Growing Up Confused

Our cultures teach in overt and subtle ways. The lessons learned don’t always serve us well. It can be difficult to escape the ingrained. Perhaps you’ll find this relatable.

I grew up being taught that unclothed was sexually stimulating. I grew up being taught that my casual nudity as a child was insignificant, but not wearing clothing was naughty. I was taught that we must conform to social norms, which were even more extreme back then. Women were wearing white gloves and males of all ages were in suit and tie. All were acting a part, when shopping and even visiting in each other’s homes.

It was naughty to be naked when the parents weren’t watching. It was liberating and titillating. By the time that I no longer needed a babysitter, feeling secretly naked was done doing cartwheels.

Images of forbidden nudity increased its sexuality, yet living in Paris, with its art, or Follie Berger, I was receiving an incongruent message.

Proper conformity felt restrictive in many instances, but also by then European topfreedom at the beach was beginning to appear and I was shielded from that. Since I was a young school age child, when our authorities were out of earshot we sang, “There’s a place in France, where the women wear no pants.”  It was a curious blend of forbidden fruit and expression in a world of repression. The following line, “And the men go naked” was a message to me, a man to be, as something exciting. I had to project myself into it, “But, how could I do such a thing?”

When new teenage sexual senses emerged, when Playboy, curiosity, and adolescent peer bluster became a part of my life, these were influenced from the conflicting upbringing of my childhood. I was a mess sexually, in a new frontier filled with fears. Even more than growing pains, I watched my college aged brother, who “after getting her pregnant,” did the “right thing” got married and struggled in life’s extremes and hardships. Interwoven into all of this was nudity, with layers of sexual connotations.

I lived with “Naked.” Titillation was found in white tanlines, the place where a body was not supposed to be exposed.

Coupled with this were those lady’s errors while they wore the ever shorter skirts. Body exposure was “nasty” stuff.

Through my zits, in the mirror, I had to deal with a changing body and the cultural images of perfection impressed upon me. I lived with my peers in competition and need for acceptance. Both of these created body image issues.

All of this was a daily torment. It was suffering that needed to be dealt with. It was a conflicting existence. It was something that I was groomed, channeled and hoodwinked into.

Effective birth control was making its way into the culture, sexual liberation began to take hold and then the media began to allow conversation about it. Playboy was read like Gideon’s, but under the bed covers and it presented a now new narrative. I had to grow up and start to make my own decisions, if I were to find some peace.

For me, nudity and sexuality were one in the same, a torrid mishmash, until one hot summer day in Michigan. When a set of parents were not home, me, a virgin in a constant state of hormone blindness, was invited by my girlfriend to go upstairs for a shower. She went ahead while my mind played out scenarios of “If you’re man enough to use it, you’re man enough to take responsibility” and “Oh boy, this is going to be great.” I was going to ravage her “completely naked” body. It was a highly sexually charged situation in my adolescent morass of confusions and ignorance.

There I was naked, with her waiting on the other side of the shower curtain. My fantasies aligned. I stepped through, my head then rose to the remarkable sight of blonde femininity. I felt somewhat shy, yet driven and ready for fulfillment. But there in those moments, something else, very unexpected happened. It was truly an astounding surprise. As we looked upon each other, and began to touch, it was just good clean fun, natural, nice, good, curious. It was not an orgy of lust at all. It was also a revelation, which changed my outlook of any contextual sense of all things interpersonal between man and woman, and for years to come. Nude was no longer naughty and could be separated from sex. It was a shower. It washed away the dirt that was inside of me, as well as the outside grime.

Soon after, I came of age in a “Woodstock Generation.” I identified with the skinny dipping when I saw the movie. I saw myself as a part of all of that. I was questioning everything that I had been raised to believe, clearly down into an absolutist philosophical quest. Sex, war, making a living, purpose in life, dress, race, patriotism, nothing was immune from my pondering and experimentation.

I found that I wasn’t an absolute kind of animal. The distillation taught that there was only one absolute in the universe, “There are no absolutes.” So, I had to discover my sense of heart, learn how to be what I felt and deal with my wholly repressed feelings. I wasn’t Mr. Spock, or a soldier with a perpetual stiff upper lip, nor to be perfect. This sorting me out and discovery was a monumental task.

This confusion, especially the knee jerk habituation that we are all taught as children and is enforced in all social and cultural interactions, can take years to shake. Nudity is a small part of the process. Nude is not sex, but it can be colored with it. Sex is colored with a million connotations and fetishes, in any given time and context. I lived and learned. It seemed that the more that I was revealed, the more was revealed.

One thing I did explore often in my twenties was how much fun it was to satisfy curiosity about uncovered bodies. I hadn’t grown up exposed to the grand variety of real human form, just a limited collage of photos.

A part of continued social nudity was finding that we could and most often became, more of ourselves and less sexual when interacting bare. Hanging around, doing whatever we do, was not just good clean fun anymore, but natural.

Sitting by a hot spring with friends sunning and conversing, being in the fundamental experiences of life, is quite a lot different fun than it had been pictured, when growing up. Eventually, sex became good clean fun as well in my mind and sense, but that’s wholly another evolving story.

It’s all a journey. We are given a matrix of facets of identity and self-concept and so life becomes a process of unlearning and seeing through the imaginative cloak that this has created. A very good strategy during this journey is to literally cast the cloak aside.

I am on the forum of FreeRangeNaturism.com often, if you would like to converse.

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