No sign existed for the nudist resort- just a red barrel by a steep driveway signifying entrance. Then, an electric gate where members buzzed in. At this get-away, I stood naked on a wooden picnic table in the late afternoon summer sun. Up next to get a picture painted on my belly, excitement spread to my toes. I was nude as a newborn babe that summer, skipping around in the grass up on a hillside. It was the early 80s and nudist resorts were taking off.
A couple of unclothed young women sat on stools holding paint palettes that were smeared into a rainbow mess. They were probably in their teens but to a 5 year old seemed so big. The cool contrast of the paint tickled against my warm skin. Moments later I proudly showed my parents the beautiful nature scene.
Later that day, as we arrived in front of my blue-collar grandparents house for dinner, my dad delivered to us girls a serious order: we were not to mention the artwork on our bellies to my grandparents. They would not understand. Of course, try keeping quiet such a share-worthy thing when you’re 5 and proud of your tummy-art.
Grandma and Grandpa nodded in acknowledgement of our bright bellies but they weren’t pleased. This was the contradiction I lived with: being nude was perfectly fine…until you left the camp. Outside these niches, nakedness lived as a best kept secret.
You see, my parents were nudists but no one else outside of our immediate friend circle or family was, save for a few. Yet I don’t remember childhood without “the camp”, as we called it.
From natural hot springs in the middle of nowhere Utah (literally a random hole in the ground in the desert), to a naked lower-middle class country club in Indiana (a sand volleyball haven), and a clothing optional upscale hot springs spa and resort in Northern California (think massage and yoga and fancy vegetarian meals), I’ve been nuding around the country.
However, in retrospect, I don’t recall talking about it with my friends until my 20s. Being the 1980s and living in the Midwest, my parents, though somewhat hippies, still were products of a subtly shaming Christianity where nudist resorts would’ve been seen as taboo.
So I wonder, as I sit on my adult perch, what do nudist camps offer for positive body acceptance and shaping one’s physical and sexual boundaries when it’s also something one keeps hush-hush about? And what costs or benefits are there for children growing up with this as the norm?
As you’ll see, and as with anything, for me, it was a complicated picture. I hope you’ll join me in this reflective journey into the naked truth of my childhood upbringing into womanhood through the lens of having been raised at nudist resorts. But first, let’s get some context of nudist resorts in America.
Nudist Resorts: A Brief History
Nudist camps have been thriving in America since the late 1920s. A place in New York called Sky Farm fought for their rights to nakedly congregate and won, spurring a growth in nudist culture throughout the 20th century. Then there were the free-loving, back-to-the-earth hippies of the late 60s and 70s- and nudity really started to boom on the edges of society.
But before that, believe it or not, Ben Franklin and Henry David Thoreau (who called nude walks outside, “air baths”) enjoyed the pleasures of nakedness and professed its health benefits. Imagine being taught in high school that some of our foundational thought leaders probably had many a light bulb moment in their birthday suits!
Yet nudism goes back even further than that. In Europe in the late 1800s, the Naturalist Movement promoted going naked as a health benefit. In contrast to densely populated and grossly industrialized burgeoning cities, they believed stripping off restrictive clothing and getting back to a natural lifestyle in general, be it with food, environment, or nudity, was a boost to one’s well-being.
The first actual nudist park was in Germany in 1903 and today there are many smatterings of nude beaches and resorts all over the world. Indeed, in Cap d’Agde, France, there’s a nudist resort so big it functions as a small city in summers, reaching populations of 40,000- all clothing free. And Pasco County, Florida is home to the probably the most densely populated nudist resorts, bearing 13 of them.
However, if we want to go deeper, according to the American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR), humans in warmer climates have been eschewing clothes for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians received much of their education in the nude and the Grecian Olympics were done bare butt until the Christians came and deemed it too pagan (taking all the fun out of life!).
