Whither Nakedness?

We are here to be men and to be naked and to DANCE!” exclaimed “Nexus,” host of last night's Romp Naked, introducing an overture of tribal drumming and initiating the rhythmic pulsings of 70 odd naked men ranging in ages from their twenties to fifties. This was probably my fifth visit to these semi-annual dances, held in the art studios of Jeff Hengst underneath the Eastlake stretch of Interstate 5 in Seattle.

At previous events, I careened flirtatiously through the naked bodies, schmoozing and carousing the night away. But this time was different. Last night I came to the dance with a date, what organizers would call a Romp Virgin. Like most adults, Buck was no stranger to naked fun, but a nudist dance, one prohibiting clothing as thoroughly as it prohibited sex, was new for him.

But men will be men. At one point during the dance I couldn't help admire a certain playfulness going on in one corner of the dance floor. Two dancers were getting a rise out of a third gentleman, and my own body began to respond in kind, my strategic dance movements encouraging the onset of tumescence.

“You shouldn't be getting hard here,” Buck chided me. “People already have a lot of body shame. How are they supposed to feel good about themselves when you make yourself so much bigger than they?”

It wasn't our first conversation on the subject. In the run-up to the dance we had discussed the propriety of taking ED drugs like Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis to help encourage any physical reactions at the dance in the hopes of looking a little more, well, manly.

It got me thinking. Was Buck right? Was I celebrating the body or only satisfying a visceral itch? The more I thought about it, the more questions I discovered:

• Faerie host Nexus had alluded to letting go of body shame in his opening speech. But does a setting where everyone is naked actually encourage body acceptance? Or does it do the opposite by creating a setting where everyone can compare the parts they’re most insecure about?

• Is nudism trying to teach us to be less concerned about our personal appearances by shedding the clothes in which we invest so much time, energy, and money? If so, are drugs like Viagra an inappropriate way to “dress up”? Where does this lesson stop? Should I stop shaving or combing my hair?

• Why do so many American nudist organizations want to strip nudity of any erotic overtones (so to speak)? Why is nudity okay and sex bad?

• Does ignoring the erotic aspects of the nude body encourage acceptance of a clothes-free lifestyle? Or does it just take naked people out of one closet (literally the clothes closet) and put them into another (a metaphorical sex closet)?

• Not all nakedness is erotic and not all eroticism is about nakedness. (Indeed it’s generally accepted that a little covering is far more titillating.) But where do you draw the line between nudism and eroticism? Can such a line be drawn?

• The law certainly makes distinctions between nude and lewd. But what about between erotic and lewd? Is the distinction the same as that between thought and action?

Romp Naked does not address these questions. If anything, it revels in ambiguity. As the Web site states, the event “is not a sex party and definitely a sexy party.”

And perhaps that’s the point. Just as Romp proclaims itself “an event that ebbs and flows,” maybe the swirling interactions among body acceptance, shedding clothes, erotic perceptions, and sexual expressions are a series of moving targets as complex and idiosyncratic as the individuals who experience them.

And what better metaphor for that interplay than a dance?