The body beautiful

Bathers, by Leo Putz (1869–1940)

I have COVID. I tested positive a few days ago, a few days before the Winter Solstice, a time when my swimming squad holds its annual solstice swim. It’s the same swim we do every day—swimming from one beach to another and back—we just do it earlier, in the dark, and in reverse. We also do it naked.

I posted my COVID status in a group chat I share with some fellow swimmers. Someone quickly replied how I would now miss the ‘nudie swim’. Someone then jokingly responded with how they thought the solstice swim was ‘for dirty old swingers’ anyway. The chat then descended down the dirty old swingers rabbit hole – and stayed there.

It was disappointing to see just how quickly a comment about an innocent swim transitioned into something dirty, something lewd, something to joke about. But it was also fascinating because the comments showed the misunderstanding and confusion that our society has with nudity and social nudity in particularly, namely: that nudity equals sex, and that social nudity is dirty or perverted.

Where did we go wrong?

Nakedness isn’t new. We were born that way. All of us. For the nine months prior to being born, we all floated around naked inside our mothers’ wombs, coming into being in our own private float tanks.

It is little wonder that many people revel in the water-on-skin sensation that swimming brings, and that skinny dipping brings even more. It is reconnecting with a very natural sensation and one you can’t fully experience while wearing wet clingy fabrics or rubber wetsuits.

But something changed. Somewhere along the road, our modern western ‘enlightened’ culture developed a hang up with nudity. Somehow, sex and nakedness became one, and we became unable to separate the two.

Even those of us who are Christians struggle with the concept that God created us ‘in his own image’, and with the Bible’s indifferent attitude towards social nudity. Instead, we insert our own cultural bias and assumptions into what we read, scared, or even unwilling, to accept the obvious: surely Peter wasn’t fully naked when he was fishing; surely when God told Isaiah to preach naked for three years, he must have meant…; when Naomi told Ruth to put on her clothes and go down to the threshing floor, she must have meant…; when Saul prophesied naked…; when Micah preached naked…; when Mary mistook Jesus for a gardener at the tomb because he was naked… Even history’s great artists have covered a Jesus who was – or historically would have been – naked when he was born, baptised, crucified and resurrected.

‘Nothing that God created is the source of our human temptation,’ wrote Chad W. Thompson in That Famous Fig Leaf. ‘To the contrary! The human body is the crown of God's creation—consummated by his declaration that it was good. That God’s people are unable to view the body without sinning is not an indictment of the body itself, but of the immaturity of the post-modern evangelical mind.’

Our culture and what we have learned and what we have taught can become very ingrained into our societal norms and beliefs. And it can become very hard to shift or even challenge long-held thinking.

Thompson again. ‘We live in a culture whose inhabitants spend billions of dollars a year to see each other naked on internet sites and in pornographic films, yet are often uncomfortable changing in front of each other in locker rooms or even being seen in a swimsuit on the beach. Could it be that we have so profoundly fused the image of the exposed body with sexual gratification that there is no context left for it to be laid bare without evoking either shame or arousal?’

Despite this modern-day fusion, we know through art, writing, archaeology, and even throughout the Bible, that non-sexual nudity was historically a common part of everyday life. Clothing was expensive. Cloth was woven by hand and all aspects of manufacture—growing, spinning, dyeing, cutting, and sewing—was done likewise.

Few people owned more than a single, simple garment, and they would remove it for any labour-intensive work so as not to wear it out through soiling, excessive washing, and unnecessary wear and tear. Even the soldiers crucifying Jesus divided up his clothing, such was the need and desire for cloth – while unknowingly fulfilling the prophecy in Psalm 22:18, ‘They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment’ (NIV).

Private bathrooms were for the future, washing and bathing was done in public baths or by the riverside or lake. And let’s not forget that the word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnós which means nude.

Non-sexual nudity was part of everyday community life and one can only imagine how differently that would have shaped a person’s understanding of the body compared with today.

It has only been in the last few hundred years—if that—that prudery began to cover our nakedness. Mass marketing throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—in the shape of photography, printing, cinema, and television—also came at a time of increasing conservatism and perhaps help foster it in. The parallel rise of celebrity culture and concerns over what, when and where to print, publish, screen, and broadcast, helped remove the naked body from its normal non-sexual contexts and sight. And one must wonder how this modernised conservative portrayal recreated our historical knowledge and understanding of nakedness. The naked body suddenly came with an adults-only rating, seen late at night, in niche cinemas and publications – the link between nakedness and sex was developing.

