Naked at Lunch (29 page)

The concept is super simple. The first Saturday in May whoever wants to garden in the nude is encouraged to do so wherever they are. You can weed, prune, plant, mulch, mow, harvest, and hoe in the buff. Why, you ask? Because “our culture needs to move toward a healthy sense of both body acceptance and our relation to the natural environment. Gardening naked is not only a simple joy, it reminds us—even if only for those few sunkissed minutes—that we can be honest with who we are as humans and as part of this planet.”
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That was in 2005.

Storey continued. “It’s been almost ten years and I’m still getting phone calls from radio people: ‘What’s your group doing?’ I go, ‘Trust me, it’s not a group.’”

Because World Naked Gardening Day is intentionally open-sourced and unorganized—and for the most part conducted in backyards—it’s difficult to say how many people around the world participate, but I admire the idea behind it. As Storey said, “We figured that if people tried gardening naked once, they would smile.”
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I can see that it could be nice. Hang out in your backyard and do a little weeding, prune some flowers, maybe lay down some mulch. As long as you’re not using electric hedge trimmers or a chainsaw, it sounds totally pleasant. But because my yard is essentially a rock-strewn cliff covered with giant agave, thorny euphorbia, and clusters of spiky haworthia, I don’t see myself naked gardening; it would be like herding porcupines.

While tending to your backyard in private is probably a good introduction to nudism, those who do so are not engaging in social protest like the World Naked Bike Ride and others who use nudity to get attention for various political and environmental causes. A few examples are Breasts Not Bombs, an antiwar protest group founded by actress Sherry Glaser that uses “our feminine nature to wake people up, to cause a stir, to arouse people from their apathetic complacent slumber”;
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photographer Spencer Tunick, who makes amazing fine art photographs of large groups of naked people, but has turned his attention to climate change by posing naked people on a glacier in the Swiss Alps; and AnimaNaturalis, a group that in 2013 protested the fur industry in Barcelona’s Plaça Sant Jaume by having members cover their naked bodies in blood and lie in a pile. There are dozens more grassroots political and social action groups around the world that use the naked human body as a way to draw attention to their message. Why? Because it’s effective. As the old adage goes, sex sells. Even if it’s not trying to be sexy.

Credit Lady Godiva as the first naked activist to expose herself in public. As the eleventh-century legend goes, she felt pity for the impoverished people of Coventry and asked her husband, Leofric, Earl of Mercia, to lower taxes. He refused and then, like a lot of married couples, they squabbled over the issue until he offered her a challenge he was sure she would refuse: if she rode naked through the town on a horse, he would lower taxes. We know how the story ends. Author Philip Carr-Gomm observed, “The power in the story lies in its alchemical nature, whereby she transforms the potential for humiliation into a moment of dignity and of pride for all the city.”
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Two groups that have taken naked protest and turned it into something of an art are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and FEMEN, a revolutionary group whose ideology is “Sextremism, Atheism, Feminism.”

PETA has run successful advertising campaigns with actresses like Alicia Silverstone promoting vegetarianism or porn star Jenna Jameson touting the seductive, tactile joys of wearing clothes made from the poromeric fabric called pleather. The group is not afraid to mix sex and its message—NBC famously refused to air PETA’s “Veggie Love” commercial during the Super Bowl because, according to Victoria Morgan, an NBC Universal advertising standards executive, the ad “depicts a level of sexuality exceeding our standards.”
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I’ve seen the ad and it is steamy—promoting hot girl-on-vegetable action—and boldly claims that “Vegetarians have better sex.”

I guess the network thought that millions of carnivorous football fans couldn’t handle the truth.

But what PETA is most famous for is the use of nudity in street actions. PETA members have been naked in cages to illustrate the plight of industrially farmed animals, naked protesting the sale of foie gras, naked en masse to promote veganism, and naked protesting KFC’s treatment of poultry. They started the “Running of the Nudes” in Pamplona, Spain, to try to prove to city officials that they could have a fun, tourist-friendly event without being cruel to animals. The running proved extremely popular, but didn’t manage to dissuade Pamplona from continuing the Running of the Bulls, a chaotic dash through the streets of the city where drunk tourists run alongside bulls and try not to get their wineskins gored.

But PETA is not a nudist organization. Like the World Naked Bike Ride, it uses nudism and nakedness to draw attention to its social and political cause.

FEMEN has a more ambitious agenda. Founded in Ukraine but now based in Paris, it sees society as a male-dominated construct: “We live in the world of male economic, cultural and ideological occupation. In this world, a woman is a slave, she is stripped of the right to any property but above all she is stripped of ownership of her own body.”

FEMEN has an excellent manifesto on its website where it articulates some of its objectives. (Keep in mind that English is not the authors’ first language.) FEMEN would like:

• to ideologically undermine the fundamental institutes of patriarchy—dictatorship, sex-industry, and church—by putting these institutes through subversive trolling to force them to strategic surrender.
  
• to promote new revolutionary female sexuality as opposed to the patriarchal erotic and pornography.
  
• to instill in modern women culture of active opposition to the evil and of struggle for justice.
  
• to create the most influential and combat-effective women’s union in the world.
  

I was with them until that last one, but then I’m a believer in combat ineffectiveness. Isn’t it better to just, you know, work things out?

To bring these issues into the public consciousness, FEMEN activists disrupt politics as usual, religion as usual, and culture as usual by baring their breasts—often with slogans painted on their bodies—waving signs, and shouting. Like sweet honey to a fly, naked breasts invariably bring photographers and reporters, and FEMEN has been very successful at getting its message across. It calls these actions “Sextremism” and defines it as “female sexuality rebelling against patriarchy and embodied in the extremal political direct action events.” Acts of Sextremism often come with catchy titles like “Get Out of My Vagina!,” which members shouted at a meeting of the Spanish Parliament in Madrid on October 9, 2013, and “Fuck You, Putin!,” which they greeted Vladimir Putin with as he met with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Hannover in August 2014.

