I let people come to me, and there is no question of filtering them. Everything is inclusive, regardless of age or body appearance. Yet, even though it poses no problem for me to body-paint an obese person or an elderly person, very few dare to! Even in a naturist environment, you often encounter a sort of self-censorship. As soon as someone is “too” old, heavy, or has a body weathered by life, they are content to just watch or chat, without wishing to participate. It’s a real shame! Last summer at Bélézy, I managed to get a few older participants, but only because a young regular there went and convinced them.

This inclusivity also means that children and teenagers come to pose. Sometimes there are even more of them than adults! This is another point that sets it apart from other projects: while in the world of fine art photography, photos of children, pre-teens, and teens are quite common, it’s much less frequent for nude shoots. Even though other photographers explore this too (Sally Mann, Alain Laboile, among others).

Sometimes a child comes alone and the parent simply tags along; sometimes we do a mother-daughter session, which allows us to link them with a common motif. The results are sometimes astonishing! You’d think a child wouldn’t be patient, but they are actually so passionate that by the end, it’s the parent and I who are exhausted!

This last aspect sometimes makes the Symbiose project delicate to export. Several Facebook warnings, an Instagram account deleted without notice—over a thousand followers lost—three internet creeps I had to kick out of the project (once even notifying the authorities). So yes, despite a clear and wholesome concept, nothing is simple. Any unique artistic endeavor encounters stumbling blocks, and this project is no exception.

Every step is a new trial: searching for new centers (in summer 2026, La Chiappa in Corsica), navigating conservative vacationers who don’t always look upon it favorably, conducting the shoots without bothering anyone, social media censorship, a few malicious internet users. The life of an artist is complicated!

So why continue? Why does the project endure?

Because the positive experiences far outnumber the negative ones. Because for every problem encountered, ten positive elements counterbalance it—compliments, beautiful memories, moments of meditation, and personal growth. That is why the Symbiose project is undoubtedly not ready to stop anytime soon. 🪐

More work from Alexis and the Symbiose project a symbiose-body-painting.com.

The women in the Telegram channels don’t know they’re there. Their photographs — pulled from Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat — were uploaded by someone else, traded for cash, paired with threats, used as raw material for AI tools that stripped or replaced or fabricated. Tens of thousands of them, according to a report released this week by the research nonprofit AI Forensics. The word the report uses for what was done to them is “nude.”

The word is accurate, technically. The images are nude. They are also non-consensual, fabricated, weaponized, and in some cases illegal. They are components of coordinated harassment campaigns. They have ended careers, destroyed relationships, and according to researchers who study this ecosystem, driven women from public life entirely. “Nude” is the least interesting thing about them. It is also, somehow, the word that keeps appearing in the headlines.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of what I’m about to say is wrong. The easy version goes: the coverage is conflating nudity with harm, which is unfair to nudists. That’s not my argument. The harm in those Telegram channels is real and it is serious, and the nudity—or what passes for nudity in AI-generated images of women who never consented to be photographed, let alone undressed—is genuinely part of the harm. When someone’s likeness is fabricated into a sexual image and distributed without their knowledge, the violation isn’t merely abstract. It is intimate and it is specific and it is, in the fullest sense of the word, bodily.

What I’m interested in is something subtler. Not whether the word “nude” is being misused in these stories, but what happens to the word itself—and everything it touches—as it absorbs this meaning by accumulation.

AI Forensics spent six weeks this winter studying 16 Telegram groups operating in Spain and Italy, analyzing nearly 2.8 million messages. What they found was not a fringe subculture but what they describe as a thriving economy: over 18,000 references to surveillance tools appearing alongside more than 82,000 abusive images and videos, with users trading spyware marketed as “parental controls” alongside photographs of women they knew personally—partners, former partners, sisters, colleagues. The most extreme content depicted children in incest and rape scenarios. The Wired headline, which was more direct than the AFP wire version most outlets ran, called it what it was: men sharing nonconsensual images of women and girls, buying spyware, and engaging in doxing.

According to the report, most of the users sharing nonconsensual sexual content are young, heterosexual men sharing content of women who are their partners, former partners, or acquaintances. This is not, in other words, a story about strangers. It is a story about the intimate surveillance of people who are known, by people who know them, using tools that have become startlingly accessible. In 2023, creating a convincing deepfake required a powerful GPU and coding knowledge. By 2026, it requires only a Telegram account.

The policy response has been swift, at least by European standards. Three weeks ago, the European Parliament voted 569 to 45 to back a ban on “nudifier” systems—AI applications that create or manipulate images to depict identifiable real people in sexually explicit or intimate ways without their consent. The vote was framed, across virtually every outlet that covered it, as a win for women’s rights and child protection. “Every day, women across the EU are targeted by deep-nude AI tools that strip them of their dignity, intimidate them online and make them vulnerable to blackmail and abuse,” said Dutch Green MEP Kim van Sparrentak after the vote.

She is right. And the ban, as written, is carefully scoped: it targets systems that create non-consensual intimate images of identifiable real people, with a carve-out for platforms that have effective safeguards preventing such misuse. It is, as these things go, a reasonable piece of legislation aimed at a genuine harm.

And yet.

The word “nudifier” is doing something interesting in that legislation. It is naming an application by what the application produces—a nude image—rather than by what makes the application harmful, which is the non-consent. This is not a trivial distinction. It is, in fact, the distinction the legislation itself tries to encode in its carve-out clause. But in the public conversation surrounding the vote—in the headlines, in the MEP statements, in the advocacy framing—“nude” and “harmful” have become functionally synonymous. The nudity is the harm. The harm is the nudity.

I want to add here that I write about nudity for a living. I publish a daily newsletter called Planet Nude that covers nonsexual nudity and nude expression through history, culture, politics, and art—not sex or pornography, a distinction I have now made so many times it has lost all meaning to me personally. I have been doing this for three years. If you’re reading this now, you most likely already know all this already. You’re most likely a subscriber. Anyway, I mention it not to establish credentials but because it gives me a particular vantage point on what happens when “nude” becomes a dirty word again. Because it does, periodically. And the consequences are not abstract.

Platform moderation is perhaps the most immediate example. The Guardian’s January investigation identified at least 150 Telegram channels distributing AI-generated sexual images of women, and noted that channels shut down by the platform would reopen under near-identical names within hours. Telegram’s moderation, in other words, fails the people it most needs to protect. But platform moderation, when it does engage, tends to operate on keywords and image-detection heuristics rather than context. “Nude” trips the filter. Whether the image is a fabricated sexual assault or a photograph taken on a clothing-optional beach with the full knowledge and consent of everyone in it does not always register as a meaningful difference to an algorithm.

This is not a hypothetical. Naturist organizations, figure photographers, body-positive health advocates, and artists working in the tradition of the nude have all had content removed from major platforms in recent years—not because their content was harmful, but because it was nude, and “nude” had been defined, by accumulating association, as inherently problematic. Instagram’s nudity policies, notoriously applied with spectacular inconsistency, have resulted in the removal of mastectomy photographs, breastfeeding images, classical art, and documentary photography. The content moderation systems that were ostensibly built to protect women have, with some regularity, been turned against women’s bodies instead.

Legislation follows the same logic, slowly. When the EU Parliament's nudifier ban moves through negotiations with the Council, its careful carve-outs may or may not survive intact. What will survive, reliably, is the cultural association that has been built around the word itself. Nudity, in the discourse that produced the legislation, is something that is done to people. It is a vector of harm. It is the thing that needs to be banned. In Arizona, AANR is currently opposing HB 2133, a bill targeting non-consensual image sharing whose language is broad enough to create liability for naturist clubs and members posting consensual photographs. The bill passed the House in February and is advancing through the Senate. Nobody writing that bill set out to criminalize nudism. That's the point.

AI Forensics researcher Silvia Semenzin, speaking about the Telegram findings, made a point that the headlines largely missed: “We tend to forget that most victims are ordinary women. The majority of this violence is directed towards people who the perpetrators know.” This is important for several reasons, the most obvious being that it reframes the harm away from stranger danger and toward intimate partner abuse—which has different causes, different patterns, and different remedies than platform-level content moderation.

But it also says something else. The harm in those Telegram channels is not the nudity. The harm is the violation of trust, the weaponization of intimacy, the use of a woman’s image against her by someone who has access to it precisely because she trusted him. The nudity is the instrument. The harm is something older and more specific and, in many ways, harder to legislate away.

This matters because we are in the middle of writing the rules. The Telegram report will inform platform policy discussions. The EU nudifier ban will move through negotiations. The US Take It Down Act, signed into law last year, requires tech companies to remove non-consensual sexually explicit images within two days of notification. All of this is happening now, and the language being used to describe the problem will shape the solutions that emerge from it.

If the problem is “nude images,” the solution is to restrict nude images. If the problem is non-consensual violation of a person’s body and dignity, the solution looks different—and leaves considerably more room for the bodies and dignities of people who have chosen, freely and deliberately, to live without clothes.

I am not arguing that nudism is equivalent to the harm documented in AI Forensics’ report. I am not arguing that naturists are the real victims here, or that the concerns of the beach volleyball community should weigh against those of women whose images are being traded like commodities in Telegram channels. That would be obscene.

What I am arguing is that language matters, and that the language being used to describe this harm is imprecise in ways that have consequences beyond the immediate policy debate. Every time “nude” absorbs another connotation of violation, it becomes a little harder to talk about the body in any other register. Every time the headlines reach for the most viscerally alarming word rather than the most accurate one—and “non-consensual” is both more accurate and more alarming, if you think about it—the word “nude” does a little more work it was never meant to do.

The women in those Telegram channels deserve better than the coverage they received this week. They deserve reporting that names what was done to them with precision—not because precision is a journalistic virtue in the abstract, but because precision is what produces legislation and platform policy that actually protects them, rather than legislation and platform policy that protects everyone from nudity.

Those are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing. 🪐

On March 31, 2025, a city councilmember named Lucy Lauser in Stevenson, Washington walked to the courthouse lawn and took off her shirt. It was International Transgender Day of Visibility. She had written four words across her chest in marker: MY BODY IS NOT A SIN.

Lucy Lauser was first elected to the Stevenson City Council in 2023, the first openly transgender person to hold elected office in the town of just 1,400, roughly, where the Columbia River runs just south of downtown. It is not a city where a sitting councilmember typically ends up at the center of a First Amendment case that goes to the state supreme court—but these are unprecedented times, and that is where the councilmember ended up.

