‘I’m not being the first one out there,’ my friend Tori declares as she scurries over to the peephole to scout the corridor for naked bodies. She squashes her nose against the door and glues her eye to the small bead of glass. ‘Oh my God,’ she says, spinning her head around to beam at me, her face alive with tipsy excitement – ‘a willy!’
And why, I hear you ask, was Tori so excited about seeing a willy?
Rewind the scene an hour, and we are standing in the lobby of a famous water park in the north of England, our senses assaulted by the smell of chlorine and glaring aquarium-themed wallpaper. I look around the room, trying to imagine the scene when ‘clothing optional’ commences in less than an hour. Oh God. Less than an hour. A feeling of dread washes over me and I forget how to breathe.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Tori tries to reassure me in a voice two octaves above her usual pitch, her blonde hair framing an increasingly reddening face.
I reach for Tori’s hand as we walk up to the welcome desk. ‘We’re here for the naturist weekend,’ I manage to squeak, convinced that the young, fully clothed reception workers are inwardly laughing at us. I feel an overwhelming urge to tell them all that we aren’t actual naturists, but I had made Tori promise that we wouldn’t do that on the drive up. ‘No disclaimers,’ we agreed. That would be cowardly.
According to the British Naturist (BN) website, there are as many as 4 million naturists in the UK, 10,000 of whom are signed up as members of the national organisation. We will be spending the weekend with 420 of their most active members, here to enjoy an annual holiday of ‘fun, in a non-judgemental environment’.
After check-in, we head straight for the bar, a novelty Caribbean-themed room with a warm stone floor, wicker furniture and fake palm trees. The air is sticky, and there is a buzz of anticipation in the air as people mingle from group to group, hugging and shaking hands. We order a bottle of wine to numb the awkwardness of our impending disrobing session and take it up to our room.
Fifteen minutes and four glasses of wine later, we both set to work lowering expectations before the big exposé, describing the intricate details of our anatomy to each other in preparation for what is about to be unveiled, like schoolkids sheepishly saying, ‘It’s not very good,’ before revealing their art projects to each other. We take it in turns to remove one layer at a time, our nautical-themed hotel room – complete with bunk beds and SpongeBob SquarePants welcome packs – providing a surreal backdrop to our platonic striptease.
Once naked, we begin to fire panicked questions at each other – what do we do with our phones? Do we wear shoes? What if I have to bend down to pick something up?
Cue the peephole willy scene.
By 6.03 p.m, we are walking down the corridor, completely naked but for our towels around our necks, our social norms shattered and our dignity left somewhere in the discarded pile of clothes under our bunk beds. According to our research, the first rule of naturism is to always carry a towel, for hygiene reasons in case you want to sit down. We also discover, to our delight, that they make convenient boob covers for nervous first-timers.
We walk past the cartoon fish wallpaper lining the corridor, trying to avoid looking at each other to maintain our poise. At the end of the hallway, we call the lift, which takes approximately four months to arrive, and bundle into it next to a couple who look to be in their sixties. He wears nothing but a pair of Crocs, carrying his first-rule-of-naturism towel and a newspaper in his weathered hand. She wears a pearl necklace, her hair in a neat bun behind her head. They grin at us.
‘Hi.’ I raise my voice to be heard over the blaring Captain Pugwash lift music.
‘Hello!’ The lady’s smile widens. ‘Lovely day, isn’t it? I can’t remember the last time we had such a sunny November.’
The lift takes us down to the water park, where we make straight for the water and start to feel a little more comfortable, presumably because swimming is an environment we naturally associate with a certain level of nudity. I look around me and take in the scene. There really are all shapes and sizes here: old, young, fat, thin, tall, short, willies that are all shrunk and wrinkled, barely visible, even, willies that stretch down to mid-thigh and the odd pair of boobs that make it down just as far. The scene is completely at odds with what we are fed by the media as being normal, and I feel instantly more confident in my own body. I am humbled by a slender man who walks past us with a nude-coloured colostomy bag hanging from his stomach, happily displaying what I assume can be a confidence-denting affliction and translating it into something that is completely acceptable and normal.
