The Other Side of the Wall

Watch out, I’m talking about sex again.

A couple of weeks ago I published The Wall, an article born out of the many frustrations that have been festering in me over a generally negative attitude towards sex and sexuality that is pervasive within the nudist community, both as a cultural issue and as a policy issue. I am happy to have put those thoughts out there, rather than sitting on them and letting them just keep gnawing at me, making me bitter, making me miserable. I still have some things to process, but I wanted also take a moment to flip this conversation around. Yes, I can be disappointed in how sex-negativity within the nudist community is impacting me personally, and I can be worried that it may also be affecting other nudists’ personal and sexual lives, and I can lay out how this whole approach just makes nudists look weird and out of touch, but that none of that really gets to the impact that I believe sex negativity actually has on the nudist movement, its potential, and the lives of its advocates.

I think we should look at that. We should peek over and take a look at the other side of the wall, at what goes on in a fenced-off nudist community that decries the sexual side of nudity, stakes claim to freedom from lust and desire, distances itself from a worldly views of the body, and denies itself the tools and language to deal with sex, sexuality, and even sexual abuse responsibly.

OK. So, here’s the part where I share a personal, somewhat uncomfortable anecdote that I’ll then use to reinforce a larger trend that, I think, many people who have experienced the nudist community can relate to. It may be uncomfortable for some readers, so proceed with caution if you are sensitive. Here goes.

I know that I have mentioned this in a few places—and even on the episode of The New Nudist Podcast that I was on—but I first stumbled across the nudist community as a teenager, back when I was incredibly insecure about my body, just as my body was changing and becoming a tall, gangly version of the doughy, limp-wristed kid I already was. I was shy, I was very sheltered, I had very limited education about sex or anatomy, I had parents who both worked long hours outside of the home, and I had unmonitored Internet access. In my curious, after-school web surfing, I found a few nudist websites and naturist groups online and my fascination was piqued: There were people out there who, unlike me, felt good in their body, who had community, who were accepted by each other and confident in their skin. Mind you, I was a confused, closeted gay kid trying to figure out what was going on in my mind and my body, and everything felt weird, guilt-ridden, and awkward. My curious pubescent mind was also just glad to actually see some human bodies, to know what grown men and women were supposed to look like, what my body was supposed to look like. I don’t know, really, if it’s nudism that I was interested in as an early teen, or if it was getting my questions answered about the body in a way that I felt might pin me with fewer sin strikes from the man upstairs. I suspect, now, it was more the latter, that I felt an inherent guilt about seeking out nude bodies and sexual exploration but that nudism provided a cover for my curiosity. In any case, it stuck.

Longing for a connection to a community resembling the glimpses I had caught of gatherings and clubs online, I found a home in an online forum specifically for young nudists called YNAI (Young Naturists Association International), a now-defunct website that was supposedly started and supported by a couple of behind-the-scenes, middle-aged brothers in Australia, but run by a host of volunteer moderators. Not to diminish what YNAI symbolized to me at the time or what positive role it may have served for others, but, in hindsight, this was probably not a safe place for teenagers, despite selling itself as such. Yes, it touted all the nudist and naturist mantras and quotes and rules and ideals you would expect to find in any other nudist community or space: It lauded nudism as a nonsexual practice, it celebrated body diversity, it connected people from different backgrounds who spoke different languages and had different beliefs. I found that very refreshing. I was curious about the world and it scratched that itch for me. I made friends, I had great conversations, I felt like I was saying the right things and doing the right things and contributing to a real community. Belonging felt good, so I prioritized the things that helped me feel like I belonged—getting naked a lot, I guess, and then talking about it online.

In many ways, it was an important part of my experiences within the nudist and naturist community. But in many other ways, it also instilled a different kind of shame and guilt, especially around sex. Not because the community was any more or less militant in the way it discouraged sexual discussions and displays, but because the community and its declared premise of promoting nonsexual nudity served as a perfect cover for exactly the kind of interactions you would be horrified to find out your teenage child was experiencing online. Particularly, grown adults sharing private messages, exchanging contact information, swapping photos, engaging in age-inappropriate conversations, and sharing explicit webcam calls with minors who thought they could trust the adults in the walled-off, supposedly nonsexual community they had found but who did not, it turns out, have anyone looking out for them. I got caught in situations I should never have been in. I was having conversations I should never have had. And I was… fourteen? Fifteen? Sixteen? A child. For the record, I’m OK. I’m not hurt, nobody touched me, but I am realizing something now about that experience: I knew these were conversations I shouldn’t have been having, that these grown men and women should not be talking to me this way, but I did not feel like I could talk about it. It became a secret. I’m sure I was just grateful for the attention, for connection with a community, for feeling like someone thought I was worth their time even though I was awkward and gangly and weird. If it felt wrong, I couldn’t tell anyone, because I thought it would exclude me from this community of vehemently nonsexual nudists. And what if I enjoyed the attention? What if I enjoyed feeling interesting? Then it would all be even worse.