What Lauser did that morning was not, on its face, complicated. She stood in public, in daylight, as a political act on a day designated specifically to celebrate transgender people, and she made her body the text of her argument. It was not sexual. There was no lascivious intent. It was not meant to titillate. It was a statement of protest.

What happened next is the story

Not long after the protest, two recall petitions were filed against Councilmember Lauser—both by the same Stevenson resident, Kathleen Fitzgerald. The first petition, based on the March 31 protest, alleged that by exposing her breasts in public, Lauser had violated her oath of office and committed malfeasance. The Skamania County Superior Court agreed, finding the charge legally sufficient—ruling that "malfeasance" required nothing more than commission of a crime, and the crime, in the judge's reading, was indecent exposure. That ruling sent the case to the Washington Supreme Court.

The second petition, filed after Lauser's July 4 arrest, made essentially the same argument on the basis of the new incident. A Skamania County judge dismissed it.

There was also an arrest. On July 4, 2025, Lauser returned to the courthouse lawn for a second protest—this time with her nipples covered in black tape, one arm painted red, mouth taped shut, and “woman, life, freedom” written across her chest. She was taken into custody and charged with misdemeanor indecent exposure—despite the black tape covering her nipples. She entered a not guilty plea. A Knapstad motion—a pretrial mechanism that asks the court to rule that even accepting all the facts, no crime occurred—was heard in Skamania County District Court in November 2025. The judge said the case raised “complicated stuff” and took it under advisement. As of this writing, that criminal charge is still pending.

The Washington Supreme Court, however, was not confused.

In a ruling issued February 26, 2026, the court dismissed the first recall petition and said plainly what the lower court had refused to say: Lauser’s protest was constitutionally protected expressive conduct. Indecent exposure under Washington law requires intentional, obscene exposure. Obscene means sexually motivated, or lewd and lascivious. A topless protest on International Transgender Day of Visibility, at a courthouse, with political text written on the body—that is not obscene in any sense the law recognizes. The recall petition was neither factually nor legally sufficient.

The ACLU of Washington, which had been actively advocating for dismissal throughout the case, called the ruling a vindication.

Despite the win, Lauser resigned from the Stevenson City Council on March 31, exactly one year after the protest that started all of this. She had planned the resignation for months, always intending it as the final act in a deliberate sequence. In her prepared statement, she explained why staying no longer made sense: “I’ve been able to do more to feed the hungry outside this position than in it. I've done more to provide shelter for the homeless outside this position than in it. And I've done far more to defend the constitutional rights of my constituents outside this position than in it.” She did not sound like someone who had lost.

Takeaways and examinations

The Washington Supreme Court found that nudity, on its own, is not obscene. Obscenity requires a sexual element — a lascivious or prurient motivation that transforms exposure into something the state has a legitimate interest in suppressing. Remove that element, and what you have left is a body. A body is not, by itself, a crime.

This distinction matters far beyond the specific facts of Lauser’s case. It is the same distinction at the core of every fight over nude beaches, naturist parks, clothing-optional spaces, and the legal gray zones that body-freedom advocates navigate constantly. The law in most jurisdictions does not say nudity is illegal; it says obscene nudity is illegal. But in practice, nudity and obscenity get treated as synonyms — by prosecutors, by local ordinances, by school boards invoking “community standards,” by social media platforms that algorithmically flag the human body as adult content regardless of context.

What Lauser’s case gives the body-freedom argument is a piece of paper from a state supreme court that says: no. These are different things. And the difference is not a technicality — it is the substance of the law.

Lauser is transgender, and the context of her protest was transgender rights. It would be easy to read her story as purely a trans rights story, and it is that. But it is also something more specific: a case about what the body is allowed to mean in public space, and who gets to decide.

Part of what made her protest legible as a protest at all is the very double standard she was challenging. A shirtless man on the courthouse lawn on the Fourth of July is unremarkable. A shirtless woman is a different matter — potentially criminal, certainly controversial. That asymmetry encodes a presumption that female-presenting chests are inherently sexual, that they require covering not because of anything they do but because of what we’ve decided they mean. For a transgender woman, the double standard becomes a trap with two edges: her body is simultaneously too female to be uncovered in public and, in the eyes of her critics, not female enough to be protected by the same arguments a cisgender woman might make.

That trap is also, in a different register, familiar to naturism. The free speech frame that won Lauser’s case only protects the body when it’s saying something — when there’s a message, a courthouse, a marker on the chest. What naturism has always wanted to establish is harder to litigate: that the body doesn’t need a reason. That nudity isn’t an argument. That it shouldn’t have to be. The ruling protects the protesting body. The body that simply exists is still waiting for its day in court.

That distinction doesn’t diminish what Lauser did. It just clarifies what remains undone. The constitutional record now has something in it that wasn’t there before. The state may still try to convict her on the criminal charge. And the larger argument — that the body doesn’t need a reason — is still being made the slow way, outside courtrooms, one nude beach and one naturist park and one clothing-optional space at a time. 🪐

Let me paint you a picture. You’ve driven out to a clothing-optional hot spring, somewhere the landscape is stunning and the whole point is to slip into steaming mineral water and decompress. You shed your clothes, ease into the pool and try to do absolutely nothing. Exist without the weight of the world or, honestly, your swimsuit. And then someone slides into the water beside you, uninvited into your space, with eyes that are saying something you never agreed to hear.

If you’re a gay man or a woman, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about because you’ve also experienced this.

I’m a gay married man, and I love to visit my local clothing-optional hot springs. There’s something genuinely freeing about them. The radical normalcy of it all. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t walked away from a visit feeling uncomfortable, vaguely surveilled, and frustrated that once again, I had to manage someone else’s assumptions about what my naked body was broadcasting. I go there obviously to relax and let the stress melt away, not to be hit on by other gay men.

I used to enjoy attending the hot springs with a local “naked brotherhood” group on a regular basis, that is until a certain man joined the group and began attending as well. At first, there was no issue, he just seemed to enjoy hanging out with everyone having a nice conversation. That was until, there wasn’t anyone else nearby. He made me very uncomfortable by hitting on me and getting way too close. This didn’t just happen once, it happened a couple of times. Finally I stopped attending the nude soaks with that group to avoid being uncomfortable.

This is the conversation our LGBTQIA+ nudist community doesn’t always want to have, because we’ve spent so long fighting for the right to exist in these spaces at all. But it’s overdue. Especially in spaces like clothing-optional hot springs, which attract a genuinely mixed crowd of people seeking healing, rest, and connection with nature, and where the assumption of shared sexual intent can feel wildly out of place.

The myth that nudity is a signal

Here’s the thing that gets conflated constantly: being naked around other people is not the same as being available to them. These are two entirely different statements about a body in a space.

Mainstream nudism has understood this for decades. The naturist philosophy, in its traditional form, is almost aggressively non-sexual. Bodies are just bodies. This is often well understood in nudity required spaces, but clothing-optional spaces tend to operate in a grayer zone, and that gray zone is where things get complicated.

Consent in different location types fundamentally shapes how consent gets negotiated, with sex venues and cruising spaces often carrying a level of implied consent for sexual advances that other spaces do not. The problem is that when we are in a clothing-optional space we are not there for that implicit contract. Some of us are there for the sun. Some of us are there with our husbands. Some of us simply want to feel at home in our bodies without having to field advances we never invited.

The writer and cultural critic Michael Musto once observed that gay culture has “always had to negotiate the line between liberation and license.” That tension is alive and well at every clothing-optional venue where gay men visit or gather.

Part of what makes this dynamic so exhausting is how it’s often framed as a personal failing rather than a cultural problem. If you’re uncomfortable with someone’s advance in a nude space, the subtext can feel like: well, what did you expect? As if showing up is consent. As if you’ve opted into a particular kind of attention everywhere, always.

One framework for thinking about this holds that entering certain spaces involves accepting a kind of contract, and that everyone retains the freedom to participate or not in whatever way they choose. Saying no is always an option. That’s a generous and mostly useful way to think about it. But it assumes the contract is legible to everyone present, and that “no” is always received without pushback or social awkwardness. In practice, that’s not always how it goes.

In my experience a polite decline was met with lingering, hovering, or the kind of slow retreat that makes it clear the person wasn’t actually accepting the no, just waiting for a different answer. That’s not consent culture. That’s pressure wearing a patient face.

What’s particularly uncomfortable as a married man is the assumption that monogamy or disinterest somehow needs to be explained or defended in these spaces. It doesn’t. “No, thank you” is a complete sentence. It doesn’t require a footnote about my relationship structure.

What consent actually looks like here

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after several years of navigating these spaces, sometimes badly, sometimes well: clarity is kindness. Not just for the person whose boundaries need to be respected, but for everyone.

Respect for personal boundaries is genuinely considered a cornerstone of nudist community values, and staring or making assumptions about others’ availability runs directly counter to what these spaces are supposed to be about. That’s not a new idea. The nudist community has been saying it for generations. The specific gay context just sometimes forgets it.

Asking rather than assuming is the whole game. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but in practice it requires something a lot of us weren’t socialized to do easily: verbal, explicit checking-in. Not a look held a beat too long and interpreted as an invitation. Not a proximity that edges closer and waits to see what happens. An actual question. And then, crucially, a genuine openness to the answer being no.

This isn’t about sanitizing nude spaces or turning them into something clinical and joyless. Desire is real. Attraction is real. Gay men have built remarkable cultures of pleasure and connection that deserve celebration, not apology. But desire and respect are not in competition with each other. They should be the same practice.

This is the same thing that often happens with female identifying folks as well. They visit a nude space and instantly there seems to be some guy who thinks it’s a buffet and the neon open sign just turned on. It’s why many are afraid when there are too many men around at a nude venue or event. What I am saying is that… they are not alone in this feeling! It just so happens that no one talks about this happening to gay men, and that’s why I’ve chosen to share this with you.

The particular position of gay men who want different things

One of the less discussed dynamics in nude spaces with gay men is that we’re not a monolith. Gay men show up to these places with wildly different intentions, relationship structures, and comfort levels and the assumption of shared purpose can do real harm.

For married gay men especially, there’s sometimes an unspoken friction. The assumption from others can be that we’re secretly looking for permission, that the wedding ring is a bit of theater that polite insistence will see through. It won’t. And the fact that this assumption exists at all says something important about how we’ve constructed these spaces, and what stories we tell ourselves about what kind of gay man belongs in them.