After a few minutes of swimming (hiding), we emerge from the pool and wander past the fully clothed lifeguards to queue for the flumes, employing the trusty British technique of pretending everything is totally normal as we jabber away about the last season of The Great British Bake Off. Once at the front of the queue, we realise with horror that we have to sit in our rings and wait for the green light, policed by a uniformed teen lifeguard who has to step in and stop our floats with his foot at the top of the slide. I wave to him as I sit naked and exposed in my rubber ring, trying to break the awkwardness. He looks away in embarrassment, which fills me with an unexpected sense of power.
An hour later we are back in our room preparing to head down for dinner, which is, horrifyingly, in buffet form. We straighten our hair, apply our make-up and leave the room with a niggling feeling that we’ve forgotten something. After pointing at the beef to the clothed meat-carver, who painstakingly avoids our eye contact, we sit down at the table with our full plates, the surrounding room full of willies, exposed vulvas and wrinkly bums now positioned perfectly at eye level. I don’t make much of a dent in my parsnips.
We walk back up the stairs to the disco in the bar, where a pub singer is wooing the crowd with jukebox hits as the surrounding masses goad him to strip. Hundreds of naked bodies groove on the dance floor, a pulsating celebration of flesh. A pair of flip-flops and a couple of bum bags are the only pieces of clothing in sight.
Lost for words, we snake our way across the dance floor and through the surrounding beer-clutching crowds, and make for the bar.
After a few more minutes of staring, Tori finally breaks the silence. ‘Why?’ She shakes her head in disbelief, eyes wide. ‘Why do they want to be naked all of the time?’ I reflect on this – perhaps the burden of proof should be on the other side, because being naked is natural, isn’t it? We are born naked, after all, and we die naked. And I get why we would wear clothes to protect us from the elements, but why do people wear clothes inside? Is it just societal convention?
Before I can launch the debate out loud, the commercial manager of BN, Andrew Welch, approaches us. Despite wearing nothing but an official BN lanyard, Andrew has a white-collar look about him, with a thick head of shiny chestnut hair, a round, cheerful face and rimless glasses.
Andrew is the first recipient of Tori’s question.
‘Because it makes me feel free, relaxed and happy,’ he says. ‘I have even been on This Morning and Daybreak to promote the cause.’ He looks across at Rob, who has also joined the conversation.
Rob is a thirty-four-year-old accountant. He puts me in mind of a naked Chris Evans. ‘It is the ultimate in inner confidence,’ he responds when Tori asks him the same question, ‘a middle finger up to conventional society. It completely disassociates me from my day job, as if I am removing my mask and really being myself for the weekend.’
I see my opportunity to ask the question that’s been plaguing me all day. ‘How do you disassociate seeing a naked woman on a naturist weekend from seeing a naked woman in a sexual context?’ We all know what I’m asking here, don’t we? And no, we haven’t seen any yet.
‘It’s not about disassociating,’ he says. ‘I never associate it in the first place. Just like I don’t associate a woman in clothes with sex. Genitals aren’t about sex in a place like this. The size of the genitals here is the same as the size of an arm or a leg.’
‘Have you ever had an involuntary erection at an event?’ I brave. We got there in the end.
‘No, never,’ he says, poker-faced.
Tori heads to the bar for another round, as I confide in Rob. ‘I feel painfully self-conscious here,’ I tell him.
‘I’m not surprised,’ he says, ‘because all the time we are being told that there is something wrong with the human body, usually by companies that make money out of selling us something to fix the problem.’ He opens his hands, gesturing at my frame and causing me to instinctively recoil, my body almost folding in on itself. ‘This is especially true for women,’ he says. ‘You are pushed everything: liposuction, Botox, anti-wrinkle cream. The media shows you pictures of flawless women and says “you can look like this too”, even though these images have been airbrushed and manipulated.’
He takes a sip of his drink. ‘So women are shown unrealistic objectives that they can never obtain, to keep them spending money on beauty products, clothes and even cosmetic surgery, in more extreme cases. A lot of people have fallen for it and now people will look at you if you don’t comply and think you don’t care, or that you are slovenly. This is why so many people are so self-conscious of their naked body because they compare themselves with unrealistic ideals.’ He pauses to take another sip of his drink.
