Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism by Brian Hoffman (review)

Naked provides a well-organized overview of nudism in twentieth-century America, documenting the contributions of nudist leaders, intellectuals, court battles, and milestones for the nudist community. Though it bills itself as a cultural history, the volume connects the social history of nudists in America with the cultural history of how they portrayed themselves and were portrayed by the media. The ability to unite the two approaches is critical to the monograph’s success. By skillfully weaving together practices and representations, Hoffman has provided the long-overdue volume that explains nudism, which served as a backdrop to so many other aspects of radical, commercial, and liberationist sex culture.

Hoffman dates the emergence of a nudist culture in America to December 5, 1929, when a group of German immigrants launched the American League for Physical Culture. This group was inspired by the German physical culture movement and saw nudism, sun-bathing, and physical culture as measures to ameliorate the ills brought by industrialization and modernization. Associated with bohemian radicalism, alternative medicine, and physical fitness, early nudist organizers sought to counter shame of the body and promote sexual liberalism. Though they lost a number of early court and publicity battles to anti-vice agencies, nudist groups eventually tied nudism to religious and therapeutic goals while nudist organizations moved from major urban centers to more isolated rural retreats by the 1930s.

Despite the physical culture origins of organized nudism, the movement has always been beset by accusations of perversity and vice. The spread of nudist magazines that functioned as the organs of nudist groups during World War II raised questions about distinctions between commercial sexual culture and the more therapeutic nudist culture. To counter claims about eroticism and vice, nudist magazines limited the images to stylized versions of nakedness, while nudist groups promoted the ideal of nudism as a wholesome family activity by only giving memberships to supposedly solid citizens; single men and non-whites were excluded from organized nudist groups. As nudism fought for and gained a degree of respectability, however, individuals sought to benefit from the greater latitude given by the courts to publications and films that documented nudism as a “lifestyle.” Quasi-pornographers churned out documentaries and feature films to be shown in red light districts about nudism that skirted between information and prurience.

Against the shabby erotics of nudist films and the stuffy family-centered nudist camps from the 1950s, youthful radicals stripped naked with a political purpose in the 1960s. They used the nude human body as revolutionary theater. Remaining outside of formal nudism as a movement, they also tried to gain access to beaches for sun-bathing and nude bathing and promoted an unorganized and reactive form of nudism in the late 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, critiques about the treatment of minorities began to be applied to nudist organizations when activists looked at the politics of nudist organizations. Feminist activists associated with antipornography feminist organizations looked at nudist publications as exploiting women and accused older nudist organizations of quieting claims of pedophilia and child abuse.

Hoffman ends his book with the more recent development of an upscale renovation of nudist resorts and nakedness as a commercial enterprise. While this conclusion might provide a sense of chronological closure by bringing issues up to date, it nonetheless brought even more questions about growing commercialization of consumer culture and corporate takeover of radicalism. Also left unresolved are the continuing tensions between nudism and sexuality that bedeviled nudists throughout the book. Did nudism have nothing to do with sexuality or did it promote a healthy eroticism for the individuals and for society? These issues fall by the wayside in the conclusion as Hoffman traces a trajectory based on nudist leaders, groups, and ideas, but one that avoids the larger consideration of the body in American society.

Hoffman made a number of strategic decisions that affect the structure of his book. His introduction provides an overview of...