You can be gay, happily married, and want to soak in a hot spring without it meaning anything other than exactly that. The freedom to be in a nude space without having to field advances is not a heterosexual value accidentally imported into gay culture. It’s just a value. Full stop.

This doesn’t require a manifesto. It just requires a little more care.

If you’re someone who approaches others in these spaces: read actual signals, not projected ones. Prolonged eye contact and a smile might be interest, or might just be a person being polite. When in doubt, ask or leave it alone. And when someone declines, let it be done. No hovering, no second approach ten minutes later, no slow orbit that communicates you’re still available if they change their mind.

If you’re someone who, like me, has found yourself uncomfortable in these spaces: you are not obligated to manage the discomfort of the person making you uncomfortable. A clear, calm “no thank you” or even just physically relocating is not rudeness. It’s self-respect in action. And telling venue staff when something crosses a line is not difficult. It’s how spaces actually improve.

The best clothing-optional hot springs nude soak sessions I’ve been to have one thing in common: they feel genuinely relaxed. Not performatively loose, but actually easy. Nobody is working too hard to be seen or to see. People talk, laugh, swim, read, and exist without a constant undercurrent of unspoken negotiation. That feeling doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built by the people in the space deciding, together, that everyone gets to be there on their own terms.

Gay men have always been good at building community. We’ve built it in the face of extraordinary pressure, in spaces that were never meant for us, out of almost nothing. We can absolutely build nude spaces that hold both freedom and respect. Those two things were never opposites to begin with. Just like the females I mentioned earlier in this essay, we just want to be respected and allowed to relax and just be ourselves.

And yes, I left that naked brotherhood group because it was the right thing to do. Even after expressing my discomfort to the leader of the group and getting nowhere, I felt it was the best course of action I could take. It’s sometimes not an easy choice to make but, it’s ok to walk away from a people group or space that makes you feel uncomfortable. 🪐

Before you read the article below, I want to be transparent with you about where I am writing this from.

After several years of writing about the joys and struggles of the nudist community and contributing time and energy to various nudist projects and organizations, I stepped away from my blog, my volunteer positions, and nudism itself over a year ago. For a variety of reasons, I came to recognize a growing misalignment between my convictions and the institutional direction of nudism, despite agreeing with many of its ideas. Though I am reluctant to call myself a nudist today, I have not stopped pondering what nudism means, what it has meant, and what it could mean going forward. I now also question whether the structures and assumptions of American nudism adequately address the very problems they aim to solve.

As I think back on many of my writings over the years, there was always a core tension that I could describe from various, narrow perspectives but I never quite took in the full picture. The following is not a rebuke of the nudist idea, but an examination of it through the eyes of someone who has stepped back far enough to, perhaps, see it clearly and who is not burdened with the responsibility of painting it in the most flattering light.

Writing this piece has clarified my own thoughts around nudism, and I hope it offers some kind of clarity to you as well.

In the beginning

Before American nudism, there was Freikörperkultur—not an accident of aesthetics, but a response to its historical moment. It was a pastoral reform movement that emerged in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany amid industrial acceleration and urban crowding. It imagined healing through return—to sun, soil, air—and through the disciplined cultivation of bodies thought capable of reaching their highest potential. In a Europe unsettled by mechanization and modern alienation, nakedness was framed not as spectacle but as restoration.

The body was not only something to be seen, but something to be lived. It was Körper—visible, physical, commandable, and external—and Leib—internal, feeling, breathing, moving in harmony with landscape and others, sometimes obedient, sometimes not. The promise of Freikörperkultur was not simply the exposure of the body, but its reintegration with the natural world.

When these ideas crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century, they entered a markedly different cultural terrain. Like Germany, America in the late 1920s and early 1930s was grappling with rapidly expanding industrial cities. But it was also charged with its own distinct social and economic upheavals. The market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression brought mass poverty and a turn toward escapism. The Great Migration brought roughly a million Black Americans northward in search of safety from Jim Crow violence, reshaping cities and provoking backlash from white communities unwilling to share space. Women, newly enfranchised on the heels of a controversial suffrage movement, were swiftly pushed out of industrial jobs they had filled during the war. Queer communities carved out fleeting urban visibility even as police raids intensified and moral panic spread. Meanwhile, Federal Comstock laws criminalized the mailing of material deemed obscene and cast long shadows over conversations about the body itself.

In America, the body was already charged—politically, racially, sexually—before nudism ever arrived.

Into this atmosphere, American nudism offered relief: sunlight over soot, leisure over labor, simplicity over crowding. For some, that promise carried nostalgic undertones. Early nudist imagery almost exclusively centered white bodies in pastoral settings, subtly echoing the racial hierarchies of the era. Men and women appeared balanced yet distinctly gendered, athletic yet decorous, liberated yet orderly. For others, nudism suggested something more radical: a leveling of class distinction, a softening of rigid gender codes, perhaps even the possibility, albeit imperfectly realized, of broader equality through shared vulnerability in a world plagued by resistance to progress on those fronts.

The movement attracted idealists, pragmatists, reactionaries, reformers. The nudist idea held within it competing visions of what “natural” might mean: restoration of the past or progress toward a freer future. As nudism evolved in the United States, those tensions did not disappear; they were negotiated. In the process of translation, of determining what nudism would mean in America, some possibilities narrowed while others hardened into doctrine, shaping not only how the body would be seen, but how it would be allowed to be lived.

The tree of Leib & Körper

Nearly one hundred years have passed since Freikörperkultur arrived in the United States. History may not repeat itself precisely, but periods of economic contraction and rapid social change generate familiar tensions. When prosperity falters, when communities are reshaped by migration, when longstanding hierarchies and social norms are unsettled and institutions feel less secure, public discourse turns toward purity, belonging, and control over bodies and lives. Like a siren song, moments like these invite both escapism and scapegoating. It was in just such a climate that Americans first encountered organized nudism and began shaping it to their own context and needs. It is no coincidence that, in our present moment, the meaning of freedom feels newly urgent again.

This past summer, with today’s social, economic, and political anxieties on my mind, I set out to read On Freedom, in which historian Timothy Snyder examines how political systems cultivate—or quietly undermine—the conditions for freedom. Central to his argument are two dichotomies, the first of which is the idea of freedom from versus freedom to, and the second is Leib versus Körper, two German words for “body” which each carry their own philosophical implications.

A freedom from approach defines liberty by removing perceived barriers, whether or not those barriers meaningfully shape lived experience. It protects the body from intrusion and defines freedom negatively. From this perspective, taxes that fund public services are seen as infringements on autonomy; removing them is imagined to increase freedom, even if doing so leaves many without education, healthcare, or mobility: If we do away with taxes for me now, prosperity will find its way to you eventually, too.

A freedom to approach seeks to construct systems that expand access, increase mobility, and enable fuller participation in society. It defines freedom positively. In this view, taxes used to improve education, provide healthcare, and invest in transportation grant individuals greater participation in civic life, along with financial, medical, and geographic stability; in this way, taxes create the conditions for freedom by first expanding access to life-improving services and, consequently, removing the actual barriers to freedom.

Snyder pairs this distinction with another: Leib and Körper. Though both terms refer to the body, they are not entirely interchangeable. Leib, etymologically related to the English word “life,” refers to the body as an intimate, animate being capable of experiencing life, perceiving and interacting with the world around it and connecting with others. Körper, on the other hand, is etymologically related to the English word “corpse,” and refers to the body as a physical, countable object to be perceived, owned, shaped.

Leib is our whole person, the body we are and experience. Körper is our shell, the body we have and that is seen.

Long before contemporary debates about autonomy and identity, European philosophers wrestled with the tension between the lived body—Leib—and the body as object—Körper. Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rejected the notion that the body was merely a vessel for reason—Körper—insisting that the self is inseparable from the lived, desiring Leib. Decades later, twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault examined how institutions discipline and regulate the body as object—the Körper. Between Nietzsche’s affirmation of embodied life and Foucault’s analysis of embodied power lies an unresolved tension: whether the body is the ground of freedom—Leib—or the surface upon which authority is stamped—Körper. This distinction becomes visible in the language that we use to discuss freedom. As Timothy Snyder argues in On Freedom, the very idea of “negative freedom” rests on an underdeveloped view of what a person is.

… negative freedom is the self-deception of people who do not really wish to be free. Those who present freedom as negative ignore what we are, ignore the Leib. If we are just Körper, physical bodies, then the idea of negative freedom would make a kind of sense. Objects can be restrained by other objects. Freedom could just be freedom from, without aspirations or individuality, without any sense of what life is or should be.

-Timothy Snyder, On Freedom, p. 23

The fruit

Perhaps not-so-subtly, the Leib versus Körper dichotomy is baked into the origins of the nudist idea itself, present even in the name Freikörperkultur, or “free body culture.” Whether consciously chosen or not, the use of Körper—the physical, visible, commandable body—aligns with the movement’s emphasis on discipline, exercise, and the deliberate cultivation of the body toward a “natural” ideal. Exposure of the nude body—to others and to the elements—was promised as a cure for urban malaise. American nudism emphasized escape from increasingly industrialized and—not-coincidentally—racially and sexually diverse urban environments. Yet this retreat into idyllic, isolated natural spaces also set nudism apart from civic life, quietly defining which bodies, which spaces, and which forms of exposure counted as natural.

It is unfair to paint the burgeoning American nudist movement of the early twentieth century as a purely Körper-focused pursuit. Even in Germany, alongside Freikörperkultur also existed the Lebensreform, or “life reform,” movement, which did indeed place Leib—the living body—at the forefront, at least in name. This umbrella movement encompassed much of what Freikörperkultur had to offer but placed greater emphasis on holistic living beyond physical fitness and nudity. Yet its long-term influence is more visible in contemporary organic and natural health movements than in American nudism itself.

Among the earliest American adopters of Freikörperkultur, views on the potential applications of social nudity varied widely. For some, nudism held possibilities that extended beyond physical health or pastoral retreat. American author and sex researcher Jan Gay, writing of her experience as a lesbian participating in social nudity in Europe, suggested an early openness to rethinking sexuality, intimacy, and community itself. Taking this further, early nudist pioneer and sociologist Maurice Parmelee argued in Nudism in Modern Life that nudism could reshape social norms, including through what he called the “play function of sex.” Parmelee’s controversial support of a more sexually liberated nudist practice, however, betrays the conservative, puritanical views that were far more common among the movement’s early leaders who preferred to frame nudism narrowly—as wholesome, apolitical, and non-sexual—revealing a foundational tension between nudism as social reform and nudism as respectable refuge.