‘There are all shapes and sizes here,’ he says, gesturing to the crowd around us with an enlightened smile. ‘These people have decided to be comfortable with the way they look and accept it. If other people don’t like it, fine, it’s not really any of their business.’
Tori and I had not escaped the issue of body-consciousness in our preparation for this weekend, spending hours poring over the quarterly BN magazines we had signed up to receive, researching an important question – to wax, or not to wax?
‘She has nothing,’ ‘She is very hairy,’ ‘He has nothing,’ ‘She has trimmed.’ The consensus was that most of them had gone the whole hog and had no hair at all, which proved an accurate assessment when we arrived. This surprised me, as I had associated naturists with wanting to be natural – ‘how God intended’, as it were – but this doesn’t seem to be the case here at all.
I had decided to go for a halfway house and got a landing-strip style Brazilian wax, but regretted this when I realised that I was the only one here with any kind of ‘style’. I am reminded of my experience in Essex, as the thread of feeling embarrassed that people might notice I have put effort into my appearance rears its strange head again. Although I doubt anyone else thinks it, with nothing else to label my identity I can’t help but worry that I look like a bit of a tart. Thank God I don’t still have my vajazzle.
I pose the question of pubic hair decision-making to Rob.
‘Naturism has nothing to do with personal grooming choices,’ he says, looking confused and frustrated by my question. ‘It’s just like deciding whether or not to have a beard.’
Fair.
I decide to change the subject. ‘Do you tell your friends where you’re going when you come to an event like this?’
‘No,’ he looks down at his hands. ‘Because even though they’re happy to get naked in the nightclub to the Baywatch theme tune, or to do a “naked quad run”, they would be mortified by the idea of going to a naturist beach.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s funny, really.’
‘Why do you think they feel that way?’
‘A lot of the prejudice naturists go through today is the same stuff homosexuals had to go through in the seventies. What they were doing was seen as sinful, or even criminal, but now we have legalised gay marriage, so we are progressing.’
He continues, ‘People still see the body as something wrong or obscene. There are arbitrary rules about what is and isn’t acceptable. Men are allowed to walk around in public with their shirts off, but women aren’t. But at the same time, the Sun newspaper runs its Page Three pictures of women with their breasts exposed, sexualising them. [It’s important to note here that this feature has since been scrapped. Thank God.] It’s just depressing and should have been banned years ago. This sort of thing permeates into the national consciousness.’
I am impressed by Rob and think he is an excellent advocate for the cause. Why are we so ashamed of our naked bodies? Perhaps a hangover from the Christian concept of sin. Can it really be that, thousands of years on and post the Nietzschean death of God, we are still carrying this societally ingrained shame around with us?
He interrupts my train of thought, cradling his pint with one finger outstretched. ‘You see, naturists take it one step further and say that there is nothing rude about genitals. There is nothing obscene about them – fifty per cent have male genitals, and fifty per cent have female genitals – it shouldn’t be shocking. Then you go to other European countries, and they are completely nonchalant about nudity, which makes it even more arbitrary.’
‘Why do you think nudity is more acceptable in places like France and Germany?’
‘We are more conservative as a culture. We are still titillated by the naked body. It is a very British thing – just think about the Carry On films – it is all part of our cultural identity. Nudity is seen as naughty.’
‘Oooh, Matron,’ I say in my best Kenneth Williams. Rob looks blankly back at me, and we stand for a few minutes in awkward silence.
‘What do your parents think about the whole thing?’ I change the subject again.
‘My parents don’t know I am a naturist; they don’t know I’m here,’ he says, revealing a glimmer of self-consciousness for the first time. ‘My mother had a very traditional upbringing, and she would feel strange about it, so it’s better she doesn’t know.’
I deflate. For somebody so evangelical about the naturist plight and so against societal prejudice, it seems a little hypocritical that he has avoided confronting these prejudices in his own parents. But maybe I should give him a break.
Tori re-enters the conversation, and I take the opportunity to try and convince myself that standing here naked is completely normal and that there is nothing in any way sordid about it, but I can’t help but worry that the people around me are looking at me in a weird way. Ogling. Perving. Am I just imagining it?