I haven’t spoken much about this experience. Actually, I haven’t expressly told anyone, to be honest, because I still feel some kind of guilt around it, some kind of shame as if it was me doing something wrong, but also an embarrassment for not speaking up. Who else was it happening to? I’d never know. But to have an adult woman moderator—the most beloved and adored and respected and popular and untouchable person on this platform—message you as a fifteen year-old kid telling you she would like to have sex with you if you ever met in person is not okay. Having grown men, at least one of whom a pedophile by his own admission, regularly reach out to chat and maybe even casually proposition you after finding you online in a nudist forum for teenagers is not okay. Again, in hindsight, the whole forum was a very bad idea, especially when it was being run by people who either didn’t know that middle-aged men were joining and trying to get nude photos of children or, even worse, maybe didn’t really mind. I’m not saying any of this to denigrate that specific online community or what it meant to the genuine folks who benefitted from it, but to provide an example of what happens when the nudist community stigmatizes sexuality. It doesn’t erase the sexual misconduct, it may just remove the language to talk about it. It doesn’t keep out the bad behavior, but it may well provide cover for it.

What I needed at that age was an outlet to embrace my body but also an outlet to understand sexuality. I needed sex education that spoke to me and what I was going through. I needed to know what bodies looked like, how they change during puberty. I needed to know how healthy sexual relationships were supposed to work, what grooming looked like, how to set boundaries, how to talk about sex or communicate that you didn’t want to talk about sex, how to deal with unwanted behavior, how to respect my body and explore my sexuality responsibly. I needed to know that sex was not dirty or shameful just as much as I needed to know that nudity was not dirty or shameful. Instead I was toggling between a sheltered religious home and church life and a sex-averse online community of nudists sheltering predators, both of which had me feeling ashamed. It’s not the fault of the nudist community that this one online nudist space for young people was problematic, but I can say with certainty now that it absolutely did not provide the growth and openness and honesty that I needed for my sexual health at the time. I think, rather, that it messed me up and left me holding guilt and shame associated with sex.

For a while, I walked away from this community feeling lost and uncomfortable, not really registering why. As I’m working through my frustrations with sex-negativity in the nudist community now and digging up these past experiences, I’m starting to understand why.

What’s somewhat ironic here is that nudists love to lament how people grow up these days only experiencing nudity through pornography, and they offer nudism as an alternative that allows us to love our bodies without them being sexualized… and I think that’s valid, I guess. But it’s also naive. People absolutely need better education about the human body than what pornography has to offer, yeah, but we all also need better education and openness about sex and sexuality than what either pornography or nudism has to offer. That’s not to say that pornography or nudism are bad, just that neither of these things is going to provide a comprehensive education on the body or sex. To think sexuality and desire diminish self-worth is ridiculous. To think better self-esteem and a healthier worldview should be derived from desexualizing the body is ridiculous. To think we can combat hyper-sexualization by advocating for even fewer outlets for sexual expression is ridiculous. To think we can “cure” the enjoyment of pornography or erotica by shaming sexuality is ridiculous. To think we need to fix or eradicate any of these things at all in order to enjoy spending time naked is… you get the idea.

I think some might be reading this and wondering how, after those experiences, I could possibly come to the conclusion that nudists need to be less sex-negative instead of advocating for even more stringent barriers against sex and sexuality to protect the community. Well, because these spaces are already sex-negative, are already adamant that sex and sexuality never pose a threat in nudist and naturist spaces, already insist upon the squeaky-clean culture of the community, already leave little to no space for a mature and respectful dialogue about the sexual side of nudity. If that youth-oriented nudist platform had laid out a protocol for handling issues of sexual misconduct, if it had alerted its users to behaviors to watch out for, if it had informed its members of the dangers of online spaces for young people, if it had encouraged its young members to find appropriate spaces to explore and educate themselves about their sexuality, maybe there would not have been grown adult community moderators privately messaging children about sex, asking children to post nude pictures of themselves, asking children to email photos to them directly under the guise of community. The unfortunate truth is that the nudist community is inherently a private one, one that people are hesitant to admit they belong to, and also one whose adherents feel divinely tasked with evangelizing its benefits and defending its respectability. All of which only exacerbates the issues nudism claims to be solving. Because I couldn’t both be a part of the community and also question its respectability and its adherence to its own stated principles, I chose community. I chose to keep it to myself.

