The End of the World: The Naked Truth

Birk Oxholm

I walked into a naked party the other day. Well, technically, it was the naked room at a clothed party, but boy, did it do.

I've never been invited to a naked party. I've often wondered why, since I tend to run in the same circles as those who attend such functions. Perhaps the party organizers, who are undoubtedly scrambling over every last detail, nude—"How's the china?! Are the hors d'oeuvres ready?"—notice my grizzly beard and think, "He probably has a lot of back hair, which would be aesthetically unappealing." I do not.

I'll admit I've always been a tad jealous of the Bacchanalian socialites who must frequent these parties and a little afraid that I wouldn't measure up once I got there. So being thrust into the naked room involved a strange mix of nerves, curiosity, titillation, and terror. Two girls, call them Betty and Veronica, friends of mine, sat back smiling languidly and laughing in comfortable chairs, while one guy, whom I just barely knew, sat hunched over between them. I don't remember much about him.

"Hey, Birk!" One of the girls waved. "Come on in. Welcome to the naked room. Take your clothes off."

"But you don't have to," emphasized the other naked girl. "There's no pressure," she said, staring at me to see whether I would take off my clothes.

"Yeah, man, just do what makes you comfortable," added the guy.

I seethed. I would show this douche what comfortable is all about! I ripped my shirt off and dropped my pants. And I don't wear underwear, which I assume must be good for some kind of street cred at these things, so there I was.

"I was in the pool!" I wanted to scream.

But I played it cool, leaning back awkwardly against the wall with my arms folded.

"Here, sit," said Veronica, who got up and sat on the arm of her friend's chair.

They resumed a conversation that I had interrupted, something about the construction of sexuality and gender. "All these binaries," the boy stammered eagerly, to no one in particular.

I tried very hard to look Betty in the eyes and listen to what she was saying, which meant I also tried very hard to keep her breasts in my field of vision at all times. Also it's really not fair how much breasts look like eyes at a time like that.

"People ask me if I'm bisexual, and I really don't know how to respond to that, or why I should even have to respond. I mean, I am, and I desire. Why can't that be enough?"

"Hmm," I nodded.

"Boobs," I thought.

They, the people, smiled at me, and I smiled, sighed, and tried to collect myself, and I'd look around the room at the sheets, the books, and the posters, and then look back at their faces. And it was fine. But below their faces were their breasts, and somewhere below those, I could just make out a bushy brown patch that I knew, somehow very deeply, that I must not look at. But I did!

Slightly disoriented, but hanging in there, I put my elbow on my knee and rested my head on my hand and gazed at my friends as sweetly as I could, a docile, yet troubled and bloated, thinker.

I was sitting like this when a good friend ran by the room, fully clothed, then slowly crept backward into the doorway, and smiled and shook his head. If up until that point I had been teetering between total helplessness and relaxation, perhaps even beginning to deal with—it cannot be ignored—the constant, almost tedious perplexity that there were naked women in the room, then my friend's knowing look sent me over the edge into feeling like a total lame-oid. It only took an instant of being reconnected to a world that sees naked parties as weird and self-indulgent at best to make me feel like an idiot.

"You're uncomfortable," said Veronica, who also had breasts.

"Nah," I dismissed her feebly. I got up and started to put my clothes on. I had to suck in my stomach to button my pants, and I made sure to zip up my zipper. I wriggled into my shirt (it suddenly seemed a size too small). "I just wanna dance," I mustered.

I paused for a second after I stood up. I looked at my two friends with their smiles and their warmth and, yes still, their breasts and their things, and their friend.

"Thanks for letting me come to your party," I said. They could obviously sense that I felt awkward, but I could sense that they didn't mind, and that they didn't feel badly towards me for it, which I appreciated.

I passed by Betty on the way out, who might well be the most empathic person I know and who also has gorgeous breasts, and gave her a high five as a I ambled out the door.

What was with me in the naked room? Believe it or not, I wasn't that much more nervous than usual; it was actually one of my smoother interactions for the month of February. And I wasn't overwhelmed by sexual energy. There might have been some paleo-sexual awareness that my genes stood a greater chance of getting passed on, but I certainly wasn't thinking about sex.

There was just this unremitting, droning awareness that these people were naked, that there were breasts in the room, and a substantial portion of my mental energy had to be continually expended in order to deal with this important and inescapably relevant fact. For reasons whose names I did not know, it was irresistibly more pressing to respond to these people in light of the fact that they were naked than to respond to them as I might have ideally with the full respect and care they deserved.

Of course, there are always barriers to being authentic with people. We're always being pushed subconsciously to act in certain standardized ways towards people based on things other than what they deserve as people: gender, race, class, and perhaps even the type of clothing they wear. I've always tried to make it my personal philosophy to overcome those barriers that I feel when interacting with people, primarily through humor, honesty, and treating them with the respect I feel for them as people. Boobies made this impossible.

