Reclaiming Time & Love For Being Naked

Reclaiming Time & Love for being naked

Jasmine Valentine

If you were to check your TikTok ‘for you’ page, there’s a likely chance you’ll scroll past a woman dancing in a bikini, effortlessly owning every inch of her body—while only a few clips later, there’s someone dehumanising another for wearing too little. In its worst instances, you may glimpse the active entitlement of a man to a woman’s public nudity.

It’s safe to say that culturally, we’re both incredibly confused yet linear in our approach to being naked. No one wants to acknowledge it—in a “don’t talk about that in front of Grandma” way—yet we all seek access to the nakedness of another. For many, nudity is exclusively reserved for sex and sexuality. If we didn’t see a pair of boobs plastered across a newspaper’s page three, we were taught to save ourselves for marriage, let our spouse savour our nakedness for their sexual enjoyment. We’ve flip-flopped between different social definitions of nudity throughout most of our documented history, and the tide feels as though it’s turning once again. The digital world in particular is stuck between the rock of reclaiming nakedness, and the hard place, which speaks for itself. However, the push of the pandemic may be slowly bringing us closer to the rock than we think.

We’re nowhere near the cultural achievement of nude emancipation, even now. Every platform, website or print publication presents itself like the addled mind of a teenage boy, divided in its efforts to establish exactly how we should be feeling about our own naked bodies. It’s no surprise that the onus falls on women to bear the brunt of nude shame—

if you’ve got a dick, it’s absolutely fine to windmill it outside of PC World before the Euro 2020 final.

If any part of a woman’s body is on display, our default is to assume it serves the purpose of sexually satisfying a male ego. Yet amazingly, the relationship between nudity and sexuality hasn’t always existed. The Romans wouldn’t have batted an eye at the naked body of another during a visit to the baths, comfortably engaging in business and gossip while it all hung out. Art history shows us the centuries of nudity immortalised in sculpture, adorned and held in high esteem by the cathedrals and courtyards that housed it. The hyper sexualisation that has stemmed from capitalist structure has rotted the relationship many now have with what they see in the mirror. Being naked has always had a social value attached to it, only now it comes at the price of consent and safety.

In the Roman Baths, Fyodor Bronnikov, 1865

Since the start of the pandemic, the energy around being naked feels distinctly different. Spending more time in your birthday suit was legitimately prescribed as a health benefit, virtual life drawing classes skyrocketed, body positive Instagram accounts seeped through the algorithm into our feeds. While we had (too much) time to reflect, unpick and do that all-important work on ourselves, a side effect appears to have been the subtle nuanced changes of our collective relationship to nudity. While we have typically sneered or written off nudism as being for either the old or unconventional, there was a 31% increase in the early months of 2020 alone. Perhaps the sexual side has been forcibly taken from us, after spending so much time without the comfort blanket of touch, or company outside of a vibrator. There’s been a structured window for us to learn to love what we see and feel in ourselves, away from the shackles of prying eyes that turn something wholesome and natural into a sexualised commodity.

I write all this because that’s exactly the journey I had. Before the age of about 20, I’d never been naked in front of another person—if we exclude my debut from the womb. Even when alone, I’d systematically get changed so I would reveal as little flesh as possible. Naked always meant dirty. It meant adult. An adult thing for adults to do, together. It never dawned on me that naked could mean comfortable, loving or exist outside an act or a type of behaviour.

As I got older, I stole moments of enjoyment in my nakedness. I knew I was beginning to feel comfortable owning my body but didn’t really know what to do with those feelings. Nudity still existed within the framework of dating and relationships. Little by little, I began to steal those moments purely for myself. Take a quiet moment to appreciate myself before a shower. Setting aside time to sit in the comfort I was feeling. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I began to actively embrace it. In lieu of a life drawing class—something that’s always intrigued me—I began to draw myself. I dedicated hours to looking, checking myself out in 360 whilst fuelling the fire with positive affirmations and praise. I’d dare to take more time to do the everyday things in the buff. I’ll never be at a naturist level, but I’m completely in love with my naked body.

As the pandemic marks an irreversible turning point for so many facets of life, I hope the same can be said for the conversation around nakedness. It’s starting to truly sink in that nudity doesn’t equate to sexuality, and our relationship with it feels as though it’s on the road to becoming healthier. We could really learn a lesson from the blazon attitudes of yesteryear. Our nakedness is ours and ours alone, not something others are in any way entitled to. Of course, we’ll continue to share it sexually—as we should. But perhaps now assumption will die out in favour of the naked truth.