You’ve most likely seen a picture of FEMEN protestors in the news, usually facedown on the ground being handcuffed by police.

FEMEN’s ultimate goal is “complete victory over patriarchy,” and I wish them well.

The World Naked Bike Ride and World Naked Gardening Day are trying to change the world in a slightly gentler way; they have some of the same goals as FEMEN and PETA, but the use of nudity is more, well, nudist than revolutionary. Mark Storey has a different take on nude protests: “Instead of thinking in terms of how much hassle we can cause people, I would rather try to look at civil disobedience in terms of how many smiles we can put on people’s faces.”

As Marshall McLuhan said so insightfully, the medium is the message, and in the case of naked protestors, the medium seems to be bare breasts. The breasts bring the attention of the public and news media, and the message—animal rights, women’s rights, etc.—is embedded in the nakedness of the activists. I think there’s something more than just our culture’s obsession with nudity. It’s not just casual titillation at work. A protestor without clothes is vulnerable; images of topless women tackled to the cobblestones bring out our natural empathy. By taking off their clothes, they appear to be putting it all on the line, putting some skin in the game, transforming “the potential for humiliation into a moment of dignity.”

But what about the young naturists who might not have an overt political agenda? The people who like to be naked and outdoors but don’t necessarily want to shout, “Fuck you, Putin!” Since they’re not joining nudist clubs or resorts in appreciable numbers, where are they going?

To answer that I have to revisit Austria and the Naked European Walking Tour of 2013.

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It was mid-July and we had spent the morning climbing to the summit of an Austrian mountain that overlooked the Obertauern ski resort. We had made the climb without clothes, as this was the Naked European Walking Tour, but now, as we sat on the summit and ate our cheese sandwiches, the weather began to turn. A cold wind kicked up and dark clouds moved across the valley toward us, the sky threatening to open up and drop rain or snow or sleet or something unpleasant on our heads. Most of us put on jackets or those thermal fleece things that hikers like to wear—I even put on my wool beanie—and we began the trudge down the mountain before the weather got even worse.

As I walked around a few patches of snow and felt the first drops of cold rain hit me, Karla, a British naturist in her thirties, ran past me. Except for a pair of boots, she was totally naked. She stopped and looked at a small pond on the mountain and turned to me. “Is that ice?”

I followed her glance and saw that the water on the small pond had indeed been frozen over by a thin layer of ice. I turned back to her and said, “Yes. Yes it is.”

She nodded and said, “Thought so.” And then she scampered down the trail.

Karla and Stuart
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are the couple behind the website Free Range Naturism. Previously they had a website called Naked Munros, which chronicled their ambitious attempt to climb all 282 Munros in Scotland in the nude. A Munro is what they call a mountain that rises over three thousand feet above sea level in Scotland. This friendly moniker is a tribute to Scottish mountaineer Hugh Munro, who cataloged the peaks. It’s a thing among Scottish climbers to try to “bag the Munros” by climbing all of them. It is not a thing among Scottish climbers to bag the Munros in the buff—in fact, it’s illegal. But that didn’t stop Karla and Stuart from bagging more than twenty-five summits and documenting their exploits by taking some genuinely beautiful nude-in- landscape photographs of each other. It doesn’t hurt that they are both attractive and fit.

The day after the Ursprungalm Death March, I sat down with them over tea at the hut in Mandling, Austria, to talk about their nudes-in-the-wild project.

I propped my leg up on a chair, trying to rest my swollen knee. “How’re you guys feeling?”

Stuart looked at his feet. “I feel kind of dead at the moment.” It was true that everyone on the NEWT was walking stiffly and joints were creaking after the long hike. Even Vittorio’s dog was tired.

“What made you take on the Munro challenge? I mean, climbing all of them with clothes on is difficult enough.”

Karla, who’s English, looked at Stuart as if something so specifically Scottish required a Scottish explanation. Stuart shrugged. “I grew up in Scotland, and everywhere in Scotland you’re near hills. So as soon as you’re old enough, a lot of us start running into the hills, that kind of thing.”

Which is understandable. But how does a person go from a casual hiker to a naked mountaineer?

“I quite often walk by myself and, you know, it would be a long hot day and you’re coming down the mountains, no one else around, and you see this beautiful stream with rock pools, and I thought, ‘Well, let’s just get in.’ So I stripped off, jumped in, and I thought, ‘Oh, I rather like this.’ And it sort of went from there, you know, just walking a little bit naked sometimes, but I guess it really took off when I met Karla.”

Stuart has a whacky sense of humor and I wondered if that was a pun. Was Karla a nudist? Did Stuart get her into it?

Stuart continued. “The first time we went hiking together, we went with a couple of friends and they were going rather slowly, so we raced on to the summit. And Karla had such a wonderful idea. When we got to the summit she would take her clothes off. We’ll take some pictures and then she’ll put her clothes back on, and then the friends would turn up and be none the wiser. And the pictures turned out really quite well.”

Karla looked over at Stuart. “We made a rule, didn’t we?”

Stuart nodded. “We always made the rule that no matter what the weather, the very minimum would be the summit naked shots, which encouraged us to stay naked a little bit longer. Now it’s quite a big thing in Scottish culture to try to complete the Munros. I’ve been doing Munros since in my early twenties, so every time I went out, I was usually trying to do another Munro. But you know, there’s thousands of people every year who complete the Munros.”

I pointed out that not many of them were naked because, among other things, the weather is notoriously windy, wet, and cold.