So nudity is nothing new. In fact, there are about 300 clothing optional resorts in America right now. Some are mom-and-pop type campgrounds in the Midwest, others are swanky spas in the wealthier coastal towns.
While it isn’t legal to walk around naked in public, and generally you can’t even be seen naked through an open window inside your own home or on your property, nudist resorts are legal communities or businesses that have been transparent with their states (the American Association for Nude Recreation is a great resource for finding legal nudist resorts in America).
Now that we’ve acquainted ourselves with the context of nudist resorts in the world, what exactly happens at them and what is the attraction for folks anyway?
What Happens at Nudist Resorts? Understanding the Appeal
Nudist resorts appeal to people primarily because they promote self-acceptance and a come-as-you-are outlook on life. Sure, you may get an errant pervert whose aim is to ogle or harass naked strangers but that is actually rare, according to the AANR.
Generally, nudist camps are like any other recreational resort business or campground but where clothing is optional. They are havens for like-minded people seeking common ground in our most basic form: our naked bodies. The outlook can be summed up to a philosophy that we are born naked, there’s nothing wrong with it, so be happy in your own skin and carry on with life’s activities, together, naked.
For instance, growing up in Ohio, our nudist mainstay was a place called Paradise Gardens. It was a lakeside nudist campground on top of a wooded hill that closed several years ago.
Put simply, it was like a sleep away camp with all the fun of boating, volleyball, art, sun bathing, and swimming but done without clothes. Do you want to ride a golf cart around the acreage? Fine, do it naked. Want to share an ice cream cone listening to music? Naked. Carry on.
Never in my childhood had I a negative experience at a nudist camp (early adulthood? read on). Some of my fondest kid memories come from there. Granted, we were under the constant presence of my father but I like to think it’s true for most cases.
For instance, us kids stood nude by the side of a warm lake at the peak of summer trying to catch tadpoles. An innocent nude me held onto my naked father’s back as he was the shark and I the minnow playing in the pool. I grew up with a sense that my body, and others, were fine just the way they were and fit into nature like a hand in a glove.
Nudity at these resorts wasn’t a thing to hide or to even note. If you did seem preoccupied with others’ nakedness, you were likely asked to leave.
In summary, for nudists, there’s a real gift in seeing the nether regions of humans in an ordinary, day-in-the-life way. It takes the stigma off our genitals, removing the sexuality from it, and freeing one up to look at the human, and yourself, as they bare-butt are. This common mentality for nudists invites a communal connectedness and a sense of camaraderie as fellow children of nature’s, or God’s, creation. And to some, that’s spiritual.
But in a society where on the one hand we put suggested nudity all over the media in a highly sexualized way in ads, sexy shows, in rock stars, and on social media in the vein of Only Fans and the like, but on the other hand we shame and condemn nakedness in the general public and act like prudes about sex and basic nudity (think of all the upset over women breastfeeding in public!), what should be considered at nudist resorts in the context of bringing children to them? Le’ts take a look.
Are Nudist Resorts Family Friendly? Pros, Cons, and Considerations
As mentioned, the nudist camps I’ve grown up with have been family friendly. In general, according to the AANR, most camps are open to having kids attend and promote their resorts as opportunities to spread kinship and naked positivity to children. Kids take to nudity like fish to water and are more likely to be less self-conscious than their parental counterparts (depending on their age, of course. Tweens and teens are more likely to be shy or modest about it).
But some camps are strictly kid-free, such as ones made for adult swingers (Personal opinion? Yuck!), so it’s up to the consumer to do the research beforehand about bringing kids. Also, most places have a “mind your kid at all times” policy. However, there are some naturalist, or nudist, summer camps for youths that tie in typical summer camp activities with an education on nudity and naturalism.
As with anything, there will be pros and cons to making nudism a family affair and it’s important to thoroughly analyze the issue before you jump into this lifestyle with kids in hand. Starting with the positives of nudism, let’s dive into these.
