Nudism: A Healthier Lifestyle or a Bunch of Hype?

By Nicole McClelland, AlterNet. Posted January 25, 2008.

Several days into our time in Australia, I convinced my intended that we should work at a nudist resort.

We had eight weeks and little money to spend on our trip, and so decided to join an organization called WWOOF, or Willing Workers on Organic Farms, whose $50 membership came with a book of names and phone numbers of Australians who would trade us food and lodging for about four hours of work a day. The day we got the book, I read it in our hostel as I would an enthralling novel, turning the pages until well after my eyes grew tired, fascinated by each subsequent sentence. There aren't really any rules for who can and cannot run a listing in WWOOF; anyone with 45 bucks can get his contact information and a description of what he's looking for printed. The upshot is that there are opportunities far beyond organic farming for a WWOOFer. We could do anything. We could shear sheep, or build tables, or baby-sit someone's ailing mother, or groom alpacas, whatever those were, or keep a lonely couple company. I wasn't far in when I encountered the first entry by nudists, and, excited for a salacious break in otherwise tame reports of cow-milking and hay-making, I read their requests and warnings aloud to Dan.

"This one says, 'Nudists only, please,'" I told him, and he laughed. Half an hour later, I interrupted his journal-writing again. "Look at this: 'Please be advised that we are naturists.'" It hadn't taken me long to figure out that "naturist" was a euphemism for "naked all the time." But though Dan smiled, or shook his head -- or ignored me, after awhile -- I was picturing us running nude through a vast vegetable garden, stopping here and there to scoop up weeds while exotic birds called overhead. I imagined wind caressing my evenly tanned skin and warm afternoon sun on my buns, even as we drove to Peter's (non-nude) Organic Farm, where we had made contact and agreed to work.

Once I decide that something is a good idea -- going to Australia, baking a chocolate cake, trying nudism -- I work blindly, diligently, toward setting it into motion. As I continued flipping through the 1,500 entries in the WWOOF book in search of our next destination after we finished our daily duties to Peter's chickens and banana trees, I marked the nudist positions along with those that offered interesting activities like composting and making cheese. And I kept pestering Dan.

"What if we were naked right now?" I asked him while lobbing a machete at a banana branch our first morning in the sweltering field. He said something pragmatic, like, "We'd be getting badly burned," or, "We'd have a hell of a time getting this banana sap off later."

Both of our fathers had consistently walked around naked or in their underpants in our youths, but our mothers and culture had nevertheless managed to instill conventional embarrassment for our nude bodies in us as children. I'd had my first taste of the thrill of bucking it on European beaches years prior, but Dan didn't believe my assertion that casually baring his genitals to a crowd would be empowering. He wasn't annoyed, as I was, at the shock our hosts exhibited when I got ready to go swimming in the creek by stripping down to a bikini. (I realized a minute too late that the four other girls joining us, their grandchildren, swam in long shorts and tee shirts.) But Peter and his wife were teetotalers, Baptists and septuagenarians, and after three days in which we hadn't been able to curse, get wasted, or rag on Jesus, I knew the time was right. I announced to Dan my intention to call Taylorwood, a 30-acre nudist resort in the Whitsundays, a gorgeous piece of the continent's east coast that we had to drive through on our way south anyway. Dan simply shrugged and said, "Fine."

We arrived at the low, long sign with yellow wooden letters announcing the resort five hours after leaving Peter's early one morning. We turned off the empty, jungle-lined highway and pulled into the drive, stopping at a short, swinging fence that was held fast by a padlock and a thick metal chain. Dan got out of our tiny, imported rental and inspected the lock before doing something I couldn't see and throwing open the gate. "It's a trick chain," he said, getting back in the passenger seat and handing me an envelope with our names on it. "There's a break in one of the links." After he replaced the chain, we drove on along the bumpy dirt path, looking at the surrounding palm trees and fields. The envelope contained, in addition to plenty of spelling and grammatical errors, the information that the first little green caravan -- caravan is Australian for trailer -- on our right was our new home. There were also instructions to throw off the shackles of the clothed world immediately.

"We are a NUDIST resort, NOT a clothes optional resort, and this applies to our staff and WOOFERS as well. (This naturally will depend on the type of work, the weather and naturally, health, then we wear clothes.) Can you imagine wipper snipping in the buff? OUCH!" Wipper snipping is Australian for weed whacking, and Dan and I suspected this had been typed without a hint of irony. We had also received a page of frequently asked questions reiterating that it was best to assume "the nudist uniform (nude)" as soon as possible, pointing out that we needed to carry a "personal towel" at all times so that our bare bottoms didn't make contact with couches and chairs in common spaces (which, though we had never considered it before, greatly relieved us), and assuring us that there was no reason to be embarrassed by our nudity because every nudist has had to take "that first step of being nude amongst strangers," which I guessed implied that they were a sympathetic people.

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Nicole McClelland is an editor at Mother Jones and the founding editor of The Extrovert.

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