While some nudist pioneers imagined some more lived, experiential, Leib-oriented elements of nudism, most nudist writings, including many by Gay and Parmelee, were decidedly more Körper-oriented, focusing on the exposure of the body and discipline applied to it to bend it to one’s will.

In a climate of sexual repression and economic hardship, nudism also found commercial opportunity. While Comstock laws restricted the distribution of sexual materials, nude photography and literature presented through a purportedly educational, nudist lens exploited a loophole. According to Brian Hoffman in Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism, during the Great Depression, illustrated nudist publications were among the few profitable ventures, despite frequent censorship, quickly becoming a prominent marketing tool and unifying force of the American nudist community. As writer Mark Haskell Smith notes in an interview with CBC, American soldiers during WWII were provided with nudist magazines because the Pentagon could not sent them pornography. Upon their homecoming, nudist resorts boomed. Nudist imagery continued to occupy a carefully negotiated cultural space between pornography and propriety.

The blurring of sexuality with nudity that came as a result of censorship against pornography and obscenity benefited the American nudist movement but it also further complicated its relationship with sex and reduced bodies to commodities—Körper.

Though some leaders expressed their own views on sexuality, the early American nudist movement never articulated a coherent public vision of how social nudity might relate to healthy sexual expression—likely out of fear of censors and a lack of internal consensus. Nudist literature and magazines, alongside more overtly sexualized publications posing as such, circulated widely among nudists and non-nudists alike. Yet it became the party line to assert that these publications were strictly non-sexual and wholly educational. Defending against legal and public scrutiny required that nudism declare itself a wholesome way of life that resolved the problem of sexuality through repeated exposure of and to the body. In practice, this performance of respectability reshaped the movement itself: couples-only restrictions took hold, domesticity was elevated, whiteness and heteronormativity became policy, and identities deemed too disruptive—Black, queer, overtly sexual—were pushed to the margins or excluded altogether. Nudism promised freedom—but only for those deemed acceptable. Liberation and legitimacy came with invisible borders drawn around whiteness, heterosexuality, and domestic propriety.

Despite its own ideations of a world made more free, natural, and egalitarian through the practice of social nudity, American nudism did not concern itself with extending those freedoms to non-white or queer participants. A fleeting hope for racial progress existed in theory, yet the movement never acted; freedom was optional, inclusion was optional, and the body remained disciplined above all else. In Nudism in Modern Life, Parmelee did speculate that interracial nudism might one day soften racial prejudice through prolonged exposure, but he stopped short of recommending integration as integral to the movement. Only that if we remove our clothing now, other unfreedoms may someday resolve themselves.

In practice, American nudism adopted a freedom from posture. It sought freedom from obscenity charges, from sexual suspicion, from racial controversy, from moral panic. But it stopped short of embracing a Leib-oriented approach, from articulating a freedom to—a freedom to cultivate genuine interracial community, to integrate sexuality honestly, or to dismantle the hierarchies it quietly preserved.

The fall

Much like the unfreedoms that nudism promised to resolve, the defensive instincts forged in the early decades of American nudism have not disappeared. Instead, they have hardened into the organizational structures and community culture that define today’s nudist movement. The American Association for Nude Recreation’s own framing of its purpose reflects this orientation: protecting nude recreation from political interference, defending its wholesomeness and respectability to skeptical publics, and preserving its own organizational structures and institutional stability. Its language is careful, managerial, and defensive, oriented toward safeguarding the right to exist rather than articulating a broader vision of what embodied freedom might become. What is absent is an expansive account of how nude recreation might contribute to rethinking gender, race, sexuality, or communal life more broadly. The emphasis remains on protection and containment, on freedom from.

Within both formal organizations and everyday nudist culture, the longstanding anxiety over the conflation of sex and nudity persists. Conversations about race, sexuality, and other forms of difference are often deferred, and when they surface, they become contentious. Clubs continue to assert their respectability through family-friendly branding, strict codes of conduct, and occasional couples-only policies. Leaders debate whether the inclusion of marginalized participants requires intentional effort or will resolve itself over time. Online communities protest censorship and plead for visibility and exposure, framing their struggle in terms of corporate interference and limits on sharing nude imagery. Adherents police one another on appropriate expression, and may judge one another on adequate exposure. Meanwhile, the physical spaces for social nudity continue to shrink through club closures and, in the case of nude-friendly beaches, precarious legal protections. Yet even in the face of contraction, the movement’s energy remains focused less on articulating a transformative vision of freedom than on defending its fragile legitimacy.

Without such a vision, the modern American nudist movement prioritizes defense and visibility, holding out hope that broader social prejudices will soften over time, much as Maurice Parmelee once speculated that interracial exposure among nudists might gradually diminish racism.

Increased visibility becomes both tactic and aspiration: if nude bodies are seen often enough, framed as wholesome and respectable, and portrayed as free from the complications of race and sexual politics, perhaps acceptance and liberation will follow. By tightly regulating sexual expression and maintaining a strict separation between nudity and sexuality, the nudist movement seeks to shield itself from suspicion and secure public legitimacy. Yet these strategies subtly invert means and ends. Nudity became the goal, not the vehicle and bodies were curated for optics, not felt for life.

The American nudist movement’s focus on visibility and respectability often overlooks the lived, embodied experience that makes us human. It treats the body as Körper: an object to be displayed, curated, and consumed—a means of asserting the legitimacy of a larger cause—rather than as a felt, connected, experiential self. Leib, the body as we inhabit it, a site of perception, connection, and relational freedom, is largely absent from this vision. By treating the body as an object, the movement betrayed its own promise of liberation and reinforced the very hierarchies it claimed to escape. Nudism centered on Leib, in contrast, would begin with the lived reality of the body—its sensations, desires, and interactions—and consider social reception as a secondary concern. It would treat freedom as something actively experienced and shared, not merely defended or performed, and would measure success by interpersonal connection and the inclusion of diverse human experiences, with nudity serving to deepen connection across differences.

In striving to liberate the body, nudists may have objectified it; in striving to overcome prejudice, they may have simply absented themselves from the conversation. Escapism became the movement’s solution to worldly unease. “We’re all equal when we’re naked,” shrouded a culture of, “we don’t discuss inequality when we’re naked.”

The central roadblock for the century-old American nudist movement is an unresolved tension: a reluctance to embrace a bold, expansive, inclusive vision of freedom. Instead, the movement commodifies nude bodies in service of spectacle, framing clothing, sexuality, government intervention, identity discourse, and social media censorship as obstacles to exposure. While many practitioners carry a Leib-centered philosophy—sometimes identifying as naturists—these views do not drive the movement or its organizations. Without centering lived human experience and connection, American nudism continues to fall short of its promise. Its pattern of prioritizing image over experience, defending a narrow respectability, and avoiding engagement with difficult social questions reflects a broader human tendency to favor comfort and legitimacy over genuine connection. This philosophical misstep—the prioritization of a Körper-centered approach over one grounded in lived, felt, relational experience—is nudism’s original sin.

Return to Eden

Just like the America of the 1930s, America over the past ninety years has been marked by social unease, sexual revolutions, and modernization. The mistake American nudists made was believing that geographic and ideological escapism—absenting themselves from both the world and its ongoing struggles over injustice and inequality—was the solution. By centering the exposition of the nude body, stripped of deeper meaning or relational experience, and adopting a defensive posture toward its surrounding cultural context, the movement quietly bent toward the premise that freedom could be secured through exclusion. Certain people, certain conversations, even certain garments became framed as barriers. Yet the absence of those things was never freedom itself. It could only narrow it—contain it to fit within the space that nudists occupied.

Looking to contemporary social movements, we glimpse what a Leib-centered nudism might become. LGBTQ advocacy, racial justice initiatives, body-positivity campaigns, and movements for sexual autonomy place lived experience, relational connection, and the dignity of diverse bodies at the center—precisely the qualities largely absent from organized American nudism. These movements remind us that freedom is not merely the absence of interference or the visibility of the body, but the ability to inhabit one’s body fully, safely, and authentically within community. They insist that bodies are not abstractions or spectacles—they are lived sites of vulnerability, history, and relation. They also caution against a visibility-first approach: placing queer bodies, Black bodies, or other marginalized bodies before the public without attention to their lived realities risks turning them into symbols, commodities, props—Körper. A nudist philosophy attentive to this distinction would shift emphasis from defending exposure to cultivating connection, from curating appearances to honoring embodiment, and from policing sexuality to educating and celebrating it.

Whether the modern nudist movement can atone for the original sins of its forefathers is, I believe, a difficult question, because the solution requires deeper introspection than the nudist movement has previously demonstrated. Rather than looking to outside factors as the root of nudism’s limited success, nudists must examine their history, retrace their path, and take responsibility for the choices made along the way instead of becoming mired in resentment. The unfortunate problem I see is not that the nudist movement lost its moral compass along the path it took, but that whatever compass the movement had has been leading it in the wrong direction from the start.

Nudists must imagine what their movement could look like if it embraced a Leib-centered philosophy, one that treats social and artistic nudity as a path to fuller participation in civic life, mobility across identities, improved education around healthy sexuality, and ecological stewardship. In this scenario, nudity would remain an important condition of participation—encouraging vulnerability and heightening the body’s senses—but it would not be the end goal. Instead of retreating from the world, the movement might engage more fully with broader social initiatives, measuring success by expanding access to its spaces across communities, demographics, and regions. It would ask what freedoms it could build, rather than simply what freedoms it could protect. How can nudity expand the human experience, rather than limit it?

Exploring these possibilities would be an important exercise for the American nudist community: to examine why they believe nudity is uniquely capable of creating the kinds of freedoms they hope to see. Yes, it feels good, and yes, it is physically unrestricted—but freedom from restraint alone does not resolve broader unfreedom. In the previous example offered by Maurice Parmelee regarding optimism that interracial nudism might gradually erode racism, his suggestion rests on the assumption that proximity transforms prejudice—an assumption equally plausible in clothed social life. If simply being naked does what activism, education, and empathy already do, then what, exactly, is nudism for? Does a nudism that is unwilling to address unfreedom have a place in society? Is it really just about being naked, about seeing each other naked, and should that come at the cost of greater freedom? And if that’s the case, why do so many nudists claim that merely taking off our clothes will solve all these issues? It seems to me that the average nudist wants nudism to be meaningful and impactful—not just a hobby, not just propaganda, not just a body on display. To reflect on Timothy Snyder’s earlier excerpt, does the average nudist actually want freedom, or just a different set of restrictions?

