<< Nudity >>

I believe that nudity in the home is desirable, and that it can play a highly useful role in educating children toward a sexually well-adjusted adult life.Sex education, in my view, is more than simply talking about sex. We educate through open or closed behavior, through our acceptance or rejection of its manifestations, through our expressed attitudes — even through our body postures. Body language can show the world that we are open and relaxed individuals, or buttoned-up, prudish, reserved, with walls erected between ourselves and other people. Nudity is closely related to all this. In itself it is an expression of openness, of freedom, of a lack of false shame and false modesty. It says that the body is not something special and shameful, to be concealed and subordinated, and implicitly it also says that the nude person believes sex is a part of life, like sleeping and eating. But nudity is not sexual behavior in itself, as so many people seem to believe, except in deliberately erotic situations. It is simply an expression of freedom and its enjoyment.

One of the paradoxes of human life is that we’re told constantly and in many ways how beautiful the human body is, yet we’re ashamed to show it in front of other people except within certain limits. As a look at swimsuit styles will show, the limit has now been pushed to its farthest extreme.

This need to cover the body is as old as Adam and Eve, in one sense. People originally covered themselves as protection from the weather, but in time it became a matter of religion, and in our own society it’s a heritage from the strict religious feelings of the early colonists, whose Puritanism, as we call it now, set the tone of American life in its moral aspects. Consequently people can’t be as free as some might like to be, short of joining a nudist colony, because they’ll feel the weight of society’s displeasure and its laws.

To artists and sculptors, of course, it has always been something else — a celebration of beauty. Since the days of the ancient Greeks, the nude figure has been painted and sculpted millions of times, presented in every conceivable form and in every possible attitude, from the classic gods and goddesses of Greece to the most bizarre viewpoints of contemporary art. It is one of the paradoxes of our society that galleries and museums are thronged with people admiring nude male and female figures, but most these same people regard going nude at home as antisocial and improper behavior. Only the youngest children are spared the compulsion to be clothed in something, however inadequate, that will cover those sources of power and “corruption”, the genitals.

As a boy and a girl get older, they grow taller, and their bodies change shapes..


At the bottom of much of this feeling seems to be the assumption that children will be aroused by seeing the genitals of one sex or the other, or both. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the only place where this notion can be adequately observed and tested, the nudist camp or colony, it is unequivocally clear that neither children nor adults are aroused by seeing the other sex or their own in a nude state. In these groups, nudity is commonplace and simply a part of the total social scene.

A few plain facts that “everybody knows” but few seem to practice should be convincing proof that nudity is not equivalent to arousal. Quite the contrary: It is concealment that arouses sexual interest and desire. Little boys who have never seen a nude female of any age want to know what is under the little girl’s dress and inside her panties, which obviously conceal something “other people” (adults) don’t want them to see. Often little girls will lift their skirts and show them, in return for the satisfaction of their own curiosity about boys. Even pornographic movies, which are made by people with a minimum knowledge of eroticism, recognize that people are aroused by what is concealed, and nearly every sexual act is preceded by some form of what used to be called a striptease, a kind of arousal that may be raised to the level of an art. Nudity has become almost matter-of-fact in terms of public entertainment.

In non-pornographic movies and stage shows, as in the burlesque theater itself, it is not the nudity at the end that is calculated to arouse. Usually that is so brief as to be almost subliminal. It is the slow undressing that is designed to create arousal in the customers — the fragmentary glimpses of partial nudity, not nudity itself. “If they want to see a nude, let ’em go to a museum,” one burlesque entertainer once told a reporter questioning him on this subject.

Another argument sometimes advanced against nudity, usually by orthodox Freudians, is that a boy seeing his father nude will be envious of his large penis, which will lead to all kinds of psychological complications when he is older. I think this belief is usually a reflection of the believer’s own fears. Any child who asks the natural question “Why is Daddy’s penis so much, much bigger than mine?” can be answered easily by telling him that he is going to grow as big as Daddy some day (and maybe much bigger), and his penis will grow along with him, like the other parts of his body.

If growing up were simply a matter of getting bigger, adults would look like giant babies, but really
some parts of our bodies grow more than others. The center of gravitation also changes.