This sexualised culture also hid normal shapes and sizes. When we do see the naked body today, it is only ever shown in a sexual (cinema, pornography etc.) or sexually suggestive (fashion, marketing, advertising) way; and, because of this, the bodies seen are far from average. It is little wonder that so many people become confused when confronted by the natural, normal, naked body.

But by comparison, there are many indigenous cultures that still enjoy elements of nudity or partial nudity. It makes sense for their climate, way of life and traditions.

These cultures are hunting, gathering, fishing, working together in a communal village or nomadic life connected to nature in a way that is unfathomable to our western city life. They aren’t dealing with our level of internet and media exposure, nor the pressures from marketing and celebrity to look a certain way.

Being naked—either fully or partially; or always or sometimes—is neither here nor there. It is based on need and environment, not sex and body image. Nudity is commonplace and always has been. It is therefore normal. I wonder if those societies are gripped by the same body image and pornography issues that ours is. I suspect not.

The connotation of the body

Ironically, the moment we cover something out of ‘modesty’ is the moment we sexualise it. It is human nature to crave what we can’t have—as any advertiser knows—so by covering an ankle, a leg, a penis, a breast, or a vagina, we immediately create lust for those parts.

Instead of keeping our bodies normal and natural, our prudery has created intrigue, confusion, secrecy, and shame where there previously wasn’t any – and where there needn’t be any.

Which is why there is fear and anxiety when we stand naked on a beach surrounded by other naked people, about to go for a swim. We fear judgement: that people will see the wrinkle, the scar, the birth mark, the blemish, the body fat, the cellulite, our size, our shape—our averageness—and see us as less.

Because of nudity’s modern connotations we fear that we will be sexually objectified by others – or that perhaps we won’t. We fear that our friends, family, or colleagues will find out and think we’re weird, perverted, and sexually promiscuous.

We fear that we will be misunderstood.

But the judgement also comes from within: how do we already view ourselves? How have we been taught to? How will we feel when we are fully exposed, when we reveal the very things that we have tried so hard to hide from others for so long? And what will we see in others? How will we judge them?

And this is precisely why we need to stand naked on a beach with others and enjoy a naked group swim.

Why we need to get naked

Yes, we should be fit, and we should be healthy; we should not glorify or ignore poor nutrition or lack of movement. Rather we should care for one another and promote healthy lifestyles and wellbeing – and that includes a healthy attitude towards what is normal and what is natural.

Our society is confused about our bodies. We see this whenever we debate whether a woman should breastfeed in public; when sweaty teenagers are too embarrassed to shower and change in front of each other after sport; when men are too embarrassed to wear anything less than knee-length boardshorts on a beach or in a pool (but eagerly expect women to wear as little as possible); when a topless man is acceptable but a topless woman is not; and when sending ‘nudes’ to a new partner is an expectation, not an exception.

And we see this confusion when a brief nude swim held in the dark on the shortest day of the year is thought of as something ‘for dirty old swingers’.

I will miss out on this year’s solstice swim, but it is a swim I have done a few times before. My take on it is that it feels weird for about ten seconds until you realise that everyone is naked, and no one cares.

Soon you start swimming, and it simply feels wonderful. You are completely connected to the marine environment in a way that you have never been before. You are surrounded by those you swim with every day but feel connected to them in a way that you have never felt before. And you see yourself in a way that you have never seen yourself before.

Then you return to the beach, towel off, chat to a few people as you get dressed and reluctantly go home bewildered by the simplicity and naturalness of the experience.

You have just done something that every other culture has done for millennia: you bathed in nature alongside other members of your tribe. You were surrounded by normality, and you fit right in. There was no judgement, no shame, no sex. There was just community.

David L. Hatton, a Christian writer, pastor, and former maternity nurse, wrote, ‘…a few moments of viewing a naked person of the opposite sex, in a normal, nonsexual context, can overturn a lifetime of false instruction about how the mind is supposed to react.’

What you just witnessed, and took part in, was a reclaiming of the body as something non-sexual. You just deflated all the body image and sexualised pressures that we are constantly bombarded with. You, as Hatton stated, just overturned years of social conditioning about the naked human body.

Perhaps there should be more opportunities to reclaim the naked body as something normal; something to be celebrated, and not shunned; to be seen for what it is, and not for what it isn’t.

Because when everyone is naked, no one is naked, right?