Naked at Lunch (22 page)

I bought a trimmer and went to work. It wasn’t as difficult as I expected. The various attachments provide protection from nicks and cuts and, well, the hair just kind of falls off. I had intended to do a light trim, but once I was into it, I just kind of went for it. Like I said: it was an experiment.

Later that night my wife looked at me and said, “Oh, honey. What did you do?” She said this in the concerned, sympathetic voice you might use when a young child draws on his face with an indelible marker.

While I might have overdone it with the trimmer, I was nowhere near being a smoothie.

“Smoothies” are men and women who prefer to be completely hairless from the neck down and are not to be confused with blended fruit drinks. “Smoothie” is the common term for what’s technically an acomoclitic naturist, a person who prefers to have hairless genitals, the nudest of the nudists. Serious smoothies will shave or wax all their hair, not just their pubic hair. They claim that taking off this last layer of covering will “promote the classical aesthetic ideal of a smooth and hairless body.”
********
It is part of what they call the “smooth lifestyle.”

As the “Smooth Naturists” section of the EuroNaturist.com website proclaims: “Pubic hair serves no useful purpose in humans and there are good reasons for going smooth.” While I don’t want to get in a debate on the utilitarian or decorative aspects of body hair, let’s look at the “good reasons for going smooth” they put forward: “It looks and feels great! It is cleaner and more hygienic, especially for women. The smooth skin is more sensitive and it enhances sexual pleasure in many ways!”
⁵⁹

While I raised an eyebrow about the hygiene comment—“especially for women,” really?—it is refreshing to see a nudist organization talking about sexual pleasure.

I had seen several men and women who were smoothies when I was at Vera Playa and Cap d’Agde, but I didn’t know they were part of a movement. Or that the movement had special clubs and events to promote mutual glabrousness. If fact, being smooth means you might have a very active social schedule. The World of the Nudest Nudist (WNN), a smoothie club in the Netherlands, offers “weekly evenings in saunas and swimming pools, summer meetings all over the country, weekends in a naturist hotel in Germany, nudist cruises in Croatia and our yearly International Smoothy Days at Flevo-Natuur, a naturist campsite centrally situated in the Netherlands.”

Smooth and Cut Naturists (SCN) is an organization in the United Kingdom that promotes not only hairlessness, but also circumcision for male smoothies. As it says on its official website: “SCN is of the firm opinion that to be smooth (ie without any body hair), and for the male to be circumcised, forms the perfect combination (especially when nude) with so many distinct advantages.” The SCN is also into hygiene, which makes me wonder if it’s also not some kind of germaphobic nudist club. Maybe it’s just me but I think the circumcision requirement is strange, but the club defends it by saying, “We at SCN firmly believe that the circumcised penis is aesthetically more pleasing for various reasons—hygiene and looks (as naturists) being just two—particularly when it is not surrounded by what we, as smoothies, consider to be unsightly pubic hair. It is this extra requirement that makes SCN unique.”
⁶⁰

…

Pubic hair has an oddball history. First the U.S. government wouldn’t allow magazines to show any, and the art directors of
Sunshine & Health
,
Modern Sunbathing
,
and many of the dozen or so nudist magazines that sprang up in the late 1950s and early 1960s would have to pose models to hide their pubis or simply airbrush pubic hair out of the picture entirely. As censorship relaxed, magazines like
Playboy
and others began showing glimpses of pubic hair. My favorite magazine of this era is
Jaybird Happening
,
a kind of flower child nudist skin rag that showed freaky, free-flowing, uncoiffed genital hair in abundance. The magazine merged the nudist lifestyle with the pro-sex hippie movement of the late 1960s, and routinely showed naked men and women goofing off in various locales and posed in what are known as “spread shots.”
Jaybird Happening
was pretty much a celebration of free-range pubic hair.

A study by researchers at George Washington University used
Playboy
centerfolds as a timeline for the evolution—the researchers called it “Evulvalution”—of female genitalia and pubic hair. They found that, up until the late 1980s, almost all the models featured in the magazine had natural-looking pubic regions, but in the 1990s things began to change, and nowadays the majority of
Playboy
bunnies have partially trimmed or shaved pubic regions. According to their study, as the “appearance of centerfold models’ genitalia was becoming increasingly deviant from a natural female appearance, we hypothesized that pubic hair would appear partially or completely removed among the majority of the sample.”
⁶¹

Why did this happen? Some people claim that the arrival of the Brazilian wax in our hemisphere introduced it and the television show
Sex and the City
popularized it. That may be true, but I think the simple answer is: online porn.

Porn stars shave their pubic hair off for the simple reason that it provides the viewer a clear and unobstructed sight line to the actors’ genitals while they’re acting. A cleanly shaved vulva is the face, if you will, of the porn industry. I think this is done to distract the more discerning cinephile from the wooden quality of the acting and the simplistic script.

Shaving your mons pubis does have a historical precedent. It was primarily done by courtesans and prostitutes to control lice. Of course, a prepubescent pubic area wasn’t considered erotic back in the day, so to bring the sexy back early professionals would wear a pubic wig called a merkin. In an ironic twist, contemporary Hollywood actresses—who are, we must remember, young women living in this day and age—have been having to wear merkins while playing roles in period films like
The Reader
and television programs like
Boardwalk Empire.
I imagine that if
Downton Abbey
had explicit sex scenes, they would need a merkin or two to keep things historically accurate
.

Maybe nobody has pubic hair in Hollywood—which, let’s be honest, is in the business of infantilizing women—but they are slaves to fashion like everyone else, and fads and styles, much like influenza, eventually run their course.