This seems antithetical to the very purpose of naked parties, which seems to be to liberate people from the boxes of institutionalized power that are clothes. Now I only wish to stereotype a little, so I'll let Carla Bloomberg (who for better or worse is known as the de facto spokeswoman for naked parties on campus), do the talking. In a profile of her in The Blue and White, she said of naked parties, "The idea came out because in this consumer culture, we're creating this image through clothing, instead of clothing being an accessory." If I had to guess what that means, it would be that clothes suck because, while we're in them, we get treated on account of what we wear, rather than who we are. Clothes, to these iconoclastic naked party-goers, act as a barrier to a more authentic, less conditioned experience. So why did I find the experience of the naked room that much more artificial?

From what I can stereotype, there seem to be two main types of naked parties. They are bonded mostly by a distaste for the pornographically orgiastic. One type gives acknowledgement to the body and makes nakedness the focus of the party. There might be bodypainting or contact improv. dancing, pillowfights, or snuggling. The slope to sexual objectification is slippery, because I think people aren't nearly as cool as they pretend to be at naked parties, but whatever, I'm a pessimist. At least in this case people are forced to confront and work with that which conditions their interactions. If they have the discipline to work with it, more power to them.

The other type bears an uncanny external resemblance to any other party, except everyone's naked. People mingle. They drink from glasses of wine. New York magazine's David Amsden managed to infiltrate such a Columbia naked party and shrewdly noted that "The code of the naked party, it appears, is to pretend you are not naked." Foucault probably comes up, but this is Columbia—he'd come up anyway. While the dialogue might sound no different from any normal Columbia party—slightly awkward, smarmy, insightful—I'd be willing to bet most guys at the party have an internal monologue going that's something like this:

boobiesboobiesboobiesboobies
Boobiesboobiesjugsboobiesboobies.

I hesitate to ascribe the same style of muted, incessant voiceover to other genders and sexualities in part because I've been told that the male equipment isn't all that pretty, but I'm not willing to foist some categorical difference onto them either. It doesn't seem exclusionary to say that the stark reality which is almost impossible to ignore, the fact that people are naked around you, makes it exponentially more difficult to be authentic than when chained to the accustomed shackles of clothing.

Responses at this point probably vary from, "Awww, widdle Birkie's afraid of the scary girls. Somebody call the Waaaambulance," to, shrewdly espoused by someone wearing black, "Notice how the author has yet to mention his own body. He's clearly masking his own insecurities behind a polemical attack on the feminine." Check aaaand check. Both of these observations fit under the greater and entirely possible point that I am simply not stable or mature enough to handle naked parties. Wow, yeah, that's really true. I've rarely been accused of maturity, and never stability, and I'd be the first to admit that my take on things can be a little weird. But not everyone goes to naked parties expressly to fuck the system. People go because of friends, or curiosity, or, in all probability, just to fuck.

Perhaps I just committed the cardinal academic sin of assuming my experience would apply to most other people: that everyone else is loose as a goose at these things, and I'm the only one who's stiff. If that's true, well, then this just got a little awkward. If you've been thinking that the whole time, then you're not just reading, you're rubbernecking, and really, it's not polite to stare. Plus, you're lying, at least if you're a heterosexual male and, more than likely, even if you're not.

If naked partiers (the hobnobbers, not the finger-painters) think that their event succeeds in allowing people to be treated for who they are, rather that what they wear, they have come to this conclusion prematurely. Naked parties don't solve the problem of being treated on account of what you wear; they exacerbate it by turning it into the problem of being treated on account of the fact that you're naked, which is far worse because we're not accustomed to dealing with it. At least I'm used to clothing, so it's not so hard for me to treat people rightly and warmly, whether they're wearing pants or a skirt (I wear skirts sometimes).

I'm not opposed to nudity. In fact, I'm writing this naked. But on my list of things to change about the world, the oppressiveness of clothing comes in at no. 942, behind things like genocide.

For those for whom nudity is the cause celebre, a word of wisdom: naked parties where nudity isn't confronted defeats the purpose. If people want make change for the sake of treating others more authentically, on a very personal level, it's going to be awkward for a while, as people learn to get over their own prejudices. Deliberately ignoring one's own insecurities, however, and pretending they don't exist, which the atmosphere of the naked party encourages, doesn't make them go away. It just makes them more insidious, the elephantine breast in the room that keeps hindering people from having normal conversation, because it's really squishy and cumbersome and hard to move out of the way if you want to meet face to face with someone. I can't believe I'm freaking saying this, but the people who roll around naked and paint yin-yang signs on each other's stomachs are sort of onto something. At least the things they do, even if they are kind of weird, make people confront nudity, however they feel about it, and work at growing more comfortable with it. If people's prejudices aren't acknowledged and dealt with on the way, then the quest for a kingdom where people will be able to drink martinis freely and make self-love smugly through their knowledge of theory, all in their birthday suits, is over before it has ever begun.