Pros of Nudity around Children
Unfamiliar folks may assume it’s risky to expose children to nudity because it will corrupt their perception of sexuality and their bodies. Parents fear that if their kids see them naked the kid will be psychologically shocked or damaged and somehow relate sex to their parents. But in fact, this is not true, according to research.
Children who grow up with nudity in the family, and it not being made into a “thing”, wind up with healthier outlooks on their own bodies. They have better expectations around sexuality and the nakedness of others. Unrealistic images of perfect forms are less likely to lodge in kids’ mental pictures of the physical form because they’ve grown up seeing what actual nude bodies look like. This takes pressure off of them to have “perfect” bodies or to expect that of others (and we can all use a break from perfect!).
In other words, children are sponges to the indirect (and direct) messaging they receive around bodies, nakedness, sex, and others. Thus, it’s important to be intentional about how we carry ourselves around our kids in regard to nakedness, our bodies, and opinions of others bodies if we’re going to expose them to regular nakedness.
Naked Imagery & Unconscious Messaging to Children
Looking back, I recall receiving these unspoken messages clearly about nudity. For instance, the swimming pool at our Ohio club in my early childhood sat inside a large glassed-in building with a mural painted on one wall, showing cartoon images of curly headed naked adults and kids sharing a laugh and playing sports.
Illustrations of happy, pudgy tots hanging onto their daddy’s hairy legs were depicted, along with varied-sized flaccid penises and vaginas complete with 1970s style pubic hair just a few feet above the tots heads. Boobs like pendulums or ant mounds popped out on tall and short women.
We were happy and free children whose parents were often trailblazers riding off the hippie mentality of challenging societal norms. Nudist campers were people who celebrated the naturalness and as-is-ness of bodies who played volleyball together and sat in the grass on towels talking.
These messages of human innocence were powerful to my young mind. Children are naturally not ashamed of their bodies. It isn’t until mostly well-intentioned adults tell them to hide it away and shame them that they start being body-conscious and possibly develop negative feelings towards birthday suits.
Thus, the upside of exposing children to nudity in a healthy, communal manner is that their unconscious minds develop a normal, relatable, and informed view of theirs and others bodies and that sexuality is not automatically tied to being naked.
Positive Takeaways for Kids Being Raised Around Nudity:
- Self-acceptance, no body part shaming or labeling as taboo
- Normalized body “flaws”/what real bodies look like
- Opens doors to discuss sensitive topics like consent (i.e. giving kids permission to not want to be naked around you or see you naked)
- Opportunity to talk about boundaries and healthy/unhealthy touch/looking
Now that we see the potential benefits of nudism and families, I have to admit that I was lucky to not have crossed paths as a child with a sexual predator at a nudist resort. I just have to imagine there were some who attended our nudist camps but we didn’t cross paths. My parents, particularly my father, were always watching over us.
Indeed, in a bubble of a naïve trust of adults, I grew to feel safe being naked around men. My father’s trustworthiness as a good man lodged into my young unconscious, setting me up to extend that benefit of the doubt to all men as I grew up. There’s that ‘kids-being-sponges- absorbing-the-messages-of-their-childhood’ again.
However, as I entered my early 20s, this openness to nakedness would have me regretting such an innocent mentality and wishing I had been given better verbal communication around nudity than what I got from my good parents. So we must acknowledge the potential risks of raising children around nudist resorts. Because try as you might, parents can’t always know everything a child needs to hear in order to properly send them out into the world alone. Let’s take a look.
Cons of Nudity around Children
You can certainly go overboard with nudity around kids. Especially if you fail to talk to them about it or educate them on sexuality, boundaries, and appropriateness, you’ll set your kids up for struggling around nakedness or worse, put them in danger.
Little children are more likely to be flexible and open-minded about seeing their parents nude. They openly ask questions, feel a lack of embarrassment, and accept their environment as “normal” because that’s what they know. However, because they are susceptible to what adults provide as their experience, it’s key that the adults tell little kids about healthy and unhealthy touch, staring, and time-and-place rules for nudity.
