This is a book about nudists enjoying themselves, but it’s also about people finding nudists threatening. As we all know, nudism is only an erection away from open-air group sex. One minute it’s volleyball, the next it’s people heading for the sand dunes, and the fall of western civilisation. And what about hygiene? Yes, by all means factor in the benign setting of a consenting nudist-resort bakery and the reassuring porn-led trend, especially among nudists, for scrupulous pubic baldness, but frankly we all know the full range of what private parts are used for. And while we’re at it – really, have these people no dignity?
Doubtless all this is why nudism is so funny, even to those of us who have only dared walk naked up and down Oxford Street in the service of our nightmares. It’s telling that the author is scarcely three sentences into this highly entertaining work before he finds himself inescapably typing “scrotum”, long acknowledged as the most amusing word in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In order to take nudism seriously, first you have to make fun of it.
Smith, a likable American writer who ambles a breezy path between the likes of Bill Bryson and Geoff Dyer, offers up plenty of hilarity as he prepares to embrace this subculture of “nakations” and “clothing optional” environments. He is soon poolside, trunks furtively wriggled out of, seeing his future in the drooping nether regions of the older folks who outnumber supermodels to such a dismayingly high degree at these gatherings.
But there’s rigour here too – a brief history of his subject, from ancient Greek javelin throwers to Victorian religious sects and radical socialists to 1920s Germans (inevitably), whose wholesome love of bare-arsed wandering up mountainsides was bound so stirringly with the promise of a purebred, blue-eyed master race. Practical philosophies are claimed in the name of nudism – as a proof against alienation, as an assertion of our common humanity, as a rejection of status-giving corporate brands and logos, as a route to inclusion and tolerance and social justice.
Nudism has been variously associated with vegetarianism, environmental issues and animal rights. Freedom is its watchword – not just in the sense of being unencumbered by clothing, but in the spirit of a civil right.
Having said that, what most practitioners really want is just to “drop trou”, hang out and, yes, boogie. Smith counts the ways it might be done, with immersive stays in France and Spain, a Caribbean nude-cruise, a nine-hour naked hike in the Alps, as well as “living the anti-textile dream” in the more broiling parts of the US.
Like me, you might think you’ve never met a nudist, and yet here they are in their ordinary thousands, rolling acres of them – on the beaches, in the hot tubs and casinos, in the bars and night clubs and restaurants and fitness suites, their bits proudly jiggling, dangling and of course sagging. There is no shame here – quite the reverse. Yet for some, it is the fortnight in the sun that dare not speak its name. Some – especially those working in public service – are worried they might lose their jobs if anyone back home found out what they do in the privacy of their own holidays.
Opinion is slow to change, and the exhortation from owners and organisers to keep it clean amounts almost to an anxiety. Clubs routinely use the terms “nonsexual” and “social” in their marketing. Vigilance is high. Lone men, where they are allowed in at all, are viewed as crypto deviants. A wry notice in one Palm Beach establishment warns: “Behaviour requiring an apology is not tolerated.”
Spain’s family-oriented beach club Vera Playa – the world’s biggest naturist hotel – hits an even balance of live and let live, with its games of petanque, mix of young and old and laidback neighbourhood. But then look at the Cap d’Agde in the south of France – a town-sized apartment complex that houses 40,000 fun-lovers, many of them fetishists and swingers. Here a battle for the soul of nudism rages between the resort’s hardline naturists, with their love of exercise and fresh air, and the priapic libertines, with their penis bling and lewd night-time shenanigans – witnessed for us by Smith, who gazed from his balcony one balmy evening to see a man being given an oral attending-to by two naked blondes.
Yes, you’re thinking, give them an inch and that’s what it turns into. This is what they’re afraid of in the state of Montana, where under the three-strikes rule skinny-dippers can be sent to jail for the rest of their disgusting lives.
This thoughtful, funny book is a plea for the middle ground. By the end of his unbuttoned adventures, Smith has widened his idea of what normal can be – and, following him into that sea of flesh, so has the reader.
Naked at Lunch is published by Atlantic, £8.99. Click here to buy it for £7.19
