It is only recently that I have started to realise that my exposure to normal everyday nudity when I was growing up was unusual. Telling people about it now they are always surprised when I say how routine nudity was for me when I was a kid, and they tell me that their life was very different. So what do you think? Was my experience unique or did anyone else have it similar?
From as early as I can remember, nudity was just something that happened from time to time and no-one thought anything about it. From a very young age in the early 1970s I can remember going round to visit my parents’ friends houses in the summer and finding family members sunbathing either topless or in the nude outside in the garden. I can remember getting changed when other people were around and no-one finding it odd, and I can remember going swimming in back-garden pools without bothering with annoying things like swimsuits. Nudity was normal, routine, and absolutely nothing even slightly weird.
My parents were fine with nudity although they had slightly different attitudes to it. My father was unbothered by it and occasionally got naked himself when changing on the beach or around the house. I never saw him naked at anyone else’s house, but he clearly had no problem with anyone else doing it and his comments suggested he approved. My mother was different and seemed to want to pretend that nudity didn’t exist. When she met a naked person she would not disapprove at all, but would try to find a way to avoid interacting directly or looking too closely. I never remember seeing her naked even at home, but I always got the impression that she was okay with it in theory but just never wanted to do it herself.
This relaxed attitude to nakedness from the people around me carried on into my late teens, and not just with family or friends of family, as when I met up with people from school it was no big thing with them nude either.
At primary school (ages 5-11) it was mostly a situational thing, with no-one worrying about who saw what if we were getting changed or if we were swimming nude. This extended to their siblings and families too, and particularly on hot summer days it was a non-thing to see their brothers, sisters, and occasionally their parents in the nude, usually in the garden but occasionally showering with the door open or just getting changed. I’m not suggesting that this was universal and that I regularly saw everyone in the nude, but it was routine enough that those who were nude did not seem even slightly unusual.
When I got to secondary school (ages 11-18) the nudity with friends and others continued, and despite beginning to drift into our hormonal teens we never seemed to associate that sort of nudity with sex. It was still routine, and I saw enough naked people of all ages back then that it stayed completely normal.
Whilst at school I began to get interested in photography, and I was soon taking pictures of everything. This led to an interest in photographing people, and as a few of my friends were into photography too we somehow ended up taking pictures of ourselves and each other, sometimes clothed but often in the nude. Why nude? I think it was because we had heard somewhere that all good art photography was of nudes, and as none of us were bothered about it we decided to go with the flow.
After I left school, things changed. There was no Facebook or other social media back then to help us keep in touch so I lost track of most of my school friends quite quickly. My new friends and colleagues at work were either less nude-friendly or simply didn’t talk about it, and so I went from seeing nudity everywhere to it being something quite unusual almost overnight. Of course by then I had a car and so it was quite soon that I discovered nude beaches and found other nude friends, so plus ça change… as they say.
How unusual was this? Were the people I grew up with in the 1970s to 1980s complete outliers, or did this happen in a lot of places? And if it did then why did it stop?
One response
That’s certainly very different from my experience growing up in the UK in the 60s. I don’t remember ever seeing a family friend naked. My dad clearly had no issues with nudity and would regularly walk from bedroom to bathroom naked without any attempt to cover up. And at a young age I can recall sharing a bath with him as a totally normal thing. But my mum was totally the opposite. Never saw any other kids naked at junior school, and it came as a shock on starting secondary school to be expected to shower naked with 20 plus other boys. I wasn’t comfortable with it for ages, tho it appeared most of the other lads were unphased by it until they started puberty In fact there were a handful of lads who would hang out naked in the shower together chatting for as long as they could – which I found a bit daunting while at the same time wishing I had the nerve to join them!. As an early developer, I was probably just ahead of the rest in my selfconciousness, and, by my mid teens found I actually enjoyed being naked, and was one of the few lads who would still shower after sports, and began sometimes stripping of in quiet bits of woodland. But always as a solitary thing. I didn’t know of anyone who did similar, or spoke about being naked around family or friends. Though I read about nudist beaches and nudity at music festivals etc.in the Sunday papers in the 70s nd thought how wonderful that must be. but never experienced it until my mid 20s, and then I was hooked! As a student, I found one or two other guys who were quite relaxed being naked in shower rooms etc – tho others found this a bit outrageous – and had one friend in particular who was totally relaxed changing in front of me and vice versa. He came from a large blended family and told me he and his bothers were always openly naked together at home… though I think mostly for functional reasons than any social function. antBut this was as far as it went. I never met anyone who would simply hang out naked socially until I started going to nude beaches in my late 20s.