After one more drink, Tori and I congratulate each other on making it this far and allow ourselves to say our good nights and escape for the evening. It has been a long day, and we are very excited by the prospect of wearing pyjamas.
The next morning, I drag myself out of bed early for a ‘bareobics’ session in the bar. A plump lady with blonde shoulder-length hair, wearing nothing but a pair of pink flip-flops, makes her way to the front of the group and introduces herself as the leader. In a group of around twenty, I am the youngest participant by at least thirty years. While I am adjusting my ponytail, the group are asked to take a step back, leaving me exposed in the front row, where I am promptly papped by a man taking photos for the BN website. FML.
‘I use the exercises we will do today as a warm-up for children at the start of the school day,’ Mrs Pink Flip-flops tells us, as Aqua’s ‘Cartoon Heroes’ kicks in. I have a momentary out-of-body experience as I ponder the absurdity of my current situation.
Aside from having to hold my boobs for the star jumps, the routine is gentle, with lots of grapevining and arm waving. After every song, we have to stop and ‘catch our breath’, perhaps unsurprising given that the majority of attendees here are retired couples. Outside of this, the demographic is broad: there are gay people, straight people, transgender people, a few younger people who are here with YBN (Young British Naturists) and many families with young children. The only age group who seem to be missing completely are those between twelve and twenty-five, presumably when we feel the most body-conscious as we battle with adolescence.
After a quick breakfast, Tori joins me for the next event of the day.
Naked yoga.
Running a little late, we walk into our yoga studio (the bar, again), now lined with crowds of people sitting around the edge of the room, reading their morning papers, drinking coffee and preparing for the spectacle about to unfold. The class has already started, so the only spaces left are on the outside edge, mortifyingly close to the audience.
As first-timers, Andrew had warned us the previous evening that we might want to wear pants for the yoga. We took his advice and brought them down with us, before arrogantly leaving them on the back of a chair like abandoned bow ties at a wedding reception.
We copy the rest of the group and lie on our backs on top of our mats, making the numbers up to around thirty. Once again, we are the youngest in the group by a significant margin.
The teacher is a wrinkly older gentleman with neatly trimmed white (head) hair and a moustache. He looks healthy and has an energetic glow.
‘OK then,’ he says. ‘Let’s start with some gentle stretching.’
He takes us through a series of stretches: touching our toes, which no one can do, obviously; reaching up tall on our tiptoes, which makes a few of the group topple over; and twisting our spines to look behind us, which fills the room with hideous clicking sounds. Unaffected by the inflexibilities of the group, the teacher weaves his way in and out of the class smilingly, straightening a back here and adjusting an arm position there.
‘Now everyone get down on your hands and knees, push your arms out in front of you and raise your bum in the air.’
Oh no. Downward-facing dog.
Tori and I catch each other’s eye and collapse to the floor in a fit of giggles. Luckily no one seems to mind.
The next position is a body fold. I manage to complete it and grab my ankles from behind, now so exposed, I worry onlookers may actually be able to see inside my body.
‘Oh lovely,’ I hear the teacher say. ‘Now everyone stop, turn around and look at this lady.’ The whole class goes silent, and it takes a second for me to realise that the entire room is staring at me.
‘No, no, no, please don’t!’ I squeal, turning an unnatural shade of purple and recoiling back into a standing position so dramatically my boobs do a dance of their own. ‘I’m not that good, you don’t all have to look.’
Tori has collapsed on her front again, her whole body shaking. I’m glad someone finds it funny.
The final move is a shoulder-stand and ‘plough’ pose, which involves pulling your legs apart and pushing them over your head to touch the floor behind you. There now isn’t a single part of my body that hasn’t been exposed to the audience in its entirety. I curse myself for being too proud to wear the pants.
After yoga, we allow ourselves a short break, returning at 3 p.m. for a belly-dancing class. Again, true to form we are a little late on parade, which means all of the coin belts have now been snaffled. Tori is devastated and decides to use her first-rule-of-naturism towel instead. Not wanting to be the only completely naked one, I join her, but my towel is bigger than hers, so it just looks like I’m wearing a comically oversized nappy.
