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

What drives otherwise ordinary people to arrange their lives and spaces around being naked is less a concern for Brian Hoffman in his well-researched monograph Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism than how naked living in the modern era ran afoul of American sexual mores, cultural norms, and the policies that kept them in place. The current proliferation of nudity through the wide availability of Internet pornography, online “selfie” culture, and new ratings standards for film and television provokes contemporary questions about the meaning of nakedness, its relationship to sexuality, the line between art and obscenity, and whether or not it is even possible to untether the nude human form from the eroticized body. Hoffman helps readers think about nudity and sexuality in American culture by narrowing the focus to the organizational history of nudism (the practice of living and socializing naked) and nudists’ long-standing struggle to navigate a thicket of changing obscenity and morality laws.

In the early twentieth century, largely in response to urban industrialization, millions of Americans became concerned about the health and upkeep of their bodies. Urban life placed greater importance on the visual corporeality of daily life; consumer culture pushed products and fashions showcasing idealized bodies; and an emergent middle class of managers and professionals became especially concerned about the weakening of the male physique as deskwork replaced physical labor. As women moved in larger numbers into the wage-labor force, their bodies came under intense scrutiny, particularly those of working-class white and black women, and Progressive reformers sought to control female sexuality. At the same time, the nation also entered an era of new sexual mores, courtship rituals, and a growing tolerance for sexual expression that was publicly manifested in pre–Hays Code film, modern burlesque, and popular fiction. As Hoffman writes, “Whereas nineteenth-century society treated all forms of sexuality with suspicion and hostility, the first decades of the twentieth century saw American society and culture embrace heterosexual pleasure and desire” (4).

Nudism, which had its roots in late nineteenth-century German Lebensreform (life reform), was an expressive response to modern American urban life. Gathering together at gymnasia and outdoor retreats, nudists exercised, exposed their bodies to sun and air, absorbed vitamin D, sported a healthy glow, and shed the vestiges of uptight Victorian sexual norms. As nudism grew as a cultural movement in the 1930s and 1940s, nudists took their practice home with them and shaped an all-encompassing lifestyle united by a belief in natural living, the pursuit of optimal health, and the founding of organizations and magazines that showcased a joyful world where the body was free of the hindrance of clothing. By reclaiming the naked body as something beautiful and wholesome rather than shameful and erotic, American nudists envisioned not only a more progressive world but one where sex and the body became untethered, freeing them to be naturally comfortable in their skin while fending off the prurient gaze provoked by the sexualized world of commercial entertainment. But as Hoffman argues throughout his book, “The growing social, cultural, and legal tolerance of heterosexual pleasure in modern American society depended on the exclusion of threatening, violent, or deviant forms of sex. This era of sexual liberalism promoted and enforced heteronormative boundaries that restricted sexual expression to adult, white middle-class, heterosexual couples within the nuclear families” (5). Thus, nudist culture in the United States tended to be relatively homogeneous, traditional in its values, and focused on promoting naked living as a therapeutic health strategy for families and couples while forcefully denying associations with free love or sexual experimentation. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of the naked body as the movement’s guiding precept meant that throughout the twentieth century nudists were subject to harassment, repression, and arrest, as law enforcement and community leaders had trouble distinguishing nudity as cultural practice from nudity as degeneracy.

It is not difficult to imagine nudists venturing into the wilderness to commune...