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I See Naked People
 
Megastars baring all, 'Girls Gone Wild,' nudists next door. Where is America's fascinationwith nudity taking us?
By Michael Leahy –
The Washington Post 
[Source
:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30524-2003Oct28.html]
 Sunday, November 2, 2003At this junction where American hedonism was about to run into American squeamishness, on a dusty road in Marylanda hundred yards down from his cabin, Mike Transparenti, retired insurance agent, waited naked for a representativefrom Baltimore Gas & Electric Co., which had promised to send out someone to inspect Transparenti's electric meter."Naked" in this case is not a figurative description.Mike Transparenti was not, for instance, naked in his angst over his meter, or nakedly betraying his irritation with thesize of his utility bill. He was just Mike Transparenti, a naked man, and he stood next to me out in the middle of this dirtroad alongside some woods, and together we waited for the man from the power company."Are you warm?" he asked. "Would you like anything else to drink? Hot day."It was still summer. I had on khakis, an Oxford shirt, a loosely knotted tie and a pool of sweat running down my shirt.Transparenti had gray chest hair and no tan lines. He had a genial, subdued bearing, and in retirement had grown a thick Papa Hemingway salt-and-pepper beard, but all this belied his ingrained zest for thoroughness and efficiency, whichexplained why he wanted to deal pronto with his old electric meter. He is a detail man, and even in retirement, at 57, hegravitates toward projects, loose ends, work to finish -- tough habits to break. Without telling the whole world about it,he largely concentrates on enjoying himself, spending most of his summers right out here, at the Maryland HealthSociety, a name that sounds like a think tank's or a state medical clinic's, like anything other than what this place is.He joined MAHESO (pronounced: Ma-HEE-so) in 1996, and became its president five months ago. These days hehappily rides herd over its 100 acres of woods and hiking trails, marked with 22 cabins, that back up to the bucolicPatuxent River, in the town of Davidsonville.He smiled genially at a nude long-legged blonde striding toward us, briskly closing the distance, 20 feet away, 10 feet,five feet, prepare to dock. Hi."Nice day," she said to Transparenti.She added that she was thinking of taking a swim today. And Transparenti said, "Well, have a good one," and shemoved on down the dusty road. Here came a grinning pair of elderly nudists, tanned a kind of nutty brown everywhereand waving, and Transparenti waved back, calling out something about condiments and a barbecue, and then, "See youSaturday." He stood there on his own version of Main Street, saying he felt a breeze on himself. "Beautiful day," headded. "Good just to hang around."His passion had begun with a recollection: an image of himself swimming nude as a little boy at a YMCA pool. Noexperience had ever felt better, and, on vacations, decades later in the Caribbean, he had tried a couple of nude beaches,and then dared to set foot in a nudist club back home, and then at MA-HESO, where to spend a weekend left himfeeling more relaxed than two weeks anywhere else. It was his life now.He could see the BG&E truck now, spewing a little gravel and making its way through the MAHESO gate, and,smiling, he waved toward the driver and, in a reflex, smoothed his silver hair.The driver, a man named Kimberly Hayes, in turn took a look at the waving man and thought this:WHAT THE HELL? THAT GUY IS BUTT NAKED.
 
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The BG&E truck stopped. Then, slowly, it moved forward. Transparenti kept waving. The various parts of him bobbing,he strolled quickly toward the truck. But Hayes wasn't getting out yet. He coasted to a stop, rolled down his window. Henodded uncertainly at Transparenti, who said pleasantly, "Thanks for coming out. Nice to see you."Hayes nodded again, intent on looking professional. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay." He was composed, but his head was on aswivel, trying not to fix on Transparenti. He glanced at the woods and Transparenti's face and his steering wheel, thenhis face and the woods."It's our electric meter," said Transparenti. "We're the fourth cabin on the left.""Okay, uh-huh, uh-huh." Hayes's head lolled from left to right, and it was then that he caught sight of the action arounda large pool, where about 10 nudists, most of them women, were sunning themselves on chaise longues and benches andpadding around the deck. From behind his darkly tinted, wraparound safety glasses, he looked without appearing tolook, which is voyeurism in a perfected state. And with the look came a realization. Once up at Transparenti's cabin,trudging along the side of the house where the meter was affixed, Hayes softly remarked, "This is a nudist colony, isn'tit?"A lot of outsiders refer to the place as a nudist colony. The term has that communal, utopian, hippieish, 24-hour-sex-for-all vibe. Transparenti smiled affably, radiating the old insurance man's diplomacy, correcting without correcting. "Yes.A nudist club.""A nudist club," Hayes repeated. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay."It was then that Hayes realized he had just taken a quick look up and down Transparenti's body to see everything, andwondered why he had done this, and after fretting about this, decided not to think any more about it, but then he thoughtabout it. It was hard not to look. Hayes declared the meter obsolete and offered to replace it with a current model."Really appreciate your taking a look at it," said Transparenti, who, as an expression of gratitude, invited the meterinspector to a MAHESO event that weekend. There would be roughly 100 partying nudists at the annual Nude BullRoast, and, besides, he was always looking for new members. "Lots of food. Swimming. We'd enjoy having you, if you'd like to come out.""Okay, uh-huh." Hayes didn't think that was likely to happen, but he remained professionally appreciative. From behindhis safety glasses, he looked Transparenti straight in the eyes, finding this was already becoming easier. It was weird, hethought, how fast the impulse to look at everything wore off.Hayes wrapped up his work, got back in his truck and drove out. "When I got back to the guys I worked with," he saidlater, "they kept asking me, 'See anything nice?' But, you know, once I got over the initial shock, it was kinda routine.There were a lot of naked people, but how many can you look at -- you know what I mean? I'm thinking now it mighthave been more special for me, a little erotic maybe, if they'd had a little piece of clothing on. A little clothing, andyou'd wonder what they look like maybe."But Transparenti understands that -- despite Hayes's non- chalance -- his passion for nudity still strikes many Americansas, in a word, creepy. And not everyone is as broad-minded and courteous as Hayes. He thinks that to understandnudism it is important to experience it."Do you think you might want to try it?" he asked me."Try?" But I knew what he was getting at."It might help you understand.""I'll certainly think about it."He often heard that line.
 
