Part 1: Nudity Is a State. Sex Is an Activity. Let’s Not Confuse Them.
Why treating them as different volumes of the same thing gets everyone in trouble
This is Part 1 of a three part series about nudity and sex. Part 2 will be published in a few days. If you find yourself wanting to argue with us before you get there, good. Thatโs exactly what Part 2 is for.
A quick note on language before we start. When we use the word “sex” in this article we mean the act. The activity. What people do. We are not referring to biological sex as an identity category or sexuality as the broader psychological and social dimension of who someone is. Naturists are sexual beings in that fuller sense: curious, embodied, human. That’s not what this argument is about. This argument is specifically about the act of sex and the state of nudity, and why treating them as the same thing causes problems for everyone.
Weโve heard the argument. Maybe you have too.
It usually comes from someone who means well. Someone whoโs genuinely frustrated with how squeamish Western culture is about bodies, about nudity, about the whole tangled mess of shame that makes a topless person on a beach somehow more controversial than a pharmaceutical ad explaining what to do if your erection lasts more than four hours.
And their solution, stated or implied, is: โWe just need to destigmatize sex. Normalize it. Open it up. Once sex stops being shameful, nudity wonโt be either.โ
We disagreeโฆ pretty fundamentally.
Noโฆ we are not prudish. If youโve read anything on our blog, that ship has not only sailed, itโs been gone long enough to send a postcard. You can start here if you are curious: โNaturism, Sex, and All the Messy Bits Weโre Not Supposed to Say Out Loudโ
The reasons we disagree are because the argument has flaws in it that get more obvious the longer you look at it.
Letโs Start With the Language. Because the Language Is Already Broken.
Hereโs something that bothered us once we noticed it and now we canโt stop noticing it.
People in the naturist world, us included until recently, talk a lot about โnonsexual nudity.โ As a clarification. A qualifier. A way of saying this kind of nudityโฆ not that kind. Like there are different kinds.
But let’s think about this. Nobody says โIโm going to nonsexual bedโ because they sleep nude. When we go for a shower or bath, which happens almost every day, nobody has ever felt the need to announce that it was the nonsexual kind, because the question never comes up. The nudity is just incidental. A byproduct of washing your body. The idea of clarifying it would be genuinelyโฆ weird.
And yet somehow, the moment nudity moves into a different context, we reach for the qualifier. โNonsexualโ nudity. As if without it, everyone would assume the worst.
Nobody says โnonsexual eating.โ Nobody says โnonsexual hug.โ You donโt hear โsexual clothedโ versus โnonsexual clothed,โ even though people have sex while clothed constantly and nobody feels the need to specify that their Monday morning work outfit is the other kind. Clothing doesnโt carry a default assumption. Nudity apparently does. And the phrase โnonsexual nudityโ is the proof. Itโs the stigma baked directly into the vocabulary, accepted so completely that even the people arguing against it have been using language that quietly concedes the whole argument before it starts.
So Where Did This Phrase Even Come From?
Probably a courtroom, honestly. Or a town council meeting. Somewhere defensive.
Naturism and nudism spent much of the 20th century under genuine legal and social pressure, accused of being fronts for sexual activity, associated with moral degeneracy, fighting for the right to exist in many places. When youโre constantly having to prove that what youโre doing isnโt something, you eventually borrow the accusationโs language just to deny it. โNo no, this is the nonsexual kind.โ It was a shield. A legal and social survival strategy.
The problem is shields have a way of becoming permanent. You pick up the language in an emergency and two generations later itโs just the vocabulary. Nobody questions it because itโs always been there. The threat that created it faded but the phrase stayed, doing the work of an argument that should have been retired decades ago.
Itโs a bit like if left-handed people had spent decades defending themselves against accusations of dark intent by calling themselves โnon-sinister left-handed people.โ The English word sinister comes from the Latin for left, which tells you everything you need to know about how far back this kind of thing goes. At some point someone would notice that the clarification is doing the accusersโ work for them.
โNonsexual nudityโ keeps sex in the room. Itโs in the first word. Every time you say it youโre essentially opening with โI know what youโre thinking,โ which, arguably, plants exactly the thought youโre trying to dispel.