You don’t want your little Charlie to strip down in kindergarten because at home Mom does the dishes naked sometimes. Or barging in on others using the bathroom. Or worse, you don’t want them to not know the difference between seeing mom and dad naked and that stranger down the street showing their private parts rying to trick them in some sick way.
Not only that, but as kids age, they gravitate towards self-consciousness around nakedness because their sexuality and independent, different-than-the-parents thought is emerging. If parents don’t set up healthy lines of communication with their youths then this can give the kids some psychological issues.
Tweens and teenagers need to be comfortable saying to parents, “hey, I don’t want to see you naked or to be seen naked by you anymore.” If this freedom isn’t established, then this can give the kids anxiety or repressed emotions. It could inhibit their sense of being able to say “no” to future unwanted sexuality or nakedness with other people.
This is a key point (and ties into my own negative young adult experience related to nudist resorts- see below): If you don’t teach your child to have a say or not about nudity and also don’t teach them that it’s NOT OK for other adults to be naked in front of them, you run the risk of them being preyed upon in their trusting naivety about nudity.
So be clear with your kids about when and how to say “no” to getting naked with others, help them set boundaries, and make it ok for them to speak their minds without shame or reprimand.
Some Signs To Look For That Your Child Is Uncomfortable with Nudity:
- Talking too much about nakedness and making sexual jokes/comments
- Staring too much at yours or others private parts
- Refusing to be around you when you’re nude or saying they don’t like it
- Making rude comments about bodies or trying to touch people’s private parts
- A change in their personality when you or others are naked in front of them
All this is to say, while kids can receive plenty of healthy unspoken or verbally limited messaging from parents, it’s super important to have meaningful, clear, repeated conversations with children and teens about nude boundaries, sexual boundaries, and the appropriateness or not of being naked with others in a situation.
This leads me to my negative experience at a nudist resort in my early 20s and how a lack of clear, instructive communication in my upbringing played a role in my being sexually mistreated by an older man there.
In Over My Head
When I was about 19 or 20, My father took us to the crème-de-la-crème of nudist camps: a California haven just hours away from San Francisco above the wine country. It was there that I learned an adult right-of-passage: that you can’t simply trust the world around you despite its larger goodness or absolute naked beauty. That just because your home growing up was safe, it doesn’t mean the world is! Ah the naivety of youth.
Arriving at the CA resort for the first time was positively overwhelming. A fancy iron gate in the form of a Chinese dragon barred entrance. The scent of rosemary and sage scrub lifted my simple Ohio olfactory system to new heights. Wild manzanita trees with their lipstick red bark and twisty limbs speckled the mountainous landscape. The silence of being on top of a large hill, nestled into the crook of a mountain range overwhelmed my sense of normal, making me feel that I’d arrived at some sort of Eden.
I’d never seen a place so beautiful.
As we walked up to the fancy pools, lush, carefully landscaped floral horticulture lined walkways and overhung from gazebos and trellises. A big fountain stood as the centerpiece, joining a ring of mint green lodges, a squat yoga center and spa, a vegetarian restaurant and tea house, and rentable pretty purple cabins underneath tall California oak trees. I could hear the trickling of a nearby waterfall. It was a spiritual awakening in me.
I was gobsmacked with wonder. People lived like this? I wanted some of that! For a young lady stepping into adulthood, it opened an array of of possibilities for my life that I’d never considered.
A year or so later, as I just turned 21 and realized college wasn’t right for me (then), I packed up my dad’s Corolla and drove the 2000 miles from Ohio back to that California hot springs nudist resort all alone. Roughly 150 people lived and worked at the hot springs. I wanted to become one of them while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I loved the potential ahead: learning how to meditate, doing yoga, and becoming a vegetarian.
