Book Review: Naked by Brian Hoffman
Naked
Overview
In the acknowledgements, author and scholar Brian Hoffman notes that the idea for this book grew out of his own early experiences in a clothing optional home/community. He noted that as he grew older he became increasingly aware that what was normal in his own life was not nearly so normal for most others, at least in the US. It was, he suggests, that dichotomy between his experiences and the broader social order that led him to explore the history and influences on nudist life. As he notes in the acknowledgement, he tried to avoid coming across as a dyed-in-the-wool nudist who was seeking to justify his lifestyle but rather wanted to present a fact-based perspective on a lifestyle that is different from mainstream society.
The book it self takes the reader on a fact-based history of nudity and nudism in the US. One of the things that struck me as I read the book was how cyclic many of the issues are and, at the same time, how our focus and values shift over time. It also underscores how tightly we in the US associate nakedness with sexuality. The book focuses on the legal and social influences in the US and, beyond noting the influence of German Freikörperkultur on the development of nudism in the US, does not touch on how social nudity is handled in other countries. I think a more global exploration of nudity would be quite enlightening.
One of the key ideas I got from the book is that there are, and will always be, people who see the negative in the world; those whose minds will always expect the worst and are willing to throw out the baby with the bath water. They are the folks who presume to tell others how to live and find any excuse, shaky or not, to justify their crusades.
The book does not shy away from addressing the reality that there are people who leverage situations for their own advantage. That is, yes, there are swingers in the nudist community. There are pedophiles in the nudist community. And, yes, in an effort to protect the community many times those transgressions were ignored or explained away. There are also people and groups who hijack ideas and twist them to their own agendas. Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of that in politics today but it is really not much different today than in the past.
But the book also makes the point that there is room for a variety of perspectives. Are nudists more sexually liberated than mainstream society? That's a question the book only tangentially addresses. The astute reader, however, my infer from the information provided that people who are more open to nudism, more comfortable in their bodies, are likely to be more tolerant of alternative views of relationships. Whether that is good or bad depends, I suppose, on one's own point of view.