Letting the Cat Out of the Bag (Without Opening the Bag)
Because “So Anyway, We’re Nudists” is a Terrible Conversation Opener
At some point, most naturists face the same question: how do you go about telling people you’re a naturist without making it weird for everyone involved? You’ve been living this life, quietly, happily, without a press release, and now someone in your world is about to find out. Maybe you want them to. Maybe you’re terrified they will. Either way, the idea of sitting someone down and saying “so, we don’t wear clothes at home” has the energy of a human resources meeting nobody asked for.
There’s another way. It’s slower, lower stakes, and considerably more fun. You let humor do the early work.
We didn’t plan this strategy. We stumbled into it, bought a few things that made us laugh, and realized somewhere along the way that we’d been quietly field-testing our disclosure for months before we’d had a single serious conversation about it. Humor, it turns out, is a remarkably efficient room-reader. People show you exactly who they are when they’re laughing. Or when they’re pointedly not.
Here’s what that looked like for us.
Start at the front door
It started with a doormat. It says: “Hold on… we are probably not wearing pants.” Then we added another one by the hot tub.
Visitors either laugh, take a photo, or stare at it for a bit too long while recalibrating their expectations. All three responses are useful information. Nobody has turned around and left. Yet.
The mat has a longer reach than we expected. An Amazon package went missing, and Corin called the delivery company to sort it out. The agent pulled up the photo of the delivery, the one they take as proof, and Corin heard her laugh on the other end of the line. “I love your doormat,” she said. Corin laughed along with her. The package apparently fell down the crack between the house and deck.
The mat worked on a complete stranger, at a distance, with zero context, and the stranger still got it and loved it.
The doormat isn’t a confession. It’s a signal, the conversational equivalent of leaving a breadcrumb. Some people pick it up. Some file it under “Kevin and Corin are a bit weird” and move on. That’s fine too. The point isn’t to force a conversation. It’s to leave the door slightly ajar, so that when someone eventually wants to walk through it, they already know the hinges aren’t locked.
Work your way around the property
It started by the pool. We put up a sign: “We don’t skinny dip. We chunky dunk.” It was the first one we put up on the deck. Since then, we have added about 20 more over the years including by the hot tub. All reference nudity requirements.
Inside, by the front door, there’s a coat hook with a small label underneath: Emergency pants.
None of these requires explanation. That’s the point. They’re funny on the surface, and they’re honest underneath, and the gap between those two things is exactly where good conversations start. Someone who wants to ask will ask. Someone who doesn’t, won’t. You haven’t cornered anyone. You’ve just made it easy for the curious ones to find a way in.
We’ve also added the naturist symbol to the glass railing at the entrance to our deck, and yes, there’s a bumper sticker on the car. Both are subtle enough that if someone recognizes them and says something, you already know everything you need to know about that person. It’s not a billboard. It’s a secret handshake. If you’re not sure what the naturist symbol is about or looks like, it’s worth a few minutes of your time at naturistsymbol.org
A sign inside explains what naturism means and what it means in our home specifically. Taken together, these aren’t a campaign. They’re more like a slow accumulation of context, the kind that lets people arrive at their own conclusions at their own pace, which is generally when people arrive somewhere they’ll actually stay.
Be a voice for naturism, even with your pants on
About three years ago, this month actually, we created NUDIMS, though “created” makes it sound more intentional than it was. We started by putting the characters on a few pieces of merchandise for ourselves, mostly to see what would happen.
What happened was smiles. Adults, kids, strangers on the street catching a glimpse of two cartoon nudists in snorkel gear with the words “Snorkel Naked” across the back and grinning without quite knowing why. A women looked, smiled, and said “I love it!” Those reactions told us something: humor could carry this further than we thought, and nobody was clutching their pearls over a cartoon.
So we kept going. We wanted a way to show support for naturism in spaces where being nude wasn’t an option. Work. Travel. The grocery store. Anywhere that isn’t your own backyard. The idea was simple: “be a voice for naturism”. Give people something they could wear or display or hand to a guest that said something true about who they are, without requiring them to say it out loud first.
Fittingly, even our characters took a gradual approach to the whole thing. For the first three years they were just faces and parts, no full body. This month, working with an artist, they finally got the full treatment: proper 2D characters who look like they’ve been comfortable in their own skin all along. Apparently it takes time to get there. We can relate.