The teacher is a large lady with short bleached-blonde hair and rosy-red cheeks. She insists on showing us the entire three-minute dance routine on her own before she will teach us anything. So we all stand staring for an uncomfortably long time as she shakes her hips and thrusts to Middle Eastern music in a coin belt that doesn’t cover anything significant. When the show is over, she teaches us some simple moves: hip slides, figure eights, thrusts, lifts, drops and shimmies, shaking our wobbly bits to the omnipresent audience around the edge of the bar. Some of the women are mainly made up of wobbly bits, so the scene is reminiscent of a tray of wobbling pink blancmanges.
When we are finally released from belly-dancing class, we decide to warm ourselves up in the outdoor hot tub, where we promptly discover that most people here have lied to their friends and families about where they are this weekend.
‘We use code names here,’ one man tells me, his arm around his wife’s waist, fiddling with the strap of her waterproof bum bag, or at least I hope that is what he is doing. ‘We like to keep our lives separate. No one here knows who we are in the real world, and vice versa. I wouldn’t want any of my naturist friends to add me on LinkedIn. Imagine that!’ Oh dear, I had already added Andrew.
One of the only people completely open about his hobby is Clive, an avuncular sixty-two-year-old who was inadvertently outed as a naturist on national TV.
‘I remember signing a release form,’ he chuckles, ‘but I thought I was too far away for anyone to recognise me. Didn’t realise they had zoomed in on me, did I?’
After the programme was aired, Clive received call after call from his friends and family. ‘We had no idea!’ they told him. Some even said they were envious.
‘It was one of the best things that ever happened to me,’ Clive says. ‘I wouldn’t have had the guts to tell them myself, and now everything is out in the open.’
I instantly like Clive. He puts me in mind of a naked Father Christmas. In a non-creepy way.
‘I have always considered myself a naturist,’ he continues in a deep voice with a soft Yorkshire accent. ‘I enjoy being naked and have never had a problem with it. I would often sneak off to the naturist beach without my wife knowing. We just never really talked about it.’
His voice quietens and he starts to wring his hands. ‘Then when I lost my wife ten years ago – it was a hard time – I thought, I can either give up now, or I can go out there and get my own life. So, I thought, why not? I’m going to do it!’
‘What do you like about it?’ I ask him.
‘Well, my first experience was at Cap d’Agde in France, a beach town that is pretty much the naked capital of the world. You can be naked all of the time there. It’s a lovely sense of freedom. Getting out of bed in the morning and going straight outside into the sunshine. The warm sun on your body.’ His eyes light up, and he nestles deeper into the hot tub, like a dog snuggling into a warm blanket. ‘It’s exhilarating.’
‘Since I got involved, I have made a huge circle of friends. By their very nature, naturists are less inhibited and more game for a laugh.’
‘They definitely seem less bothered about self-image.’ I nod in agreement.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and I’m not bothered about being a bit…’ – he looks down at his belly, searching for the right word – ‘portly. People don’t care, they just look at my face and try to get to know the person behind the body.’
‘If naturism was banned tomorrow, would you continue to socialise with the community?’ I ask him.
‘There would be a hell of a stink kicked up if—’
‘Hypothetically speaking,’ I interrupt as Clive puffs himself up.
‘Of course, naturism creates a particular type of person. I was a lot more closed-minded when I was a textile.’
I raise my left eyebrow, and Clive takes his cue: ‘Oh, textile is the word we use for people who aren’t naturists.’
So now I am a private (non-circus), a mundane (non-goth) and a textile (non-naturist). Oh, and a Muggle, sadly.
He continues, ‘Well, back then I was a bit homophobic, I think because of the way I was brought up. But coming here I meet all types of people: gays, transgenders, business people, artists. You learn to take people as they come. All that matters is if they are nice or not.’
I ask him a question I had been wrestling with for a while. ‘Are you ever worried about the kids here, Clive?’
‘No, not at all.’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s so safe because everyone is looking out for them. Each club has a child-protection officer. I am one at my club and have done a course on how to identify abuse, but it’s rare in a naturist situation, because it’s far more visible, of course.’ When I work out what he means, I wish I hadn’t.
