Years ago, I was on the periphery of a circle of friends whose main group activity was skinny-dipping at Hippie Hollow. At the time, the king of these naked nerds was my best friend's boyfriend. Wanting me to feel welcome and included, King and his roommate invited me to join them for naked sunbathing many times.
"Thanks, but no. Not my kind of thing."
"You don't have to be naked. You can wear a swimsuit."
I never quite knew how to explain that modesty wasn't the issue. Boundaries were. I could cover my own flesh, but my friends would still be exposed.
Around about the same time, another very close friend met the man who would become her husband at another skinny-dipping event (evidently, none of my fiends of that era were capable of keeping their clothes on for very long). They are still married and one of my favorite couples.
For myself, though, I never understood how they managed to generate any sexual tension given that they were naked when they met. Where's the mystery? The discovery? Like getting an unwrapped gift. Like reading the last page of a novel first.
Fast forward 20-odd years and a significant portion of my dating life is spent having sex in semi-public places. I spend more time than the average gal naked in public, among strangers. Still, I have this prohibition against non-sexual nudity. I like that taking my clothes off with another is a sexual signifier. I like the fact that disrobing is something I do with just a few (yeah, I'll wait while you finish laughing).
My reluctance to bare myself for non-lovers has nothing to do with being a prude. Paradoxically, it's because I'm such a pervert that I want to preserve the sexual significance of nudity. I never want the act of taking my clothes off to become pedestrian; I never want to lose the sense of exposure, of excitement, of - dare I say it? - intimacy to be stripped from the act of stripping.
Is it so very odd that I choose not to have the intimacy of nudity with non-sexual friends?
One outcome of having to undress in P. E. class is that everyone in the school seemed to know that I wore boxer shorts. This was 1974; no one else under the age of 40 wore boxer shorts. All other guys wore jockey shorts.
ReplyDeleteOne day the other kids in the neighborhood invited me to go down to Pajarito Springs where a small local creek joined the Rio Grande and formed a natural swimming hole complete with waterfall. Jay and Jan and Tina and Terri were inviting me along. It would involve swimming in our underwear. I didn't want to be pointed to and hear comments made about my underwear fashion sense. On the other hand I thought I would like to see Tina and Terri in wet underwear.
I had a couple pairs of jockey shorts given to me by some clueless relative as a Christmas or birthday present so I went in to change first. Then we headed down the trail, down the steep side of the canyon and then across the more leisurely rolling plains area where the creek made a switchback hook, and finally down to the pool. I was shy about taking off my street clothes but I managed.
Being badly nearsighted I had to choose between wearing my glasses and being somewhat curtailed in what I could do in the water or not wearing them and not being able to see things in focus. I figured it would be pretty obvious what I was wanting to look at if I left my glasses on so I decided to take them off. We splashed around and took turns standing directly under the waterfall, and we had some water fights.
Jay teased Tina some when she was adjusting her bra strap, pretending to think she was taking it off, but it was actually a pretty G rated day, although it was exciting just because of the idea of the kind of things that might happen, even though they didn't.