All this sex negativity isn’t solving sex, it just seems to be fomenting a different guilt and shame about the body and sex and making the nudist community less equipped to protect its members. I’m not saying this is how the entire nudist community is. It’s not. Some of it is great! Most of it is sincerely and entirely normal and bland and mundane! And I’m also not saying that nudists need to welcome or tolerate sexual activity in their clubs or gatherings. What I am saying is that our collective fear of discussing and accepting the sexual side of nudity, the anti-sex language we use, and our blind commitment to painting human nudity and the nudist community as nonsexual and pure at all costs has perhaps done more to provide cover for those who would abuse this community’s innocence than to protect the community from that exact bad behavior.

In my adult life participating in the nudist community, I can recall conversations, for example, of leaders suggesting more visible processes for reporting unwanted sexual behavior in nudist clubs and gatherings, suggestions that were unpopular because it might make people think we have a problem with unwanted sexual behavior. Or it might make people think women and children weren’t safe in our spaces if we had to inform them of ways to report issues. It very much felt like some in the community were more committed to avoiding any appearance of impropriety than with actually pursuing propriety. But these are efforts we actually need to work towards if we want our spaces to be safer and more welcoming for more of the people who want to be respectful and kind to one another. What harm could possibly come from giving each other tools to feel safer? What harm could possibly come from alerting one another to potential danger, from making predators uncomfortable, or from asking ourselves to keep an eye out for each other? Instead, we often treat sex like a bad word and like its existence is a threat to the nudist community. That isn’t making us safer or healthier or more enlightened at all.

I can also recall hearing hardworking, intelligent, forward-thinking people be discredited or have their participation in committee work questioned behind the scenes because, in addition to their work within the nudist community, they were not shy about their support of sex workers, their participation in their fetish community, or their generally open attitude about sex and sexuality and gender. It's fine to have different opinions or experiences around this, but I personally feel that having people involved in the community who understand consent and safety and boundaries and context and nuanced human sexuality is more valuable than worrying about maintaining the status quo, smothering discussions about our internal issues, and projecting this idealized version of our community. The fetish community, for example, is not some malicious group of deviants seeking to impose sex on the world, but is a community that understands consent, context, and safety. Funny that people have similar views about nudists. There are intellectually minded, sexually liberated, body-positive people who can guide the nudist community to better, healthier dialogues about nudity and sexuality without making nudism about sex. The nudist community could benefit from a sex-respectful approach.

I think, inevitably, all of these instances are what happens when you hitch an entire movement’s respectability to this ridiculous moral standard, this puritanical sexlessness, this inverse relationship that requires that sexual nudity be both fully bad and also completely absent from the good nudist’s way of life in order for nudism to be respectable and good and wholesome. Even now as I write this, I know that no matter how delicately I present this information, someone will be upset that I made nudists look bad, made nudists look like groomers, made nudists look like puritanical sexphobes, made nudists appear to not properly handle claims and instances of unwanted sexual behavior. I feel guilty already for bringing it up because it may come across as an attack on the community, rather than as an opportunity to course-correct. I may be risking my own place in this community by talking about this at all. Why can’t you just focus on the good parts of nudism? But I also don’t think I can keep holding onto it. I think, or rather, I know that the approach that the nudist community has taken towards sex and sexuality has hurt me in the past and is weighing heavily on me still now. And I can’t help but imagine it is doing the same to others.

Even if it’s not, though, and even if I am the only one ever impacted, it is still valid for me to have these concerns and discomforts, and it’s still valid for me to question whether this is a good or healthy place for me. More and more, I don’t think it is. More and more, I think I’ve been broken by my involvement with the nudist community over the years. And, for that reason, I’m not particularly worried about nudists being uncomfortable with my perspective.

But for you nudists reading who want to make this place better, please take these messages and my story and learn something from them. This is something that I believe will plague the nudist community until we learn how to have a more mature relationship with sex, until we learn to stop tying the respectability of the nudist movement to an opposition to sexuality, until we learn to accept that people must be free to enjoy the sexual side of nudity just as much as we would like them to enjoy the nonsexual side. I am not suggesting that nudists should incorporate sex into their message, their spaces, or their gatherings. Not at all. All I am suggesting is that nudists, for their own sake, would do well to examine how blatantly sex-negative so much of their language and principles can be, how much of their identity they are wrapping up in a rejection of their own and others’ sexuality. Nudists would do well to consider whether this is a healthy message to be spreading, whether it is truly making anyone safer, and whether we could perhaps take a more tolerant, honest, reasonable, and holistic approach.

I think there’s room in the world for nudism to stay true to its values while also respecting sexuality and fostering mature dialogue around sex when appropriate. I don’t think these things need to be opposing forces and I don’t think any of this needs to be so complicated. It makes me wonder: Are we whole human beings or, in practicing nudism, are we necessarily opting to be only a small portion of ourselves?