Heh. This reminds me of a recent experience I like to introduce as follows:
“So, I’m in this stranger’s house, completely naked except for socks, covered in Vaseline, and trudging up and down the stairs . . .”
See, I was having my preggo belly cast in plaster, and it was done at the artist’s house. Met her, chatted for a minute, then got sent to strip and grease up so the cast would come off. Socks because it was a cold day, climbing the stairs a few times to get my blood pumping so I didn’t pass out from standing still during the process. Even I, with very little modesty or care for convention, thought, “This, this is just outside normal social interaction.” But after about ten minutes I adjusted.
All our flaws. Yes. Moles, birthmarks, surgical scars, odd proportions. Fatty, lumpy, bumpy. Don’t forget the men, no asses, no hair, or gorilla hairy. Giant balls, no balls. Real people are rarely anything close to the common media portrayal. No wonder people have body issues.
The super thin tend to look sickly nude to me. Skeletal is right.
From my one visit I would say that the Fire Island beach gets more of the beautiful people, and Sandy Hook is for regular folks.
Watching people play volleyball. Really play. They’re not just throwing the ball to see what jiggles. The first summer I went topless. The next summer there was a sweltering day, and my shorts were wet and chafing. I actually felt a sort of paradigm shift in my head and realized that I was the one who looked ridiculous and was outside the rest of the group. After that I had no problems.
Walking a half mile away from all your clothes took some doing though. Just walk away. From all your stuff. If someone stole your things you wouldn’t have a stitch on your back. It’ll be fine.
My one and only nude beach experiences was on St. Martin in the Caribbean in 2000. We had a day layover for a flight back from our honeymoon and decided to go the beach on the French side. It was a lot more relaxing than I would have imagined although my wife did get sunburned on her butt.
What made it amusing was that within 6 months other people I knew wound up going there; one older couple we know and a friend from work. None of us are of the attractive set, just ordinary looking people. All people I would never have expected to have walked around naked on a beach.
Haven’t been for awhile but I did use to go to Elysium in Topanga Canyon before they lost their land. What the OP says here is true. Another way of putting it is that it’s just the average run of humanity, same as you would see clothed in a typical public place. No better or worse looking.
You often see these cartoons and jokes about nude beaches; the first timer expects it will be full of slender 18 year old (females, usually) – so many of them they have to jockey for position, but then he (for the protagonist usually is male in these jokes) arrives at the beach and finds it full of fat middle-aged and elderly people. No young women in sight. But the fact is it isn’t like either of those two extremes. Instead, it’s just your average cross section of humanity, except skewing a bit towards the over-30 crowd. When I went the first time I was 36 and I admit I couldn’t have imagined doing it when I was 26
Gawkers are definitely an issue. With one or two special exceptions, nude beaches are illegal in California so discretion is a sine qua non. This means that the customary nude beaches are virtually always secluded at the bottom of high cliffs; and more often than not, there will be gawkers up above looking down, some even with binoculars. We may want to be nude, but we don’t want to be stared at. You wouldn’t want to be stared at with your clothes on either, would you? It’s OK to look, but not to stare protractedly and mock people.
Oh, I don’t go swimming in the ocean up here–it’s COOOOOLLD!!! Sauvie Island and Rooster Rock are both on the Columbia River and are very nice for swimming. Lovely sand beaches and pleasantly chill water in summer. Bagby Hot Springs is clothing optional as well and Shower Creek is nearby if simmering in a hot tub gets too warm for you. Apparently all National Forests have no rules regarding nudity (according to some avid nude hikers I’ve run into–I can’t be arsed to go look for a cite at the moment) so if you really want to strip off and swim in that nice alpine lake, have at it!
I can’t wear polyester fabric at all and especially not near my girl bits so if I have to swim in clothes it’s generally shorts and a tank top for me. I usually pass entirely, though, and since I refuse to swim in chlorine/urine water it’s no hardship!
We have a bit of a problem with the gawkers up here as well, they’re annoying but avoidable. Age ranges the gamut from kids to the elderly, and attitudes range from totally casual to the gay guys who cruise (deliberate word choice; every year there are a few cop complaints having to do with guys having sex up in the bushes :rolleyes: ) around with what look like rubber bands around their packages (which are usually pierced and PA’d to within an inch of sanity!) to put them up on display. Sometimes the guys with the packaged packages go stand right in front of the gawkers (usually Hispanic guys in groups, drinking beer way up in the dry sand area–they never go near the water, just drink and ogle) until they get uncomfortable and leave.
It’s a funny thing about naked people–after a while you just don’t notice the imperfections as much. People are just people, and no matter how perfect someone might be right now it’s inevitable that time and gravity will work on them too. I think that women “of a certain size” look MUCH worse in bathing suits that produce more rolls and lumps than are actually there naturally, and a potbellied guy looks a lot worse in a banana hammock than butt naked. Most nude beach denizens are medium sized, medium aged, medium attractive–there are usually a lot fewer land whales on a nude beach than on a regular one from what I’ve seen. Naked pregnant women look great, though–every woman should go sunbathe nude at least once with her belly out!
I think Americans need to get the heck over their weirdness with nudity–who cares, really? We’re all naked under our clothes, very few of us has anything so bizarre under there that it warrants hiding from the world (or so fabulously special that it should be kept from the eyes of the common people for that matter) and think of all the stress and body hatred we’d avoid if women never felt they had to go bathing suit shopping–it’s a wonder there aren’t more suicides in changing booths, I swear!
