Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism

"Germany was in many ways the heart of modern nudist culture in the modern world. Ideas that first developed in the late 19th and turn of the 20th century, turned away from urbanism, seeking a more authentic state of being. Nudism rejected ideas about cultural sophistication in favour of something that seemed to be much more earthy. It was connected in Germany with the emerging youth movement as well. This very particular German character, when it traveled overseas, was taken up in different ways in different places. Brian Hoffman studies how that idea transferred to America and how it became a particularly American kind of practice. I’ve done the same for Britain, where nudism also emerged in different ways with different characteristics and attitudes, taking on a form which is quite nationalistic. Interestingly, even though nudity appears as universal, as this thing that unites all humanity, all of us embodied creatures, when it starts to become rooted in social practices, when club cultures emerge or when local literature starts to emerge by certain authors, nudism develops a very particular flavour. “That there is a kind of non-civilised world that the civilised world can learn from is a key tenet in early 20th-century nudism” Hoffman’s interest is to show how nudism developed in North America from from the 1920s onwards. Interestingly, he’s a scholar of American nudism but he also grew up in a nudist family in California, in what he describes as a ‘clothing optional community’. Moreover, his father was a lawyer and his mother a nurse. This is a really interesting pairing, for the ways that law and health intertwine as two drivers for the central discussion points that underpin nudism. As a result, he’s got this range of really interesting perspectives. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He looks deeply at the archival sources, and conflicts with law, for example, which are different in America and Britain, as my own archival work shows. Other aspects of the movement are also quite distinct to America, where nudist culture comes with a whole range of accoutrements and trappings and rather well kitted-out sites. As well as a very particular attitude to ethnicity and race. As an outgrowth of European culture of the late 19th century and early 20th century, nudism as a social form was originally very white. When it moves to different locations, its cultures and communities change, and this is particularly challenging in mid-century America, where nudism’s whiteness was subject to great scrutiny because of greater consciousness about race relations, the civil rights movements, and so on. Ideas about black, brown and tanned as opposed to white-skinned bodies play out in particular and interesting ways. Studying nudism in Britain, we see these attitudes shifting over time. Britain in the early days of nudism in the 1920s and 1930s was almost completely white. This was in part a result of demography as there were fewer than 10,000 black people in Britain around that time. From 1948 there was a big shift in immigration, and ever more discussion among nudists about the meaning of tanned, black and brown skin. Connected to that debate is the idea I mentioned earlier about returning to paradise, or a Garden of Eden fantasy, where it was debated whether so-called ‘civilised’, urbanised white people could learn from so-called natives, ‘primitive savages’ and other terminology that we would absolutely not use now. British nudists considered some non-industrialised and small-scale societies to have a closer relationship to nature. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There was a pronounced health aspect to much of this language. Non-industrialised nations were perceived to be less troubled by digestion problems, constipation, pain in childbirth – and all sorts of claims are made for a very homogenised ‘noble savage’ type fantasy. There are figures in the British nudist movement of the early 20th century who were former colonial administrators, or were employed outside Europe on military services postings. They had lived elsewhere in the world and seen first hand other cultures living with different relationships to their bodies, having different relationships to clothes. Returning to Britain, many of them wanted to encourage others to learn from this experience, arguing that the British have this very stuffy, shameful culture around the body, that we are very overdressed, overly formalised. So often, however, these attitudes were couched in ignorance. Even when they were admiring, they were quite patronising. Nonetheless, the idea that there is a kind of non-civilised world that the civilised world can learn from is a key tenet in early 20th-century nudism. I don’t have a definitive answer, but I think in the Metaverse , the Silicon Valley driven social media world, public nudity will have no place. The likes of Facebook or Meta won’t be able to handle nudity because it’s too nuanced. It’s hard to manage. These books show just how hard! Well, you can’t sell a book on Amazon that has full nudity on the cover, even if it’s about the nude! We had to find a creative solution. The other thing is that nude cultures are always bordering pornographic cultures, even if they don’t have that as their intention. The ability for nude representation to be co-opted as a form of sexual stimulation is always there, a constant threat. Once borders were broken down in the late 1960s and once visual culture became more accepting of the highly sexualised body, when pornography became more palatable, or at least more public, things really started to break down with many of the traditional boundaries we inherited historically. This co-opting is of course ever greater now, because the places where pornographic material can be consumed have expanded massively. As a result, I think they still remain a threat for people who want to gather nude together, and not to be objectified and sexualised. “Naked yoga via Zoom was booming during lockdown!” Naturists themselves see an opportunity in building their community in online spaces. But a lot of the real practice still happens in the flesh. It’s still about gathering together. During lockdown, the naturists who I’ve been in touch with and who’ve given me access to their collections of archival material, couldn’t congregate in this country. We had very strict quarantine rules. You couldn’t gather for long periods of time in 2020 and 2021, and with social distancing, restrictions to travel and the temporary closure of nudist clubs, it was very difficult. But naturists have expanded their presence online and they now gather in Zoom meetings. Naked yoga via Zoom was booming during lockdown! I’m not convinced that it’s completely satisfying. I think the real life practice of people of all shapes and sizes meeting together in the flesh without clothes is fundamental to the movement. It’s hard to see that being replicated in a very mediated way, at a distance."