Boys, more than girls, soon grow accustomed to seeing nudity in their own sex. There is little inhibition about it among small boys playing together, and what exists is often broken down in preadolescent sex play. As they grow up, they see each other nude in school locker rooms and showers, and at home brothers are not likely to conceal themselves from each other. The conditioning process is more severe with girls, and what is so often called a natural modesty among the members of that sex turns out to be far more a kind of learned repression beginning at a very early age. Girls constantly pull their skirts down, as they have been taught to do. (I have seen even girls in miniskirts do it, from force of habit.) They don’t usually undress in front of each other. There is less freedom in locker room and shower room than among boys. All this appears to be changing now, but generations of repression have had a profound effect.

People can’t be as free as they might like to be because others will be offended. We still live in a society that hasn’t given up on the Puritanism we began with, and we have to accept that fact. But people can be more relaxed about nudity in the privacy of their own homes. In the privacy of your own home relax about nudity, if the at-home standards are different from those of society. Parents are the ones who set these standards, for the most part, and they’re the ones who will determine, to a large extent, how much nudity is permitted and will be tolerated, and also where and when. It remains true, no matter what’s decided and what standards are applied, the human body remains beautiful, and we should feel no shame in viewing it.

Feelings about nudity should not be confused with the growing need for privacy as the child grows up. In both girls and boys, the pre-teen period is characterized by easily observable changes from their former behavior. There is often an increase in what we call modesty — an insistence on privacy in the bath, for example. Even at about age six, he may no longer feel comfortable in the nude at home. He begins to shut and even lock the bathroom door instead of leaving it open as he did before. He likes to close his bedroom door, and he is no longer seen wandering from there to the bathroom without his clothes on. Boys, and more particularly girls, also become considerably more careful about their state of undress when their parents are around, and even more so in the presence of strangers.

Parents need to be sure that this is not the result of a child’s desire to hide himself and his activities as a result of fear, guilt, shame, of some other undesirable emotion. But if he has been taught a healthy attitude about his body and its functions from the beginning, increasing modesty will only be a result of his general desire for privacy, which ought to be respected in all its phases. Along with this modesty, paradoxically, children’s curiosity is likely to be more intense in these years. Their earlier questions about where babies come from, even if they have been answered properly, will now be supplanted by more specific questions concerning sexuality — always provided, of course, that they feel free to ask. They may even repeat some of their earlier questioning, so intense is their need to know about the developing world around them.

Parents need to accept this need for privacy for what it is, but if their own behavior is different — that is, if nudity in the home is customary behavior among the family — they should not change but simply recognize that the children are responding to the behavior patterns of their peer group, which include the seeking of privacy.

By the time these same children are eleven or twelve years old, they will have outgrown at least part of this pattern. They will still, and perhaps increasingly, desire privacy in places like the bathroom and their bedrooms, but their feelings against nudity will diminish if the atmosphere of the home has always been relaxed about it and nudity is practiced. A few years later, in adolescence, they will be as much at ease with nudity at home as they were when they were very young — always granting, of course, that they have been brought up with it.

If by any chance a reader, having gone this far, has concluded that his past attitudes have been wrong and that he is going to reverse himself and start a practice of nudity at home, he should be advised that this short-cut to liberation will not produce the result he might think. In fact, such an experience would be very disturbing so far as the children are concerned. If they have always lived in a home in which nudity among them was discouraged or actually forbidden, and in which the parents themselves were never seen nude, any sudden reversal of this lifestyle might have a seriously adverse effect. If the children are teen-agers by this time, the reversal will be very difficult to achieve.

Nudity as a way of life at home, with all it may mean in terms of human behavior, should ideally be the natural pattern from the very beginning of a child’s life. It is still possible to change the repressive pattern before adolescence, but it cannot be done overnight. People who want to make such a change must realize that it has to be done by degrees, and casually, without making a point of it. After all, a child of twelve who is suddenly confronted by his parents’ nudity will have a completely different reaction from a child who has seen them nude since his infancy and accepts them matter-of-factly, as he accepts his own nudity.

How can such a change occur? It can begin by the parents appearing in underclothes from time to time where the children can see them. Once this has been accepted as a natural and usual occurrence, further steps can be taken, like leaving the bathroom door open when one is taking a bath or a shower. After that, if the family goes to any place where swimming can be done privately, nudity in the pool or on the beach is a next and easy step. No pressure is put on the child to do likewise, of course, but once he sees this kind of behavior accepted without shame or self-consciousness by his parents, he will probably follow suit. The tempo of the change is best measured by the degree of the children’s acceptance of what is taking place.