I am skeptical that the nudist movement as it exists today can fully address the unfreedoms it claims to confront, but I do not doubt the unique and novel usefulness of nudity in that pursuit. Nudity can be powerful, and it deserves to be more than seen—it deserves to be felt, to evoke vulnerability and introspection, to open us up to deeper connections with one another and to the world around us. That, to me, is what has always made nudism appealing: that there is more to nakedness than met the eye. Perhaps the nudist movement can correct course, or perhaps another movement that recognizes the potential in nudity will rise to the challenge. In any case, I don’t see why nudists could not start asking for a movement that means more: one that expands freedom rather than containing it, that connects people rather than isolating them, that celebrates human experience rather than reducing it to bodies, that engages with the world rather than escaping it.

That is a nudism that could change people and systems and society for the better, that could make being human a bigger experience, not a smaller one. I hope one day to know that nudism, or maybe something even better. 🪐

And there we are. The shame about nudity gone, the self-image improved a bit, same for the self-confidence. But again, the routine of it becomes limiting too.

Your partner knows you do this, but doesn’t want to be confronted with this. In his or her mind, from his or her upbringing, this is wrong. You shouldn’t be doing this. What if the neighbours see you like this? What will they think of you? What will they think of me? What will they think of us? We’re a decent family, we don’t do things like that.

This spoils the good feeling you had earlier, and you agree to only be nude when he or she is away from home. At least it’s not behind the back, but it feels bitter that even your partner doesn’t want you to enjoy your nudity, your freedom.

After a while, you get used to this, it becomes the new normal to be nude in and around the house, and the excitement goes away. You still enjoy this wonderful freedom though, you can’t live without it anymore. Having to wear clothes feels very restraining now.

Isn’t there any way to expand this freedom, this joy?

An unexpected invitation

One day, when you are very down and emotional about traumas from the past, and she gets very desperate about getting you happier again. And out of the blue, she suggests to go to a nudist beach together… wouldn’t that lift you up?

It is unbelievable at first. She was so adamant, so clear about this, no way that she would ever go naked in public. Your first thought is that she might keep her swimsuit on while you go naked. That would make sense.

But that’s not what happened. She was the first to get naked on that beach. And that one single gesture changed everything.

But how? Why?

The first thing you experience is a strong feeling of acceptance. Acceptance of yourself by yourself. But also silent acceptance from the other people there.

The second thing is the love that you feel. This gesture is so huge that it fills you with the feeling of being loved. If this person is willing to step that far out of her comfort zone for you, that can only mean that you’re worth it.

When we arrived at this beach, something I had waited for my whole life, I was unsure about how I would feel undressing in front of so many people. I think I was projecting feelings about undressing in front of a non-nudist public. But the fact was that nobody even noticed me when I undressed. In that environment, it was the most natural thing to do.

I can write about how I experienced all of this as much as I want, but I can not speak for others. I am convinced that most of the feelings that I’m trying to convey here will match with what a lot of nudists feel. My motivations are what they are, others will have different ones I’m sure.

Finding normalcy in nakedness

I think that non-nudists imagine the situation where they would face judgement and rejection if they were to go naked in public. Why? Because that’s the sort of reaction one would hear from non-nudists when the subject is nudism or naturism. And that gets in their heads. They won’t go naked not because they don’t like being naked, but because of what others might think about their lifestyle—about their body.

It’s not like we’re going out naked in the streets or to do our groceries. Because that’s when you would get strong reactions like this.

We go naked in places where other like-minded people go naked too.

Even I was expecting some sort of reaction or response from the other people there. But there was none, nothing. Nobody blinked an eye. Was that disappointing? No! It was so reassuring. What we were doing appeared to be normal—and exactly that was what I had been looking for my whole life.

When we went for our first swim, we had a slight hesitation to go deeper into the cold water. A naked woman, a complete stranger, was just exiting the water, and cheered us on. We chatted with another woman next to us on the beach, we helped a man put sunscreen on his back and we were all naked. And nobody cared about that, we were part of the crowd—part of some sort of community. That community had been there for a long time, we just didn’t realize it.

Freedom from judgment

Right there, it all came together. My life made sense. I wasn’t abnormal. I wasn’t a perverted person. I was loved enough for her to take this huge step. I wasn’t ugly or even unsightly. We saw people, men, women, even children, of all sizes and shapes, not caring about possible imperfections, but just enjoying being there, free from judgement, free of clothes. Clothes serve to hide things. In today’s society, the pressure is real to try and outshine others when it comes to clothes, makeup and lifestyle in general. All of that pressure evaporates when people don’t bother with all of this.

In the clothed world, your body is judged too. Your height, your weight, the size of your breasts, you name it, there are norms and measures.

In the nudist world, your body is free of this judgement. Your body can’t comply with fashion trends, because there aren’t any. And that is what’s so liberating. Nobody will look at you and evaluate your fashion choice and how expensive that might be. When you’re naked, you can only be judged by your personality. You could be judged by the shape of your body, you might think, but that is, “the textile way of thinking”. In the textile world, your body shape will determine what is best to wear or not wear; horizontal versus vertical stripes, long, short skirts or blouses. Take off the clothes and you are free of that “choice overload”. Your body goes well with your body, and with your person.

As I stood there, and took off my dress, I looked around me, and felt peace at last. I was there, nothing more, nothing less, and it felt right. I didn’t have to be afraid anymore that anyone could see me. Everyone could see me. And to my surprise, I didn’t care at all, or at least not in a negative way. I cared that it was possible, I cared that I allowed everyone to see me naked. I felt proud. I felt free. I hadn’t been so relaxed in years.

We went swimming naked for the first time in our lives, and I can confirm that there’s nothing like feeling the water stream over your skin, a sensation that is completely absent when you wear a swimsuit.

After our swim, we took a long walk along the waterline, and I was amazed by the realization that we were walking naked in front of a huge crowd and that it didn’t bother us at all. On the contrary, we walked proud. We even crossed clothed people, and there was nothing awkward about that at all. Again, on the contrary, it super-normalized our nudity in public. This was the ultimate in public nudity, so far—mingling with clothed people, not being sheltered in a secluded environment anymore, but out in the open.

The healing power of acceptance

We didn’t miss wearing clothes on that day, by no means. It rather felt so sad having to put on clothes again, taking away our freedom.

I’ve spent my whole life hiding things. Out of shame, uncertainty, all projected upon me by my environment, my upbringing, society. Even though she knew, I also had to hide from my own wife, because she didn’t want to be confronted with this. Again, that did project shame and a feeling of wrongdoing upon me. I felt like I was enforcing something wrong, perverted, shameful, upon her. It seriously hurt my self-image, the fact that I wasn’t just like anyone else but instead had desires that couldn’t be known to the outside world.

I felt like she deserved better than this, this wasn’t what she wanted, what she signed up for. She could have had a “normal” partner. I felt less than the others around me. They enjoyed the normal things in life, things that are widely accepted and normalized. I was again the odd one, the weird one, hoping for some form of acceptance. I was still at the mercy of the judgement of society. Where others have things to be proud of, like a husband, a “normal” marriage, I had to explain myself already as a lesbian woman. Hoping for acceptance, and then this.

Stepping into this world of public nudity changed everything. I didn’t have to explain, I didn’t have to justify anything. What we were doing was normal—we were part of something. I felt free as never before in my life, I could step out in a crowd, naked, hiding nothing at all, literally this time, and that was normal. No justification required, no explanation required. Unreal.

Ever since that day, when we go to sleep, we have a long cuddle, naked, until we fall asleep in each other’s arms. Everyone should try that. Nothing in the world is more relaxing and healing as this naked cuddle, skin to skin, holding the one you love, and feeling loved. It wasn’t the nudity by itself that changed me or our relationship. It was the trust and the love in and for each other, which materialized in this experience. Along with my clothes, I dropped my defenses. I wasn’t afraid of showing myself anymore, not physically nor mentally. And that was the key to healing, to a better life. 🪐

Editor’s note: This essay is part three of a three-part series by , exploring how nudists and non-nudists experience nudity differently. Part three is coming soon. You can find more of her writing on naturist life on her Substack:

Read parts 1 & 2:

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Catherina

Naturism is natural, as the term itself describes. Shed your clothes and really start connecting with people

The first scary step

Admittingly, the very first time you step out of the door naked, it is a bit scary. This is clearly not the normal operating procedure that you’re used to.

To a non-nudist, this is becoming a true horror story. Not just being naked, but outside of the house, and with the much higher risk of being seen. This is the stuff of nightmares. Why would you even do that? Well… let me give an idea of how it felt for me.

You feel the excitement of leaving the relative safety of your house and venture outside. You are apprehensive about the neighbours seeing you like this. They have never seen you naked, and you sure hope that today is not the day that they will. You have no idea about how you would even begin to explain to them why on earth you are naked in your garden. “I forgot to put on my clothes?” So you keep close to the back door, you leave some clothes handy near that door—as if that will save you when they see you.

At first, you just slip into and out of the house, quickly, almost like a burglar would. You look for blind corners of the back porch where the neighbours can’t see you, and start relaxing a bit. You have your coffee, read a magazine, anything to relax.

Once you get used to being outside, you start to venture away from your safe spots. You even start wondering why you were so afraid to go outside. It feels great. You’re in your own secluded garden, you have the right to your privacy, you’re not breaking any laws. So you take a lawn chair, drape a towel over it, and position yourself on the lawn, in the sun.

Feeling the elements

It is such a strange sensation, to feel the sun on your bare skin, to feel the wind over your body. You are barefoot, and it feels so natural to really touch the ground—it makes the experience complete.

But you’re still nervous. Access to your garden is open for anyone. What if the postman, or a courier driver, come around the house to drop off a parcel—as you instructed? What if the neighbour walks by behind the hedge separating your gardens, and catches a glimpse of you? What if my across the street neighbour drops by?

Yes, what if?

In your imagination, you put your hands over your boobs and utter some apology—as if that would be what the man would want.

The longer you think about it, the less you worry. If this happens, it’s their problem. They invaded your privacy, they have no right to be offended or shocked. You’re not a pervert, you’re not an exhibitionist, you just want to relax without clothes.