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Our forefathers got off to a bad start with nudity. Unlike in so many European cultures, where nudity has always beenidealized, serving as the inspiration for countless portraits of deities and military heroes, here it was just another wildforeboding frontier, on the other side of which might lurk damnation and disgrace.Puritan modesty in the American Northeast, and evangelical fervor in other parts of the Colonial land about the need tosublimate the libido, doubtless played a role in the disfavor of exposed flesh. But so, too, did 18th-century Americanartists who, according to some art historians, looked for ways to distinguish the portraits of prominent Colonial settlersfrom the depictions of Native Americans. While one group of Colonial artists depicted Indians as barely clothed, inwhat they regarded as a celebration of the natives' physicality and freedom of body, another group sought to ensure aflattering contrast by rendering distinguished Colonials as elegantly attired models of modesty. It was nothing less thanan effort to characterize nudity as the way of a savage, and the clothed as pious and enlightened. "The view of NativeAmericans' nudity made it much more difficult to imagine nudity as a normal state . . . ," says Jennifer Roberts, anassistant professor of art and architecture at Harvard. "There would be no classical nudes for that group of Americans."Through the 20th century, nudity and semi-nudity remained the foreboding frontier, to be divisively crossed, over andover. A glimpse of ankle, knee, thigh: Each, in turn, prompted the familiar arguments about immodesty andlasciviousness, complicated in the second half of the century by the arrival of feminism, which railed against"objectification." But even there, ambivalence wafted. Was something like the miniskirt exploitative or empowering?Was it a celebration of freedom and beauty, or just another tool designed to liberate only men seeking more pleasurableobjects to ogle?Nowhere were the cultural wars over nudity fought more fiercely than at the gates of the entertainment industry. Thefull nudity of the late-'60s American theater productions "Hair" and "Oh! Calcutta!" -- so stunning at the time as tosignal the collapse of American morals for some observers -- now seems old, if anything, a testament to how blasewe've become with actors disrobing onstage. Unlike New York playwrights and theater producers, who enjoyed acertain license, network television executives couldn't overcome the resistance of mainstream audiences to nudity until1993, with the arrival of "NYPD Blue," which, in showing naked backsides and employing a shadowy nudity duringlove scenes, prompted many ABC affiliates to preempt the show.Whether it was the reaction to Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazines in the '50s, or Jesse Helms wanting to place a figleaf over nude sculpture in the '90s, the furors serve as a reminder that nudity remained synonymous with sexuality andsomething forbidden.But the illicit titillation that once turned us on so easily now seems to have lost much of its force. The old nudity seemsto have fallen out of commercial favor -- not because it arouses, but because it doesn't.And as the turn-on of full nudity has slackened, the marketers have simply looked for a way to recast nudity, to discoverthe new titillation in the old ways -- the comeback of an old vaudeville strip dance with fans and boas, or the amateurplaying the role of the professional and revealing little but just enough.The new nudity is not Mike Transparenti's nudity. It isn't nudity at all, in the strictest sense of that word. It is only half-nudity, or sometimes nine-tenths nudity. The semi-nude of the moment is Britney Spears, captured in a series of photosfor the November issue of Esquire magazine, part of a pictorial titled "Women We Love." Many of the images payhomage to a photographic style identifiable for half a century with sexual icons: We see the curves of things butgenerally not the things. The most discussed semi-nude photo in the package is of Spears wearing nothing but pantiesand some strategically placed necklaces.As a term of art and journalism, the phrase "strategically placed" has been around for decades, signaling now, as at itsinception, a coyness. That the term endures indicates that a culture's coyness endures. The guise remains the greatAmerican paradox and tease: beauties covering the very things that they most want to accentuate.Amid all the contradictions, it is a hardly a surprise that yet another wave of entertainers anticipates having it both waysin talking about the pose. On the same pages as her Esquire photographs, Spears tells the world that she has put herrecord label on notice: "Look, if you want me to be some kind of sex thing, that's not me."
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