It’s ironic that men and women are spending so much time and money grooming a part of their body that they are reluctant to reveal. It doesn’t make sense to me. Unless the smoothies are right and being hairless just makes everything a little bit sexier. But I guess I’ll never know, because the pendulum of pudendum coiffure is swinging back to the style of early naturists. In a recent
New York Times Magazine
article, Amanda Hess wrote about a recent resurgence in wild and woolly pubic hair: “there’s something refreshingly retro, delightfully expressive and confidently grown-up in getting back to nature.”
⁶²

I’m putting my clippers in the garage.

********
There are Dutch and British versions of the “Smoothie Club.” Here I quote from the Dutch website (
www.wnn.nu
).

There’s a Reason Florida
Is Shaped Like a Penis

I
was driving a rented Yaris
********
along a two-lane road through the scrubby central Florida woods when I looked up and saw a small plane skywriting the words
JESUS LOVES U
in puffy white letters against a vibrant blue sky. I wondered if this was unusual. Do they write religious messages in the sky every day or was today a special occasion? Maybe Florida is just a place where unusual things happen. Earlier that day I’d been at a truck stop and saw a food product called Alligator Bob’s Smoked Alligator Jerky. The packaging claimed it was the original recipe. Which apparently meant it contained pork. I’ve never had pork jerky but I’m guessing that pork and alligator pair well. Not that I tried any.

A sign at the freeway rest area warned motorists to look out for venomous snakes on their way to the bathroom. We don’t have these things in California.

I had left the Gulf Coast beauty of Tampa and was headed in the general direction of Lake Tohopekaliga, toward the center of the state. The road wound through flat countryside, past trailer parks, the occasional farmhouse, churches, Walmart Supercenters, and lots of new and expensive-looking housing developments. The fancy homes had weird structures jutting out into their backyards, like they were wearing futuristic backpacks. These turned out to be massive screened-in porches, large bug-proof living rooms that were evidence of sweltering nights spent hiding from biblical swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitos. Maybe what they mean when they say this is a God-fearing country is that they’re afraid of mosquitos.

A billboard on the side of the road informed me that a fetus’s heart starts beating eighteen days after conception. An interesting fact, but I’m not sure what they’re selling.

Florida is called the Sunshine State for a reason, and in February the weather is seriously pleasant—not too hot and not too humid—which might explain why there are so many nudist resorts in the state. According to the AANR, there are at least a dozen nudist resorts in Florida and even more non-landed clubs. Some of them, like Sunsport Gardens in Loxahatchee and Cypress Cove in Kissimmee, are well-established resorts that draw snowbirds from all over, including a surprising number of Canadians and Europeans who spend the winter months living the sunshine-filled good life in their RVs or rented homes.

And then there’s the Pasco County phenomenon. Just north of Tampa, on the Gulf Coast, Pasco County is the only place in the United States where you can find five clothing-optional resorts and a surprisingly large number of nudist communities in one place. Maybe it’s some kind of skin-happy vortex or a harmonic convergence that makes people in this area want to take off their clothes, but whatever the reason, there are a whole lot of nudists in Pasco County. The communities have names like Caliente, which boasts of being the “Hottest Party on the Planet,” and Paradise Lakes Resort, “Where you are free to be yourself,” or you could “Be a ‘Bare’ in the Woods” at the Woods RV and Park Model Resort. Some, like the Oasis and Lake Como Resort, don’t have slogans. They are more discreet.

A nudist community is a place where you can be naked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. You can mow your lawn, pick up your mail, go to the clubhouse restaurant, play some tennis, drink a beer with your neighbors, and never have to put on any textiles. Imagine never having to do laundry again.
That should be a slogan
. If you somehow manage to get bored at your nudist community, you’re only a short drive from the beach. But it’s hard to imagine you would be bored. For example Caliente resort offers daily yoga, tennis, water aerobics, and something called “cardio pump” that might be an exercise class or, given the age of the residents, a CPR refresher, along with Spanish lessons, happy hour, karaoke, and much more. There are even real estate agents who specialize in selling homes and condominiums to nudists. Florida is second only to Alaska in miles of coastline, and with its warm, sunny weather it’s basically a recipe for a clothing-free paradise. Except for the biblical swarms of bloodsucking insects.

But I hadn’t come to the middle of Florida for a cardio pump or to go house hunting in the buff; I’d come because the small town of Kissimmee in central Florida is where I’d find the American Nudist Research Library.

I turned onto the aptly named Pleasant Hill Road and soon found myself pulling into the driveway of the Cypress Cove Nudist Resort and Spa, considered by many to be one of the best nudist resorts on the East Coast, and home to the library.

Cypress Cove’s motto is “Away from it all, but not far from anything,” and it’s no exaggeration. The resort is a short drive from Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld in Orlando. Like a lot of nudist resorts, this is a family place, a couples-only resort, and single male visitors need special permission to stay there. And, similar to my earlier experience at the Terra Cotta Inn, when I first called to get a reservation I was denied, but I appealed to Ted Hadley, the owner of Cypress Cove, and explained my desire to visit the library. Ted couldn’t have been nicer or more understanding—he probably figured a writer who wanted to go to the library probably wasn’t a dangerous swinger—and gave me permission to visit.

I followed a yellow line painted down the middle of Sun Cove Drive, past a crowded section of RVs, until I reached the main office at the intersection with Suntan Drive.

As I checked in, I learned that the resort was established in 1964, which meant it was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and I was given a special commemorative pin to prove it.