Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith

Author:Mark Haskell Smith [Smith, Mark Haskell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Retail, Travel
ISBN: 9780802123510
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

Sex and the Single Nudist

Most people would think that twenty naked adults living together in a mountain hut for a week would lead to some kind of sexual something or other. A bit of hanky-panky. Maybe an orgy. At least a furtive booty call out by the barn. But if anything happened, aside from some minor flirting, it was incredibly discreet. Maybe that’s because most everyone was married or had a significant other, or perhaps everyone was too exhausted from hiking. Whatever the reason, the only sound I heard at night was in my room, and that was the sound of two very tired men swatting at the long-nosed Austrian mosquitos called mücken******** while trying to sleep.

People didn’t even talk about sex. Maybe bringing the subject up might, you know, bring the subject up, so it was best left unspoken. But I can’t really say, because nobody really said. Although on our last evening at the hut, Harry and I were standing outside watching the sunset when Maria-Grazia came out dragging her suitcase. She was driving back to Italy that night, but that’s not why I did a double take. She appeared to be transformed. I almost didn’t recognize her. Harry laughed and said, “You see someone naked for a week and you don’t think anything of it, and then she puts on a cute dress and some makeup and you think, ‘What an attractive girl!’”

And he was right. Here was someone I had eaten dinner with in the nude, whom I had hiked with in the nude, watched doing naked yoga on the grass outside, and I never once thought of her as a sexual being. Which is odd because she is a very nice-looking woman. But something had changed and it wasn’t her. Maria-Grazia was still Maria-Grazia; she’d just put on some clothes. What changed was my perception of her. Naked she was just another naked person among a group of naked people, but in a sundress and sandals, she was suddenly sexy.

How did this happen? Was it the clothes that suddenly made her attractive?

Diana Crane, a sociology professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, writes, “Clothes as artifacts ‘create’ behavior through their capacity to impose social identities and empower people to assert latent social identities.”46

Which is true. We all know that “clothes make the man.” We send a message to the world about who we are, what we desire, and what we aspire to be by what we wear, whether it’s a uniform, a business suit, or a backward baseball cap. But asserting latent social identities is one thing; going from naked and irrelevant to sexually attractive by putting on clothes is another. It seems counterintuitive.

Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, in his essay “The Glorious Garment and the Naked Truth,” writes, “In the figurative arts, eroticism appears as a relationship between clothing and nudity. Therefore, it is conditional on the possibility of movement—transit—from one state to the other. If either of these poles takes on a primary or

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