The evening activity of the day is body-painting, which we throw ourselves into, overjoyed by the prospect of covering ourselves up in some way. I paint Tori like a mermaid, complete with a shell bra and a scaly tail. It is strange how comfortable we are painting each other’s boobs, never once thinking about anything remotely sexual.
During the body-painting, a chap walks over and kindly hands us the two pairs of pants we had left behind after yoga this morning, as if returning a child’s toy that had fallen from a pram.
After the body-painting Tori takes herself off to bed to read a chapter of her book, and I find myself wishing I was going with her. Forcing myself to stay, I order a pint of Guinness and watch the room around me transform back into the disco from the previous evening. The lights start flashing and the band open with ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, which is enough to tempt me to cast off my remaining inhibitions and venture onto the dance floor.
On my way back to my seat at the bar I have an awkward cheek-to-cheek moment with a woman as I try to squeeze past her.
‘I accidentally just touched someone’s bum with my bum,’ I confess to Andrew when I get back to my seat.
‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘Sometimes my willy pops over someone’s chair and hits them in the back when I am squeezing past. It’s inevitable.’
The band finish playing at midnight, when I somehow get cajoled into singing the opening karaoke number with Andrew. We burst out a tuneless rendition of ‘Come What May’ from Moulin Rouge, after which my co-star announces to the room that this is my first time as a naturist and hands me the microphone. I have no idea what to say, so I start to list off everything I’ve done naked this weekend. ‘Yoga, body-painting, belly dancing and… errr… karaoke.’ For some reason, this gets a roaring applause.
After another couple of hours of dancing with inflatable guitars, and an enthusiastic butchering of ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’ from Clive and me, I clamber happily into my bunk bed at 2 a.m., wondering if the evening would have been any more or less fun if we had all been wearing clothes.
It had been a hilarious but incredibly challenging weekend. Breaking through the social barrier of nudity was extremely difficult at first, although, as with most things, the human mind has a wonderful way of coping and both Tori and I were surprised how quickly we became desensitised to it all.
I was also surprised how separate nudity and sex could be. Nothing about the weekend felt remotely sexual to me. Having said this, I did feel that, while most people were there for the atmosphere and the sensation of nudity, there were probably a few people around with seedier intentions. ‘You get the odd weirdo,’ Andrew had told me on the first evening, and I think that’s probably fair.
As with most of the other communities I have spent time with, although the touchpaper for joining is a shared interest, the social bind of the group is what keeps most people coming back. ‘Naturism turned my life around,’ Clive told me during our interview, happy to have found that sense of belonging and identity we all crave.
So, would we do it all again? Having gone from being nervous about changing in front of other women in the gym, I can safely say that I would now happily go to a naturist beach or a naturist spa resort without too much cajoling. I am a convert, in that sense, because I see the value in being naked in these environments. However, I do think that being naked has its place, and it just didn’t feel like that place is at a theme park, in a restaurant or dancing to ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ in the small hours, using a deflated plastic guitar to maintain my modesty. Being naked in this environment just feels like a bit of a novelty.
On the plus side, not wearing clothes is certainly a leveller. Clothes are an extension of your personality, and expression of your social status. So by removing them, you strip away these labels, avoiding any prejudice or preconceptions. You have no idea what anybody does for a living, where they’re from or how they orientate themselves in society, which does allow for more open-minded relationship building.
Tori and I agreed that we both gained a lot from the weekend: self-confidence, a better relationship with the body we were born in, and a deeper comfort in our own skin. Having been raised in a generation where people pay thousands of pounds to achieve the looks that are dictated by the various fashion, beauty and fitness industries, which make money out of sowing seeds of dissatisfaction with our outward appearances, we realised within the first hour of being there that the human body comes in ALL shapes and sizes. Nothing is right or wrong, and nothing about the human body is obscene. We all have the same bits, so why the big secret?
The most common reply from the people I had told that I was coming to this weekend was: ‘I don’t have the body to do something like that.’ When, really, that couldn’t have been more irrelevant. ‘You have a body,’ Clive rightfully retorts, ‘that’s all you need!’