This thought relaxes your mind, and allows you to start enjoying your new-found freedom. Already you increased your self-confidence, and lowered any shame about your nudity. In fact, your awareness about your body has heightened significantly by now, in a positive way. These are the first signs of body positivity.

From now on, you get less cautious, you stop sneaking around your own house and garden as if you’re committing some crime. You get this higher sense of utter freedom. It feels so wonderful allowing yourself to do something that you didn’t know you needed, and of which you think it would be disapproved by most people you know. And it starts to make you wonder why they would disapprove.

Again you’re not harming any animals by doing this, not even the squirrel with wide-open eyes when he sees you like that. He’ll survive.

With the newly gained confidence, you start doing your chores outside. You installed a windscreen in front of this gap in the hedge separating your garden from the neighbours’. This allows you quite a bit more freedom to move around. In the evening, you spend some time watering all the plants outside, hanging the laundry to dry, cleaning up the garden here and there. And it feels so great stepping right into the shower afterwards, no need to undress before or dress afterwards. That’s two chores less to do.

One with nature

As I already wrote in a previous blog, I experimented with nudity at home during my youth. I sat naked around a local fishing pond at sunrise in summer, which was as relaxing as some illegal drugs might be to others. You feel one with the universe, you feel a real and true part of nature around you. You hear the birds awaking, nature comes alive, and you’re an integral and equal part of it now. No expectations, no judging, no stress, no worries—except getting caught. Just be.

As the sun rises, you feel its warmth on your bare skin. You can’t appreciate it or even judge it if you haven’t felt that. You are a part of a greater whole, and you belong. There and then, you are accepted.

To a non-nudist, you are probably not accepted. If anyone sees you, the atmosphere will change from light to darkness. Disapproval, rejection, even anger.

And yet, deep inside, I wanted to be seen so it could feel normal. But I knew that that wouldn’t be the response of anyone seeing me then. Being caught would have caused me to feel like a sick weirdo, because that is what was projected into my mind by my upbringing, and that would have been the reaction of any outsider probably.

The limits of privacy

So all of these experiences can be considered as private nudity, alone or with your partner. That alone is already a great liberation of the mind, letting go of the endless expectations that our society imposes upon us all. It feels as a relief to be able to let go of this, and do what you want within the confines of your privacy.

After a life of being productive in my job, being a parent, helping care for our household, being useful—for the first time I felt like I was able to just think of myself and my needs. And not just any needs, but needs that I won’t even share with just anyone.

And even that gets to be so normal that you yearn for more. But what is more?

The next logical step is public nudity. Oh my. 🪐

Editor’s note: This essay is part two of a three-part series by Catherina, exploring how nudists and non-nudists experience nudity differently. Part three is coming soon. You can find more of her writing on naturist life on her Substack: https://kath62.substack.com/

Read parts 1 & 3:

Follow for more like this:

Catherina

Naturism is natural, as the term itself describes. Shed your clothes and really start connecting with people

What attracts people to nudism and naturism?

We love being naked.

And how do you explain this to non-nudists? Do they even want an explanation? And why don’t they want this same thing?

So be naked, who cares?

As every nudist and naturist will confirm, just being naked inside your own home isn’t everything. It is a path, a journey, from discovery to exploring. As you get used to being nude, you want to push you boundaries and expand your experience.

The simple joy of home nudity

Let’s start with nudity in your own house, in private.

For people that do not have this need to be naked, this must already we weird. Being naked in your bathroom, yes. Being naked in your bedroom, yes. But no matter how they try, they will never understand what’s so nice about running around naked, unprotected, uncovered, cold—that’s their association, not ours.

To us, nudists and naturists, it’s about feeling free. Just the mere fact of being able to be naked is already bliss. Free of the shackles of what we were told. Get out of bed in the morning, go to the bathroom, go downstairs and to the kitchen, have some coffee and breakfast. Naked. That is already relaxing our mind, not having to bother with putting on some clothes.

I wonder if any of us can even explain why that is so important to us, why it gives us that feeling. And I wonder if all the other people in the world can explain why they hate even just the thought of it. The most heard reaction to this is usually “eeew… yikes”, as if we’re pooing on the table and smearing it on the walls.

Anyone who doesn’t understand this might as well wonder why a naked body triggers sexual response, arousal. Anyone care to explain? It’s not rational either, and nobody cares, they just enjoy it, rightfully. And so do we with our casual non-sexual nudity.

Maybe non-nudist might just be afraid to be seen by the neighbours, but might otherwise consider more nudity in the house. Some might be afraid of getting cold. Or getting dirty. Or getting the furniture dirty. Or they were just taught that nudity is a bad thing, is wrong, and they never questioned that point of view.

Turning the tables on textile comfort

Now let me turn the table. Let me ask the non-nudist what it is that attracts you to wearing clothes all the time? Why does it make you feel comfortable? Why do you prefer to sit in a wet swimsuit after a swim?

Hard questions, no? Absurd questions? Welcome to my world; nudists and naturists get the same questions about being nude.

The difference is that I’ve been in your place, I have been wearing clothes all my life—because I had to, but that’s not the point, and you haven’t been in my place—yet.

And I know clothing is comfortable, when it’s cold, or when it’s raining. Or when you ride a motorcycle and you want to protect your body in case of a fall. Or you step through the bush and don’t want to scratch your skin all over. And all of those reasons are rational ones. It is easy enough to convince people why they should wear clothes.

Until it gets really hot. You have to admit that you have thought at least once in your life how clothes can feel too much on a really hot day. You start sweating, your clothes get wet, and it gets very uncomfortable very quickly.

So now I have also found a rational reason to be naked.

The difference is that I can easily be convinced to wear clothes when it’s cold, but a non-nudist can’t be convinced to go naked when it’s really hot. The non-nudists’ reasons for not being willing to go naked are as irrational as the reasons that nudists have to wanting to be naked whenever they can. But the non-nudists have the advantage here that the majority in our society supports their irrational reasons and not ours.

So when we are at home, we just don’t feel like wearing clothes. No, that is not really literally our reasoning. We rather prefer being naked. Because it makes us feel good.

So doesn’t it sexually arouse us?

No, not really. Thinking like that might be a projection of the feelings of a non-nudist towards nudity. And that would be a natural feeling and reaction to nudity, of oneself or of others around you, nothing wrong with that at all.

Nudists can get aroused from nudity too—but in a different setting. When we’re with the one we love, and we’re “in the mood”. But not from nudity alone. I really adore the body of my wife. In a non-sexual context I can watch her naked body for hours, and admire it, enjoy it, love it. Just like a non-nudist can adore their partner in beautiful clothes, I can adore the sight of the naked body of my partner, without necessarily getting aroused by it. I admire it like a work of art, and it triggers strong feelings of love in me.

In a sexual context, we’re all the same. I get the same reaction to her naked body than everyone else when we make love. I mean, we’re not made of stone.

The practical realities

Now let’s get back to nudity inside the house. One might wonder—Isn’t it uncomfortable when your skin touches the furniture for instance? We have leather seats and a sofa in our house, and yes, it isn’t really comfortable to sit directly with your naked skin on a leather surface, true. But there’s a simple solution for that: we use towels to sit on. It is a bit fiddly, I admit, but you get used to that very quickly. It becomes second nature—after you got tired of your skin sticking to the leather when you get up.

But that doesn’t diminish the great feeling of bodily freedom that I described above, of getting out of bed, going downstairs, have breakfast, all without bothering with clothes. You really have to experience this with an open mind, before judging. There is nothing wrong with doing this, we are not bothering anyone with that, no animals or children were harmed by us being naked in our own house. And the world order won’t collapse because of that (there are plenty of other reasons currently). On the contrary, I’m absolutely convinced that the world would be a much better place if everyone would do this, and I’ll later explain why.

Beyond the walls

Even though this inhouse nudity feels very liberating, it does become limiting after a while. You want to feel more, you want to feel more “normality” about it, and that isn’t achieved by hiding yourself inside your own house, afraid of anyone seeing you. It still makes you feel too much like what you do needs to be hidden, like it’s a weird thing to do, and that annihilates the feeling of liberation. There must be more that you can do.

Like going outside? 🪐

Editor’s note: This essay is part one of a three-part series by Catherina, exploring how nudists and non-nudists experience nudity differently. Part two is coming soon. You can find more of her writing on naturist life on her Substack: https://kath62.substack.com/

Read parts 2 & 3:

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Catherina

Naturism is natural, as the term itself describes. Shed your clothes and really start connecting with people

There’s this moment that happens sometimes when I’m at a naturist resort or at a clothing-optional hot spring. I’ll be completely in my element, soaking up the sun without a stitch on, feeling that particular brand of freedom that only social nudity can provide. And I’ll think about my husband, who’s likely at home, probably doom scrolling TikTok, very likely partially clothed. And instead of feeling sad, I feel this warm gratitude wash over me.

We’ve been together for nearly 11 years now, married for just over two. He’s not a naturist. Never has been, probably never will be. And you know what? That’s absolutely okay.

I know this might sound strange to some people. In the naturist community, there’s often this assumption that if you’re committed to the naturist lifestyle, your partner should be too. Articles about naturism and relationships tend to focus on how to convince your reluctant spouse to join you. And while that’s beautiful when it works, it’s not the only way to have a healthy relationship when one partner is a naturist.

The difference between acceptance and participation

My husband has always been what I’d call “nudity-neutral.” He’s not uncomfortable with nakedness. He’s been nude with me at a cabin we rented, and he’s even hiked nude with me on a couple of occasions. And often on our textile cruises, he will join me out on our private balcony nude. But he doesn’t seek it out. It’s not his thing, and he’s honest about that.

What he does do is, support me. Completely, unreservedly. When I want to spend a weekend at a naturist resort, he encourages me to go. When I come home buzzing with that energy you get from a day spent clothes-free in nature, he listens. He asks questions. He’s interested in why it matters to me, even if he doesn’t feel the pull himself.

As relationship expert Esther Perel has said, “The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” What makes my relationship work isn’t that we do everything together. It’s that we respect what matters to each other, even when we don’t fully understand it.

What I’ve learned about relationships from this dynamic

Being in a relationship where I practice naturism and my husband doesn’t has taught me more about love than I expected. Research from the American Psychological Association shows that trying new activities together can boost relationship satisfaction, but that doesn’t mean you need to share every single interest.