But one night, less than a week into my being there, a wise-looking man 20 years my senior, who seemed well-respected by others, invited me to a meal in the community kitchen. The premise was to welcome me to the place and show me around. And that seemed so nice as I didn’t know anyone.
An Ill-Intended Invitation
But here’s where my innate trusting of naked older men served me wrong. I was in over my head; too naïve and lacking life experience to exercise good judgment about the invitation. And I was vulnerable: I was all along and wanted so badly to belong and fit in; to make friends and feel a part of that community.
My parents, though good people, perhaps failed to talk enough with me about the inappropriateness of sitting naked with an older man at a nudist resort. You might be thinking: duh! But to a young lady who grew up at nudist resorts with her father, that’s not an odd thing.
Instead of an assertive, critical thinker like I wish I was, I was a passive “good girl”; the personality type of not questioning authority or people’s motives who struggled to say no or speak up when conflicted.
Thus, I assumed the genuine-seeming man’s intention was as simple as he said: a good guy welcoming the new gal to the resort.
But I also didn’t listen to that little voice of intuition within warning that something was amiss (I was trained out of inner-knowing by a Catholic education that taught you to deny your own beliefs in many ways). Have you ever felt like that?
So down the slippery slope of unclear boundaries I fell.
One Bad Night is All It Takes
There I went, alarm bells ringing but ignored, red-flags flown into the wind. As soon as the man wanted to hang out at a barn in the community garden after the dinner it should’ve cued me, “Oh a 40 year old man trying to isolate a 20 year old woman with no friends or family around. Yeah, bad idea.” There’s a spider’s web of reasons why that innate warning system failed.
My parents weren’t big life-lecturers pointing out possible red flags in relationships. And Catholic schools certainly didn’t deep dive into those topics; they just told you to stay away from sex at all costs until marriage at the same time as to respect your elders!
I could reason, and blame, it into the ground why I so stupidly trusted a stranger but in reality I like to blame my brain. It wasn’t fully formed. The prefrontal cortex, the critical thinking center of us, was still a few years shy of its full debut. I made a mistake that unfortunately cost me years of my mental health.
Yet it is important to note that another reason why things went south that night was perhaps because of my upbringing at nudist camps. When we think of what gets normalized for children, nudity with older men was normal for me. When the man took off his clothes and encouraged me to, I obliged as that was all normal to me. It was hot in the barn loft, and it made sense because, after all, we were at a nudist resort.
So there we were in the loft-turned-living room of the barn, sticky in the late Spring heat. I felt obligated to hang out with him since he treated me to making my dinner (looking back, he made a few comments guilting me about it). I stupidly smoked pot and accepted a drink from him, something “to make me feel relaxed”. Years later I would understand that what he gave me was the date rape drug GHB.
He had sex with me. Yeah, more like rape. It’s always been hard for me to call it that as I take so much responsibility for my role in all of it. Doing the weed, going off with him alone in the first place. He probably thought I wanted it. But God’s honest truth, I was simply naive and wasn’t thinking about sex at all!
All I recall after I took the drink was saying no to his asking if I wanted to have sex. That was clear. Then, the next thing I remember was that he was on top of me, eventually ejaculating onto my stomach, sorry for the crassness but it’s true.
I left my body. Suddenly I was like a frozen statue, like someone took my insides out and I was left a mute sack of flesh. I woke in the dark dawn of the next morning to the irascible sound of blue jays outside the window that seemed to be squawking, “What have you done, you idiot! Look what you’ve gotten yourself into!”
Coming to Terms with The Cons of Nudist Camps
It’s hard for me to admit all this. For a good decade or more after this event I took all the blame. I called it a ‘gray area sexual experience’ rather than rape. A lot of the blame rested on me. I put myself there, I did the pot, I did the drink. But I said no. He had sex with me anyway when I was too out of my mind to get out of the situation. Too high to properly consent, or to stop him. That was all on him.