But I must emphasize again that the earlier the change begins, the better, and ideally nudity in the home as a way of living should begin with infancy so far as the child is concerned. I can understand that the fear of eroticism from such behavior is strong in most people, since it has been assiduously dinned into them as the conventional wisdom of centuries, but I repeat that it has no foundation in reality. It is only when concealment is followed by revelation in a deliberately erotic situation that arousal occurs.

This is true of adolescence, as well as earlier ages. Some parents who have practiced nudity in the home when the children were young begin to draw back from it as the small bodies take on adult form, the pubic hair develops, and the child is obviously capable of adult sexual behavior. But if nudity has always been the practice at home, the arrival of adolescence changes nothing.

In the end, the ability to accept such changes on the part of adults rests mostly on the degree of freedom the parents enjoy in their own lives, and this is rather closely correlated with the general state of their marriage. For example, people with strong inhibitions about nudity are very often those who have poor adjustments in their marital lives. They find it as hard to abandon their inhibitions as to take off their clothes. Whether they can or not depends on the strength of their motivation — that is, how much they want to change the structure of their lives. It is by no means an easy process. Inhibitions have to be unlearned, just as they were learned in the first place, and the unlearning is likely to take considerably longer than the learning. Nor is success guaranteed, because there are those in whom the conditioning process has been so successful that they are unable to root out their inhibitions without more psychologic help than they are willing to undertake.

Sometimes deconditioning takes place in ways that seem so obvious that one wonders why it didn’t occur before. For example, take the case of a woman who has been brought up in the usual old-fashioned way to believe that nudity is something of which no nice girl would ever be guilty. She, and millions of other people, may deliberately avoid, as a matter of habit, any representation of the nude body, and if she is one of those people who have no interest in art, she may not even have seen it in the most usual place, a museum, because that is a place she never visits.

To such a woman, being taken to a large museum, where she sees for the first time a great number of nude representations in both painting and sculpture, may be a liberating experience. The surroundings are eminently respectable, the other viewers are obviously not unlike her own conception of herself, and they all appear to be viewing nudity without visible emotion.

A museum visitor who stands by a nude male statue and watches the attitudes of the women, particularly, who pass by it will see a great many inhibited people of the kind I have just described. Some turn their eyes away quickly; others steal quick glances while pretending to look at something else. Only the liberated and the sophisticated regard the statue openly, seeing it as a work of art rather than a representation of sexuality. If women, as I’ve said, are more likely to exhibit inhibited behavior in these circumstances, that doesn’t mean males are not affected. They, too, betray their inner sexual state by their behavior.

Constant exposure to nude art in a museum may provide the inhibited onlooker with a perspective she (or he) has not had before, and may begin to loosen up the inhibitions that bind. How far she is able to go beyond that initial deconditioning depends on her personality, the circumstances of her life, and a number of other intangibles, but it is a beginning step toward freedom.

Why take the step at all? Why make any effort to accept nudity freely and practice it oneself in the home? If people are more comfortable with their inhibitions and their clothed way of life, is there any reason for them even to consider changing?

My answer to these common questions is, yes, of course, people are entitled to their opinions and to how they want to live, and if they want to keep nudity out of their lives, that is their privilege. No one disputes it. Yet it is worth considering, I think, what this kind of freedom can mean to an individual’s life, especially his marriage, and what it can mean to the lives of the children if they are able to grow up with parents who are not rigidly inhibited.

By way of example, let’s take the common case of the small child who comes naked into a room where one or both parents are entertaining company. Instead of making a scene, which may well be embarrassing and frightening for the child, with unpredictable repercussions in his future life, it is far better to explain quietly that there is a time and place for things. Just as he has learned that people go to the bathroom to urinate and defecate, he learns that nudity is something that takes place in the family circle only (or, if that is not the case, in the privacy of the bedroom).

Children learn best about these matters through the “time and place” kind of teaching. This is not to say that mistakes won’t occur; as every parent knows, there are moments when a child may appear naked at some inappropriate time and place, or urinate proudly on the living-room floor in the company of strangers. But that is part of growing up, part of the learning and training experience, the end result of which is the acceptance of time and place.