My husband and I have our shared loves: good food, terrible reality TV and traveling to places with excellent culture. But we also have our separate passions. He has his video games. I have my naturism and woodworking. We’ve learned to celebrate each other’s joy rather than expecting to feel exactly the same joy ourselves.

More importantly, it’s shown me what true acceptance looks like. My husband has never made me feel ashamed of my naturism. In a world where naturists still face stigma, having a partner who sees your passion as just another part of who you are is incredibly valuable. As Marc, a naturist blogger at Nude and Happy notes, “Healthy nudism requires consent from all involved. This is sometimes frustrating, but allows respect to be front and center, a core tenet of naturism.”

The practical side of making it work

Of course, this doesn’t mean there are never any challenges. Early in our relationship, we had to figure out what this would look like practically. Did he feel weird about me being naked around other people? No, because he understands that naturism isn’t sexual. Would I resent him for not joining me? Only if I let myself, which I choose not to.

We’ve developed some unspoken rules that work for us. I don’t pressure him to participate, and he doesn’t make me feel guilty for going without him. I keep him in the loop about where I’m going, not because he demands it but because that’s good communication. Occasionally, he’ll join me for something low-key, like being nude at home or on a secluded hike.

Those moments when he does participate feel special because he’s choosing to step into my world. It’s his way of saying, “I love you, and I want to understand what makes you happy.”

The freedom of being fully yourself

Here’s what I think is most underrated about having a supportive partner who doesn’t share your passion: it gives you permission to be fully yourself. I don’t have to tone down my enthusiasm for naturism.

There’s something beautifully queer about this too. As gay men, we’ve both had to navigate being ourselves in a world that doesn’t always make space for us. Maybe that’s why my husband gets it. The people and passions that light us up deserve to be honored, not diminished.

Psychologist Alan Downs writes in “The Velvet Rage” about how gay men often struggle with authenticity after years of hiding who they are. For me, naturism is part of reclaiming that authenticity. My husband supporting that, even without participating, feels like the deepest kind of love.

One thing I’ve stopped doing is trying to make my husband love naturism. Early on, I probably hoped he’d suddenly become a regular at the nudist activities with me. But that’s not fair to him, and it’s not necessary.

My husband has given me the autonomy to pursue naturism on my terms, and I’ve given him the same freedom with his interests. We’re stronger for it. We have things to talk about that aren’t just our shared experiences.

A different kind of couple goals

Social media loves to show us couples who do everything together, who have perfectly aligned interests. And that’s lovely when it’s real. But it’s not the only model for a successful relationship.

My marriage works because we’ve built it on respect, trust, and genuine affection for who the other person actually is. My husband doesn’t need to get naked at a resort to prove he loves me. He proves it every time he asks about my weekend.

Knowing that he supports me without getting anything directly out of it himself makes me love him even more. It’s pure acceptance. He’s supporting it because he enjoys me being happy.

After 11 years together, this is the kind of love that lasts. Not the kind that demands we be identical, but the kind that makes space for both of us to be fully ourselves. And if you have that kind of support from your partner, you have something truly special. 🪐

To the leadership of —

This week, The Guardian published an investigation detailing how Substack earns revenue from newsletters that promote Nazi ideology, white supremacy, and antisemitism. The reporting showed that these publications are not only hosted on your platform, but monetized by it, and surfaced through recommendation systems that steer readers toward similar content.

Our Substack newsletter, Planet Nude, rejects fascism, Nazism, antisemitism, and white supremacy without qualification. These are not abstract ideas to be weighed in debate. They are ideologies rooted in dehumanization and violence, and their normalization online has measurable real-world consequences. We are publishing this letter openly because our readers deserve clarity, and because your decisions now directly affect the credibility and sustainability of the many publications like ours that are built on your platform.

By your own measures, Planet Nude is a Substack success. We are a Substack bestseller, a top-ranked culture publication, and a sustainable business supported by a niche audience. We publish daily, pay contributors, and operate squarely within your stated rules. We are not writing from the margins.

Planet Nude has thrived on Substack in part because of your open content policies. Our work has been restricted or erased elsewhere for lawful, nonsexual expression rooted in art, culture, and civil liberties. We have seen firsthand how blunt moderation and opaque enforcement can destroy years of work overnight. We understand why Substack positioned itself as an alternative to that model, and we value that stance.

That is why your continued monetization and amplification of explicitly Nazi and white supremacist publications presents a growing problem for us, not just ethically, but practically.

As a publisher, we answer to our readers. Increasingly, we are being asked to explain why our work lives on a platform that profits from hate ideology. That association does reputational damage whether we endorse it or not. At a certain point, the trust we have built with our audience is eroded by proxy, simply by remaining tied to infrastructure that refuses to draw basic lines.

This is not hypothetical. It affects subscriber confidence, partnerships, contributor comfort, and long-term brand integrity. No amount of editorial clarity can fully offset the reputational drag of platform association once it becomes widely understood.

For this reason, it is precisely this situation that has pushed us to begin laying groundwork for alternatives: backing up our archives, diversifying infrastructure, and exploring paths that reduce dependence on systems that profit from hate. We would prefer not to do this. Migration is costly, disruptive, and imperfect. But inaction carries its own cost, and it is one we ultimately bear.

There is a fundamental difference between protecting contested human expression and subsidizing hate ideology. Substack’s current policies collapse that distinction. Demonetizing and de-amplifying publications that explicitly promote Nazism, white supremacy, or Holocaust denial is not censorship. It is a refusal to reward belief systems built on exclusion and erasure. Algorithms and recommendation systems are active, not neutral. When extremist publications are surfaced and sustained, Substack is shaping an ecosystem and benefiting from that shape.

We understand the risk of overreach. We do not want Substack to become another platform where nuance is flattened and creators are disciplined for discomfort, ambiguity, or misunderstood expression. Nudists and naturists, in particular, know how quickly those distinctions collapse. We have experienced that failure firsthand on other platforms, and it is deeply corrosive to creative and civic work.

But caution is not the same as inaction. Substack has already shown that it can make careful distinctions—most notably in recognizing that nudity does not inherently equal sexual expression and in building space for that understanding to exist. That same capacity for judgment can and should be applied elsewhere. Platforms are not obligated to subsidize ideologies rooted in dehumanization and hate speech cannot be treated as just another form of protected expression without damaging everything around it. Platforms that refuse to act eventually narrow their own culture. If the only voices that feel fully welcome are those pushing dehumanization, others will leave silently, one by one, until the platform reflects the values it failed to challenge.

We urge Substack to adopt a common-sense approach that protects inclusive, nuanced human expression while clearly excluding ideologies rooted in hate and violence. Specifically:

• Demonetize publications that explicitly promote Nazism, white supremacy, or Holocaust denial.

• Remove algorithmic recommendation and amplification of extremist content.

• Provide transparency about how such material is identified and handled.

These steps would help protect the ecosystem Substack depends on, preserving the kind of thoughtful, varied publications that give the platform its real diversity of ideas and made it an appealing home for creators in the first place.

Planet Nude would prefer to keep building here. But our responsibility is to our readers, our contributors, and the integrity of our work. If Substack does not change course very quickly, the cost of staying will soon have outweighed the cost of leaving, and that is not a calculation we control alone.

We are asking you to act while there is still something worth holding together.

Respectfully,

Planet Nude 🪐

Editor’s note: We’re keeping comments closed on this letter so it can stand on its own. If you’d like to share your thoughts, reactions, or experiences with platform moderation and publisher risk, we’ve opened a dedicated discussion in our #News-of-the-Nude channel on Discord.

You can join the conversation here: https://discord.gg/3u2SNS5Hqc

As always, we ask that discussion remain thoughtful, informed, and grounded in respect for one another.

The first time someone enters a naturist space, there is usually a moment of profound realization. It is not necessarily the thrill of the breeze or the sun on skin that hits first. Rather, it is the visual evidence that the airbrushed images we see on billboards are a lie. In a true naturist environment, you see surgical scars, stretch marks, uneven tans, folds of flesh.

For a movement that prides itself on being the ultimate expression of body acceptance, you would think that diversity would be its greatest strength. Yet, as much as naturism claims to be a refuge from the judgments of the clothed world, it is not immune to the pervasive reach of fat-shaming.

When we bring our biases into these spaces, we don’t just hurt individuals who are obese, we undermine the very foundation of what it means to be a naturist. For a movement that purports to help people find body acceptance, it sometimes adopts a toxic view of body positivity. To make our way of life accessible and inclusive to a broader coalition, we need to shift our focus from an ethos of body positivity to something more grounded and sustainable: body neutrality.

For years, the mainstream conversation around body image has been dominated by body positivity, and the reasons are understandable. Who doesn’t love positivity? It is a well-intentioned movement that encourages everyone to love their reflection and see themselves as beautiful. While this has helped many, it also places a heavy burden on the individual. It suggests that if you do not feel beautiful every time you look in the mirror, you are failing.

Body neutrality offers a different path. It is the radical idea that you do not have to love your body to respect it. It is about acknowledging that your body is a vessel, a tool that allows you to experience the world, rather than an aesthetic object to be constantly appraised. As Anne Poirier, author and body image expert has noted, “Body neutrality is the bridge between body loathing and body love.”1 It allows us to exist in our skin without the pressure of performing confidence.

“Body neutrality is the bridge between body loathing and body love.” —Anne Poirier

In a naturist context, body neutrality is incredibly powerful. It takes the focus off the visual and places it on the experiential. When we stop worrying about whether our bodies are “good enough” to be seen, we can finally focus on the actual benefits of social nudity: the sense of equality, the connection to nature, and the removal of the social markers that clothes provide. The freedom we all love. And importantly, true body acceptance.

Fat-shaming in naturist spaces represents a structural failure. When fat-shaming enters the naturist movement, it creates a hierarchy in a space that is supposed to be egalitarian. Naturism is built on the idea that without clothes, we are all just human. We lose our status, our wealth, and our social class. However, when thinness becomes the new “uniform” of acceptability, we are simply replacing one set of restrictive social markers with another.

Fat-shaming in these spaces is often subtle—especially for people who have never been obese—but the more you keep an eye out for it, the more you see it. It shows up in the lack of representative imagery in club brochures, in accessibility of grounds or lodging, in inclusivity in sports and programming, or in just in the way energy shifts in certain social encounters. Often it is more overt, disguised as “concern for health,” a common tactic used to justify exclusion. This behavior is toxic because it reinforces the idea that some bodies are more worthy of being seen than others, and pushes against people’s autonomy over their own bodies and health.