We have a large piercing contingent too. PA’s not limited to the gay crowd here. One guy struts around with chains linking all of the piercings together from the bottom to the top. Quite a sight.
Do people bring amazing amounts of stuff to the beach on the west coast? Roleez are popular here and people bring chairs, tables, tents, windscreens, umbrellas, flags, inflatable mattresses. Groups wall off their own compounds with windscreens. Someone has a battery operated blender to mix drinks.
Really, I though California was one of the few states (like Vermont) were simply being naked in public was legal unless the municipality specifically passed a bylaw against it. I know public nudity is legal in San Francisco.
A few years ago Mrs P and I walked through Noosa National Park which is a couple of hours north of here and comprises beaches and headlands and has a few known nudist spots. What surprised me was seeing several nude guys with cameras (including at least one with an SLR and a big long lens) openly photographing others. I was only passing through, but no one seemed to be objecting and the camera guys weren’t hiding what they were doing at all.
It surprised me because I would have thought that people would be concerned that there’d be naked photos of them all over the intarwebs, potential embarrassment with employers etc. I guess maybe people didn’t like it but were powerless to stop it.
Yeah, the Pacific Northwest is tats and piercing central (ever google “suicide girls?”) and some of the more out there people are off the hook! I can’t see the point of all that hardware on genitals, though, seems like you’re just asking for something to get caught somewhere, ouch!
Usually things are pretty minimalist–towels, ice chests, beach bag, blanket. Sun umbrellas are pretty common, in inverse proportion to the prevalence of their rainy day cousins, heh. I have yet to see a blender on a beach! Maybe on a boat but that’s about it.
We have some very dedicated and extremely fierce beach volleyball players and it’s a hoot to watch them. We also get windsurfers, and sailboarders–you haven’t seen funny until you’ve seen nekkid people flying through the air dangling from a vitamin fed kite! Nude waterskiing is popular as well…
This part strikes me as a iron clad reason why this just isn’t for me. I love the fact that naked is an automatic turn on. I like the though that glimpses of a boob are rare and coveted. Having that numbed away sounds like a real loss. Do you find that something is lost in this uber-casual attitude towards the naked body?
Oh good gosh, no! It’s just something you get used to in that context. Outside the context the side boob or shapely ass in jeans is just as naughty and arousing as ever. C’mon, those of us in long term relationships know that there are times when the other person is just painfully sexy and times when they’re more or less furniture–doesn’t change the basic relationship to them that sometimes you find them less than arousing, right? Even with a bunch of naked people all around you it’s possible to get “that look” from somebody and all of a sudden they shift from naked wallpaper to object of desire–it’s the intent, NOT the state of dress or lack of it that matters!
This thread is making me excited for summer. (Spring, really–it’ll be warm pretty soon here.) I’ve always wanted to try going to a nude beach, but I’ve never worked up the courage. It’s a bit too nippy right now, though I know as a Maryland transplant that you Nor’easteners would throw a party for a winter where it was 60 degrees every day.
Those aren’t jokes. We can get hard in the cold (how else would Minnesota have a stable population?), but it’s much shorter in both flaccid and erect states.
This is where I really want to be. I feel like I will be able to die happy once I can truly say that I can really just walk away from my possessions without worrying about them–just be me, completely unchained, not at all tied down to my stuff. To be able to say, “Well, it’s just stuff”, and mean it. Wow! I really can’t wait 'til it’s warm now.
OK. Black’s Beach in La Jolla is definitely one of the “one or two special exceptions”, and I’ve hiked up the cliffs nearby. No, not to look–they happen to make for incredible urban hiking experiences; there are even chairs carved into the cliff–shit, now that I think about it, the chairs were facing the beach. Shit. Well, my point is that I went up there several times and I never saw anyone else in the area, unless they were going up another nearby cliff (which looked over the very-not-nude city, not the nude beach) to smoke pot discreetly. I certainly believe that people go and sit in those cliff chairs to watch the sunbathers, but “more often than not” sounds like an exaggeration to me.
I will immediately concede that it may be totally different in LA, if there’s a nude beach up there.
I guess it is. I’ve seen enough people posing and taking pictures, and plenty of other people are in the background. I don’t worry about it myself :dubious: maybe I should have some concerns.
An acquaintance on the beach did email me a pic of myself sprawled out on the sand once, I hadn’t known that he took my picture. I think I had my legs open more than usual to try off.
It is a loss of sorts. Sometimes I try to remember what it’s like to feel ‘naked’ and exposed. It’s hard to - it’s gone. But I’ve gained so much comfort in my own skin I wouldn’t go back. No flush of embarrassment exposing body parts for doctors/nurses. I’m less shy - and I was far too shy in my social interactions.
“Rare and coveted” glimpses sound nice. But along with that you get this hysteria over a public sighting of nudity that’s ludicrous. Someone appears naked it makes news. I saw a magazine cover that showed a breast in profile with a nursing baby and there were many hysterical letters the next month.
“It’s gonna traumatize the children who see it.”
“Breasts are sexual - you shouldn’t show them” from a mother. Hello. Breasts are secondarily sexual. They exist to feed babies!
Is it healthy for a society to sexualize the body to such an extent that people forgot what the parts are supposed to be for?
And when the circumstances are right, arousal is not a problem.
I went (once) to a NB…it was horrible! Instead of nubile maidens and athletic young men, it was:
-old, sagging butts and boobs
-creepy old perverts
-hair-EVERYWHERE!
I almost barfed! To quote Kurtz (“HEART OF DARKNESS”): "the horror, the horror!