Whatโs happening while someone is nude is a separate conversation entirely, the same way whatโs happening while someone is wearing crocs and socks is a conversation nobody has ever felt compelled to have.
Nudity Already Has a Working Answer. Sex Doesnโt.
There are cultures where nudity is just normal. Not scandalous, not radical, not a lifestyle brand. Nude beaches in Germany that look less like provocations and more like slightly boring Saturday afternoons. Scandinavian saunas where nobody is performing anything and everyone is just sitting there being human and probably thinking about lunch. Plenty of places where a body without clothing is treated as exactly what it is, a body without clothing.
Can you think of a single culture, anywhere, in any historical period, that has fully destigmatized sex? Weโve been trying.
Rome comes up. Rome always comes up. And yes, Rome was permissive in certain ways, but permissive isnโt the same as destigmatized. Roman sexual culture had a rigid framework. It just organized shame differently than we do. What mattered wasnโt the act, it was the role. A Roman citizen penetrating a slave or social inferior? Completely fine, carry on. Being penetrated, regardless of gender? Deeply shameful. The stigma didnโt disappear, it got redistributed downward onto whoever had the least power to object. So Rome didnโt remove the framework. Rome just decided who deserved the shame. Which, as models for a liberated sexual culture go, is not exactly inspiring.
Ancient Greece gets raised too. Similar story. Institutionalized, yes. Without rules and hierarchies? Absolutely not.
The closest modern attempt was the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. And look, it did real good in some places. It loosened genuinely harmful shame, opened conversations that needed opening, pushed back against repression that was making people miserable. Weโre not dismissing it wholesale.
But it also produced harm that got dressed up in liberation language and handed out like it was enlightenment. Coercion became free love. Boundaries became hangups. Women in particular discovered that โdestigmatizedโ often meant more pressure with fewer socially acceptable ways to say no, which is a funny definition of freedom if you think about it for more than thirty seconds.
The revolution turned out to be better at removing shame than at replacing it with anything sturdier. Like, sayโฆ respect. Turns out shame is a blunt instrument, but it was doing something. Remove it without addressing consent, power, and vulnerability and those things donโt disappear. They just lose their guardrails and start making much worse decisions.
Every attempt to fully remove the framework around sex has either quietly kept a framework with different victims, or collided headfirst with the reality that the framework was responding to something real. So no. We canโt think of a culture that pulled it off. And Rome is probably not the counterexample anyone wants to lead with.
Destigmatizing Something Doesnโt Fix the Complicated Parts.
We destigmatized alcohol. Alcoholism is still very much here, doing its thing. We destigmatized gambling. Addiction didnโt get the memo. Removing shame from something is not the same as resolving the genuine complexity underneath it. It just means people can now have that complexity without feeling bad about having it, which is a different thing entirely.
Sex is genuinely complex. Not because bodies are shameful or desire is wrong, but because sex involves another person. Consent, vulnerability, power, trust, those stakes simply donโt exist with nudity in the same way. A nude beach works because it costs bystanders essentially nothing. A body is visible. Everyone adjusts and gets on with their day. Sex doesnโt have that same quality. It canโt. The stakes are categorically different and pretending otherwise requires quite a bit of motivated reasoning.
Theyโre Not the Same Thing. Theyโre Not Even on the Same Dial.
No matter how many times we take the scenic route through the argument, we keep coming to the same conclusion.
Nudity and sex get bundled together in most Western cultural frameworks as if theyโre just different volumes on the same setting. Turn it up and nudity becomes sex. Walk it back and sex becomes nudity. Destigmatize one and the other naturally follows. This sounds logical until you actually live in a body and interact with other humans, at which point it starts to fall apart fairly quickly.
Nudity, the kind we practice, the kind we write about, is about presence. Being in your body, without performance or pretense, alongside other people doing the same. When itโs intimate, that intimacy is about vulnerability and acceptance. Horizontal. Everyone human, everyone quietly wondering if they remembered sunscreen.
Sex is something else entirely. Not โmore intimate nudity.โ A different structure, a different meaning, a different set of stakes. For us itโs one of the most private things that exists. Certainly not because weโre ashamed of it, but because itโs ours. Thereโs a kind of meaning that lives specifically in privacy, not in shame, and those two things are not the same thing no matter how often they get confused for each other.