If a person feels they must lose weight before they are “ready” to visit a nudist resort, then that resort has failed its mission. Naturism should be the cure for body shame, not a place where it is amplified. By allowing fat-shaming to persist, the movement alienates a significant segment of the population, and one that could benefit most from the freedom of social nudity. It turns a philosophy of liberation into a gated community for the aesthetically privileged.

The myth of the visual diagnosis

One of the most persistent barriers to true body neutrality is the urge to equate a person’s appearance with their medical records. In many social circles, including naturist ones, fat-shaming is often rebranded as a “concern for health.” This allows the critic to maintain a sense of moral superiority while masking their bias. But the reality is that health is a complex, multi-dimensional state that cannot be determined by looking at a person across a pool or on a hiking trail.

The idea that thinness is a universal synonym for health is a medical oversimplification that has been thoroughly debunked by modern medicine. Metabolic health, cardiovascular fitness, and mental well-being exist across a vast spectrum of body types. Many larger individuals lead active lives and possess excellent clinical markers, while many thin individuals may struggle with chronic illness, poor nutrition, or sedentary habits. When we judge a body based on its size, we are relying on a visual shorthand that is frequently wrong.

Weight is not a behavior, and it is not a direct proxy for health. By moving away from weight-centric thinking, we recognize that health is about what a body can do and how it feels, rather than how much space it occupies.

The tendency for people—however well-meaning—to visually diagnose others is particularly damaging in the context of a naturist environment. It creates a culture of scrutiny that is the exact opposite of the relaxation and acceptance that the movement promises. If we are busy assessing the “health” of those around us, we are failing to practice the core tenet of naturism: acceptance of the human form as it is. This tenet inherently cannot come with conditions.

True body neutrality accepts that some people are healthy, some are not, and most are somewhere in between, but none of those states should determine a person’s right to exist comfortably and without judgment in a communal space.

The weight of fat shame

As a gay man who is considered overweight by “textbook” standards, I have felt the sting of silent judgment more times than I can count. In the queer community, there is often an intense devotion to a specific kind of lean, muscular aesthetic that can make anyone outside that narrow window feel like an outsider. Even with the security of a loving marriage, I am not immune to the way strangers project a narrative of poor health onto me simply because of my size.

The irony of this judgment is particularly sharp when I look at my own medical reality. If you were to examine my chart, you would see a man in excellent physical standing. My blood pressure is textbook, and my bloodwork labs come back near perfect every single time I have a checkup. These are the objective facts of my health, yet they are entirely invisible to a person looking at me across a pool or a sauna.

This disconnect between my actual health and how I am perceived is where the true damage occurs. While my physical body is thriving, the constant pressure of being shamed for my weight takes a significant toll on my mental health. It is exhausting to feel as though I must constantly defend my right to exist in a body that others have deemed a problem. When I enter a naturist space, I am looking for a reprieve from that exhaustion. I am seeking a sanctuary where the social hierarchies of the clothed world are supposed to vanish. When fat shaming follows me into the one place where I am meant to feel free, it erodes the sense of safety that is essential for true relaxation.

Building a more neutral future

The survival of the naturist movement depends on its ability to attract younger, more diverse crowds. For many people in their twenties and thirties, body inclusivity is not a luxury; it is a requirement. This generation has grown up with a heightened awareness of how harmful traditional beauty standards can be. If they walk into a naturist club and sense a culture of judgment or “fat-talk,” they will not return.

Furthermore, fat-shaming hurts everyone, even those who fit the current beauty standard. It creates an atmosphere of surveillance. When we judge others for their size, we are implicitly acknowledging that we are also being judged. This keeps everyone on edge, constantly checking their posture or wondering if they look okay from a certain angle. It robs us of the relaxation that is the entire point of being clothes-free. It denies us the basic respect that is the currency of naturism. Without it, the movement is just a collection of people without clothes on. With it, it becomes a transformative and radical social practice of rejecting the pervasive stigmas of the outside world.

To move forward, organized naturism, naturist advocates and individuals must actively work to dismantle the “body beautiful” myth. This starts with representation. If your website and social media posts only shows young, fit, athletic couples, you are sending a clear message about who is welcome. We need to see bodies of all ages, sizes, and abilities reflected in the movement’s public face.

On an individual level, it means practicing the art of not commenting on bodies, even in a complimentary way. In a body-neutral space, we talk about the temperature of the water, the quality of the hiking trail, or the book we are reading. We move away from the “look at you!” culture and toward a “glad you’re here” culture.

The naturist community has the potential to be lead the way in the body neutrality movement. It is the only space where the reality of the human form is consistently and honestly on display. By rejecting fat-shaming and embracing the idea that every body is a neutral fact of life, we can create a culture that is truly liberating. We can finally stop looking at each other and start seeing each other. 🪐

A recent Times of India lifestyle column advises parents not to change clothes in front of young children, presenting the idea as expert guidance on childhood boundaries and child safety. The piece centers on the views of Dr. Anuradha H. S., a pediatrician, teen health specialist, and parenting coach based in Bangalore with decades of clinical experience and a practice focused on confidence-based parent training. Dr. Anuradha, founder of the Confident Parenting Hub, hosts social media content for parents and positions herself as an authority on early childhood behaviors, privacy, and boundary setting.

In the video and article highlighted by Times of India, she warns parents that letting a spouse change clothes in front of a young child “may blur important lessons about personal space and respect,” and suggests that children under six “may assume bodies are always open for viewing” if adults undress nearby. According to the Times of India summary, she says modeling privacy by dressing and bathing in private helps teach respect for bodies and can “arm them with defense against child sexual abuse.”

That recommendation is framed as a matter of child well-being, yet the article does not provide citations to peer-reviewed research supporting the idea that non-sexual parental nudity confuses children or increases risk. It substitutes authority by assertion for data, repeating a common belief about nudity and children as if it were settled science.

The advice itself sounds reasonable at first glance: teach privacy, model boundaries, protect children from harm. But the leap from those goals to a claim of psychological risk tied to ordinary, non-sexual parental nudity is where evidence is essential. Decades of research have asked that question directly, and the answers are far less alarming than what the Times of India article suggests.

What the research actually says

The idea that children are harmed by seeing a parent nude has circulated for generations, often as “common sense.” When researchers began testing it, the results failed to support the fear.

As early as the 1960s, psychiatric researchers examined whether early socialization experiences, including exposure to parental nudity, distinguished children with mental health challenges from control groups. In all of those early studies, they did not. If parental nudity were a hidden driver of pathology, it should have shown up there. It didn’t.

Later work moved beyond indirect measures. Studies of nudist families and communities in the 1970s documented ordinary, rule-bound social environments centered on trust and responsibility, not boundary confusion. In the 1980s and 1990s, psychologist Marilyn Story conducted controlled comparisons and found that social nudists often reported healthier body self-concepts than non-nudists. In 1986, the book Growing Up Without Shame by Dennis Craig Smith and Dr. William Sparks studied adults who had been raised in nudist environments. Their studies found that children who had grown up in contexts that allowed for nonsexual and family nudity had healthier sexual outlooks and were more comfortable with their bodies than adults who were raised in non-nudist contexts.

The most rigorous evidence arrived in the late 1990s. An 18-year longitudinal study by Paul Okami followed 200 children from early childhood into late adolescence, tracking outcomes across self-acceptance, relationships, behavior, substance use, and sexual adjustment. Early exposure to parental nudity was not associated with negative outcomes on any of these measures. The researchers found no empirical basis for the widespread belief that such exposure causes harm.

More recent work, including pre-registered studies published in the 2010s and 2020s, particularly by Dr. Keon West, continues in the same direction. Participation in naturist contexts correlates with improved body image, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. Retrospective studies examining childhood exposure to non-sexual family nudity find no adverse effects. Some even suggest downstream benefits in comfort with one’s body.

This does not mean “anything goes.” Researchers consistently distinguish between everyday, non-sexual nudity and sexualized exposure. The former is what these studies examine. The latter is where real harm is documented. Conflating the two collapses a crucial distinction and muddies public understanding.

The cost of evidence-free warnings

The Times of India article gestures toward child sexual abuse prevention, implying that avoiding nudity helps “arm” children with defense. That concern is understandable. In India, as in many countries, conversations about child safety unfold against real fears about abuse, silence, and stigma. Parenting advice does not emerge in a vacuum, and cultural norms around modesty, privacy, and respect for elders shape how these warnings are delivered and received. Acknowledging that context matters. But context is not evidence.

Child protection research, across countries and cultures, does not identify ordinary, non-sexual parental nudity as a risk factor for abuse. What consistently increases risk are secrecy, coercion, grooming behaviors, power imbalances, and exposure to sexualized content or conduct. Teaching children about consent, bodily autonomy, and the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touch is essential. None of that requires parents to frame their own bodies as inherently confusing, dangerous, or inappropriate for a young child to see.

Some clinicians and educators have argued the opposite. When children encounter bodies in everyday, non-sexual contexts, they may be better positioned to recognize when something is out of place. Familiarity can reduce mystification and shame, making conversations about boundaries more concrete rather than more difficult.

This is where cultural distinction matters. Privacy norms around bodies vary widely across societies and historical periods, including within India itself. What counts as appropriate exposure in one family or community may differ from another. The problem arises when a culturally specific preference is elevated into a universal claim of psychological harm without supporting data.

Saying that privacy is valued, or that modesty plays an important role in a given cultural setting, is one thing. Saying that parents who change clothes in front of a toddler are making a “huge mistake,” or placing their child at risk, is another. The former is a social norm. The latter is an empirical claim, and it requires evidence.

When advice columns present unevidenced claims as child-safety imperatives, they do more than misinform. They risk reinforcing body shame and amplifying fear, especially in cultures where discussions of the body are already tightly constrained. Parents already navigate a dense web of expectations and anxieties. Adding moral urgency without data raises alarm rather than understanding. If the goal is to help children develop healthy boundaries, the evidence points toward clear communication, respect for consent, and a firm distinction between ordinary bodies and sexual behavior. Ordinary family nudity, on its own, does not undermine those lessons. That harm claim has been repeated far more often than it has been demonstrated.

Parenting advice deserves the same standard we apply to any claim about harm, regardless of culture. Ask for data. Ask what studies actually show. When we do, the picture that emerges is calmer, more grounded, and far less sensational than a viral warning suggests. 🪐

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