To trace this back to being raised at nudist camps maybe is a reach. But I do so to point out that there is a correlation on what is normalized for children playing into their adulthood. I doubt I would have gotten naked with that man if it wasn’t for my feeling that it was normal. I never suspected the man of having ill intent. I’d been naked with my father often with no bad things ever happening.
But this type of manipulative behavior, I came to learn, was rather common at the resort. I’d see that same man cornering other newbie young women the same way. Perhaps he fancied himself a spiritual leader or a one-man welcome committee with his penis. I wondered if the women had sex with him or if he raped them too. Then, I’d hear stories of other men offering massages to women and taking it to a scummy level.
Once, when I was working late, I took a soak in the clothing optional hot pool afterwards. I thought I was all alone until a fat, greasy man suddenly stood up out of the pool masturbating. He headed my way as though I was just scenery or a prop in his disgusting fantasy.
By then, I was a tougher cookie. I said something to him like, “You’d better get the fuck away from me.” Which he did (luckily, because he easily could’ve overpowered me and raped or drowned me) and I left.
I swallowed the bitter pill that humans were often awful. Despite how liberating and beautiful a place, darkness lurks just around the corners when humans are involved.
Keeping Your Face to the Sunshine
It took me a long time to process and heal from that regretful experience and the repercussions that followed. In my shame, I took the blame and stuffed it away. I fought my way to carrying on and not let it ruin my experience there. But it really did. Traumatized, I slipped down a path I never wanted for myself of frequent drug use, promiscuity, and depression.
But that’s another story. The beauty and peace of nature at the nudist resort did help soothe my wounds. But the experience put into perspective a truer picture of what it means to be naked, the dark and light side.
Shamefully, I was too scared or traumatized to seek help or to tell anyone what really happened. I pretended that I’d wanted that sex simply to have some control over what had happened.
But I forgive myself. I just wish I would’ve outed that scumbag for the predator he was. That I’d spared any other young woman that crossed his path.
So much rests on a person’s critical thinking.
In Conclusion
Nudist camps in general, I’ve found, are safe places. Nudity can be transformative. It challenges one’s fears. Facing shame about nakedness can return you to a place of joy that you felt as a child. Nudists want to be free from clothes and the constraints around bodies society puts on us. They want to feel liberated from negative stigmas about nakedness: that body parts are not just sexual vehicles.
Negative judgments about body weight and shape can be shattered when being nude with others in a platonic environment. Nudists are accepting. It can adjust one’s shame about their flaws and be a healing experience. People look beyond a person’s figure to who the person truly is.
This is the sunshine to the shadows that inevitably exist wherever humans roam.
However, it’s been decades since I’ve been to a nudist camp. If I went back to the California resort that I called home for a few years, it would be more so because of it being a healing spa with amenities like camping and introspective workshops and yoga, not the nudity. I’d probably wear a bathing suit or find a place similar to it that wasn’t clothing optional.
I have no desire anymore to get naked with strangers. Maybe that’s because of my bad experience. But I don’t need to see others bodies to appreciate them or to bust through societal judgments or constraints.
And it can be healthy to go to nudist resorts as a family with the proper guidance and communication. I have children. But I’ve chosen to not expose them to nudist camps. My father wanted to take my older son once when my son was 5. I said no. While it is healthy to teach children that our bodies are innocent and beautiful, children are impressionable, like I was. And I believe that exposure to adult nakedness without temperance or caution can set kids up to be inappropriate with nudity. Or, heaven forbid, to be taken advantage of like I had been. It can be confusing if very clear, instructive boundaries are not spelled out to kids.
I’d advise anyone taking children to these places to thoroughly discuss boundaries. Talk about safety and how to say no and not get into bad situations. Exposure without knowledge can be harmful.
So, bottom line: nudist camps are fodder for perhaps some of the most interesting and liberating moments of your life. But know that there is always a dark side.