Weโd genuinely love a world where nudity was normal. Not permitted everywhere or forced on anyone. And not without contextโฆ just unremarkable. Where a human body didnโt automatically read as sexual simply by being visible. Where we could have the German Saturday afternoon beach experience without it being treated as either a radical act or an invitation.
We would not want the same for sex. And thatโs not a contradiction. Thatโs just knowing the difference between two different things.
Asking someone to be comfortable with nudity in appropriate contexts among willing participants is a fairly modest request. It costs bystanders very little. Adjust, move on, eat your sandwich. Sex in any public or shared context, even fully consensual between everyone involved, imposes something on people who didnโt choose to be part of it. Thatโs not the same situation. Treating them as if theyโre on the same trajectory, as if solving one automatically advances the other, gets the whole argument wrong from the opening paragraph.
If the goal is genuine body acceptance and a healthier cultural relationship with nudity, chasing destigmatized sex seems like the long way around. A very long way around. Possibly through Rome, which weโve already established did not go well.
What This Actually Looks Like in the Real World.
Weโll leave you with something that happened recently. This isnโt a hypothetical or a philosophical exercise. An actual conversation that pretty much wrote the ending of this article for us.
A couple from France posted their dream summer scenario on X. It started with going to a nudist beach, finding a cozy spot, and then proceeded through a fairly detailed sexual wishlist that weโll spare you the specifics of. They were not being subtle or ambiguous. They knew exactly what they were describing and where they wanted to do it and not a single item on it had anything to do with being at a nude beach.
The first reply came and pointed out, reasonably and plainly, that behaviors like this are exactly how nudist beaches get shut down. That town halls ban naturism because of activities just like this.
The coupleโs response? Weโre translating the French, but the spirit was: โWe donโt give a damn. If no one sees, then whatโs the problem? Itโs clearly not because of a couple like us that the naturist beach we go to will close lmao. If your hobby is typing Naturist into the X search bar, pick a different fight.โ
The hilarious part of this conversation is that it was the French Federation of Naturism they commented back to. The French Federation of Naturism! Like itโs their hobby to type naturism into a search bar? And the Federation let them know that it certainly was their fight. The couple proceeded to defend themselves with mockery: โPest, when itโs been in the genes of Man for thousands of yearsโ and then the mock, โWe are the French Naturism Federation, so yes, it is our fight. Sorry, Napoleon, but youโre outdated lol. Your fight is pointless, turn the page, get used to the idea.โ
Bold strategy.
Of course we couldnโt stay out of it. We replied: โIf nobody sees, whatโs the problem?โ is a bit of a confession. Why bring the behavior to a nudist beach at all then? Just do it at a public beach. Why should a nude space carry the cost and risk of your choices?
We didnโt get any likes from their fans of course.
โIf nobody seesโ doesnโt actually answer the question, it accidentally reveals the answer. If the sex is genuinely irrelevant, if this is just two people doing what people do, any beach works. Any secluded spot works. The nudist beach isnโt a location, they were using it as a permission structure. And when you need that specific permission structure to do what youโre planning, youโve already told us everything about how you actually see the relationship between nudity and sex.
They havenโt separated them. Theyโve fused them. And naturist spaces should not be where that fusion gets to exist without immediate consequences. Because it is only irrelevant right up until the beach gets closed and everyone loses it.
This isnโt because sex is shameful or because these are bad people having a bad time. Theyโve just decided to collapse two genuinely separate things into one, borrowed naturist language to legitimize it, and then told the actual naturist community to get used to the idea.
The French Federation of Naturism said this was their fight. Weโd agree. Itโs everyoneโs fight who has ever just wanted to sit nude on a beach in their body, in the sun, eating potato salad, thinking about nothing in particular.
Nudity is a state. Sex is an activity. They are not the same thing, they do not require each other, and pretending otherwise doesnโt make you progressive or enlightened or ahead of the curve.
So. Can sex be destigmatized? Should it be? And is normalizing nudity the easier, cleaner answer, or just the one weโre more comfortable arguing for?
We have our own thoughts. Strong onesโฆ as usual. But before we get into them we wanted to make the case first and let you sit with it for a few days.
In Part 2, we ask ourselves the question we probably should have asked before we ever wrote a word on this topic. Are we actually being fair?
Kevin & Corin
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