It works exactly the way we hoped. A mug that says “Nudism: Way Better Experienced Than Explained” sitting on your desk is a conversation that hasn’t started yet. A phone case that says “May Strip Without Notice” is a personality test for everyone who sees it. We use them at home, we bring them camping, and we hand them to guests without warning or commentary, because the joke lands better when nobody announces it. You can find the full range at NUDIMS.com and Redbubble. Shameless plug. We regret nothing. 😊😊
Take it with you
NUDIMS isn’t the only game in town, and we’d be the first to tell you that. We’ve picked up pieces from other makers too, because the philosophy is bigger than any one shop. We have a beach towel created by our friends here in Manitoba that’s a dead-on parody of a Manitoba license plate, except where the plate number goes it says “NATURIST”, and underneath: “Celebrating Life Naturally” (Top image). We have another one created by our Canadian friends at “Get Naked Canada”. We don’t keep these folded in a drawer at home waiting for the right moment. We take them everywhere. Every beach. Every camping trip. Every situation where a towel might reasonably appear.
Here’s the thing about a towel: nobody questions why you have one. You just spread it out, and suddenly “NATURIST” in large friendly letters is sitting in the middle of an ordinary afternoon at the lake, and people either smile, ask, or pretend they didn’t see it. All three tell you something. The ones who ask are usually the most interesting conversation you’ll have all day.
Put your values on a mug and leave it where people can find it
The best thing that ever happened to one of our mugs happened the morning after our wedding.
We’d had about 20 people over, family, close friends, the kind of gathering where the food is gone and everyone’s in that loose, hungover, unhurried mood that only exists the day after a wedding. A guest picked up one of our cups without looking at it too carefully, poured a coffee, and wandered out to the deck. The cup had a photo of Corin from behind, nude, and the words: “Get Some Color in Your Cheeks – Naturism”.
We didn’t plan it. We didn’t engineer the moment. But for the next hour, a group of people who had not gathered to talk about naturism sat on that deck and talked about naturism, what it is, why we do it, what it means to us. It was easy. It was warm. It was, frankly, one of the better conversations we had all weekend. Which is saying something, because there was also an open bar.
That’s what humor does when it’s working. It takes the pressure off. Nobody felt ambushed because nobody was. The cup said something true, someone noticed, and the conversation followed naturally from there. By the time it ended, a handful of people knew more about our life than they had at breakfast, and not one of them looked uncomfortable about it.
Tell a good story at the right moment
Not everything needs to be a prop. Sometimes the best icebreaker is a well-timed story told with the right amount of laughing at yourself.
We have a go-to. It involves stumbling across a deserted beach while out on a hike, the brief look between us, and the decision to just go for a skinny dip. We tell it the way you’d tell any good travel story, with pacing, with the embarrassing bits left in, with a punchline. It lands well. And here’s what we’ve noticed: once you tell that story, other people tell theirs. It turns out a surprising number of people you know have skinny-dipped at least once, and most of them have been waiting for an opening to mention it. Your story gives them one.
This matters because it shifts the dynamic. You’re no longer confessing something. You’re sharing an experience, and they’re sharing one back, and suddenly naturism isn’t a thing you have to explain. It’s a thing you have in common with more people than you expected. Who knew your slightly chaotic decision would turn into a bonding moment? We did. Eventually.
What you’re actually doing
None of this is about avoiding the real conversation. At some point, if the relationship matters, the real conversation is worth having, and we’d point you to our disclosure series “When They Find Out” for thoughts on how to approach that one without it feeling like a deposition.
But humor buys you something useful first. It lets you read the room before you’ve committed to anything. It gives the curious people in your life an easy way to signal their curiosity. And it tends to reveal, faster than you’d think, who is going to surprise you.
Some of our most comfortable conversations about naturism started with someone laughing at a mug. Some started with a doormat. One started with a bumper sticker spotted in a parking lot by someone we hadn’t seen in years. None of them started with a formal announcement, a prepared speech, or anything resembling a plan. We started with baby steps… then to cautious butt-cheek bravery… and are now at absolute nude chaos.
You don’t have to open the bag all at once. Sometimes you just leave it somewhere visible, and let the cat decide when it’s ready. The cat… in our experience… usually comes out eventually. Probably while you’re not wearing pants.
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