In the case of nudity, the child whose innocent nakedness is accepted during the training process and treated for what it is can easily accept the freedom — again, within the boundaries of time and place — that nudity later on permits, and he will accept it readily and without self-consciousness for other members of the family as well as himself. A parent need only ask himself honestly: Which is better, a child growing up in this way, without self-consciousness, with a real sense of propriety, with the freedom from secrecy and guilt that nudity implies; or one who regards exposing his body as sinful and any exhibition of it as a crime against society? Concealment, fear, guilt, inhibition — these are negative emotions, and they can produce only negative feelings in people, and, far too often, negative lives as well.

It is a healthy thing, as I have said, to raise children in a sexual atmosphere that is free of fear and guilt, one in which they accept their bodies and the physiological differences between the sexes in a matter-of-fact way. Such children experiment with their own sexuality and learn from it in a perfectly natural manner, and the knowledgeable parent provides them with the information they need to understand what is happening to them as they grow up.

But I believe it may be not helpful to good family relationships and healthy growth to allow children to wander freely into a bedroom where the parents are having intercourse, as some extremely “liberated” couples do. For that matter, any kind of overt sexual behavior in front of children may be freighted with trouble. This is not the same thing as open display of affection between parents, which I will discuss later. That can be a prime ingredient in good family relationships.

What I am talking about are the permissive parents who, for example, have parties at which everyone gets a little drunk and there is a good deal of sex play with other husbands and wives going on in the kitchen, or perhaps in a bedroom or two. Whether this goes beyond passionate kissing and fondling is immaterial. To the growing child who sees his own father and mother involved, it is incomprehensible, no matter how he has been brought up. If he comes home late in the evening and finds his father kissing one of the neighbor ladies in the kitchen, or his mother sitting in a dark comer with the hand of the neighbor lady’s husband halfway up her thigh, even the most knowledgeable child may be confused, and often angry. The parent may lose status in his eyes, and something that is often insurmountable may come between parent and child.

Parents who have brought up their children to understand sex and accept it in a natural way may be sometimes astonished to see what an old-fashioned moral attitude these same children may take when they see their parents involved in sexual behavior that would not disturb them if it happened with other people. With other people, all right — but Mother! And Father! Unbelievable! Most people are well on toward adulthood before they can visualize their mothers and fathers having intercourse with each other, let alone with anyone else, and many are never able to entertain the idea, even though they know it happens.

So the permissive parent walks a tightrope. He cannot be repressive to his child, but at the same time his own sexual behavior may not be overt in the presence of his son or daughter. (Although I use the generic “he,” the difficulty applies to mothers as well, and in their case it applies with perhaps even more force, because they stand in a different relationship to children than do fathers.)

The old ways are hard to break, true enough. We are conditioned, for example, to sleep in some kind of night clothes, and the clothing industry has encouraged us in this kind of inhibitory behavior by appealing to the vanity of women and the sexual fears of men. Originally, there was a practical reason for night clothing — protecting the wearer from cold or insects. But we no longer live in the kind of primitive conditions that made these garments necessary, nor do we have any other reason to wear them now except the centuries-old conditioning initiated by precepts against nakedness.

There are sound reasons for sleeping nude, as many people are discovering today. One is a simple physical reason: Nightclothes are confining, and without them the body is free of pressures from the inevitable binding and twisting. A more compelling reason is the implied liberation in the relationship of two people who share the same bed. Just as the double bed promotes a feeling of closeness and intimacy — and I think it is worthwhile to make this point once more — so does nudity in bed subtly express the dropping away of barriers between people. “See,” the nude body says, “I am naked and unafraid and accessible.” Concealment with clothing may enhance sexual feelings or arouse them, as I have noted, but in bed there is no longer any reason for covering up except the psychological desire to erect a last barrier. True, it is a barrier easily removed, but if it does not exist, there can no longer be a final hesitancy, too readily translated into some kind of withdrawal.

If you get the erection among nude girls, just be natural and don't pay attention.
And nobody would say a word..

Nudity means openness. It is a positive force, as opposed to all the negative propulsions that make us want to conceal our bodies as well as our feelings. It is more difficult for a naked human being to conceal what is inside him, and in the context of family life nudity induces a climate of freedom in which the members deal frankly with each other, particularly in matters of their sexuality. This applies to both parents and children, in their relations with each other and between themselves.

For all these reasons, I advocate nudity in the home and between parents in the privacy of their marital bed. Of course, it is not a cure-all for problems or family tensions, sexual or otherwise, but it does create the kind of free and open atmosphere in which it is more difficult for hypocrisy, fear, guilt, and other crippling emotions to exist.

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