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. That’s exactly what Part 2 is for.
We’ve heard the argument. Maybe you have too.
It usually comes from someone who means well. Someone who’s 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: “We just need to destigmatize sex. Normalize it. Open it up. Once sex stops being shameful, nudity won’t be either.”
We disagree… pretty fundamentally.
No… we are not prudish. If you’ve read anything on our blog, that ship has not only sailed, it’s been gone long enough to send a postcard. You can start here if you are curious: “Naturism, Sex, and All the Messy Bits We’re Not Supposed to Say Out Loud”
The reasons we disagree are because the argument has flaws in it that get more obvious the longer you look at it.
Let’s Start With the Language. Because the Language Is Already Broken.
Here’s something that bothered us once we noticed it and now we can’t stop noticing it.
People in the naturist world, us included until recently, talk a lot about “nonsexual nudity.” As a clarification. A qualifier. A way of saying this kind of nudity… not that kind. Like there are different kinds.
But let’s think about this. Nobody says “I’m going to nonsexual bed” 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 genuinely… weird.
And yet somehow, the moment nudity moves into a different context, we reach for the qualifier. “Nonsexual” nudity. As if without it, everyone would assume the worst.
Nobody says “nonsexual eating.” Nobody says “nonsexual hug.” You don’t hear “sexual clothed” versus “nonsexual clothed,” 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 doesn’t carry a default assumption. Nudity apparently does. And the phrase “nonsexual nudity” is the proof. It’s 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 you’re constantly having to prove that what you’re doing isn’t something, you eventually borrow the accusation’s language just to deny it. “No no, this is the nonsexual kind.” 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 it’s just the vocabulary. Nobody questions it because it’s 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.
It’s a bit like if left-handed people had spent decades defending themselves against accusations of dark intent by calling themselves “non-sinister left-handed people.” 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 accusers’ work for them.
“Nonsexual nudity” keeps sex in the room. It’s in the first word. Every time you say it you’re essentially opening with “I know what you’re thinking,” which, arguably, plants exactly the thought you’re trying to dispel.
What’s happening while someone is nude is a separate conversation entirely, the same way what’s 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 Doesn’t.
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? We’ve been trying.
Rome comes up. Rome always comes up. And yes, Rome was permissive in certain ways, but permissive isn’t the same as destigmatized. Roman sexual culture had a rigid framework. It just organized shame differently than we do. What mattered wasn’t 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 didn’t disappear, it got redistributed downward onto whoever had the least power to object. So Rome didn’t 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. We’re 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 “destigmatized” 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, say… respect. Turns out shame is a blunt instrument, but it was doing something. Remove it without addressing consent, power, and vulnerability and those things don’t 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 can’t think of a culture that pulled it off. And Rome is probably not the counterexample anyone wants to lead with.
Destigmatizing Something Doesn’t Fix the Complicated Parts.
We destigmatized alcohol. Alcoholism is still very much here, doing its thing. We destigmatized gambling. Addiction didn’t 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 don’t 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 doesn’t have that same quality. It can’t. The stakes are categorically different and pretending otherwise requires quite a bit of motivated reasoning.
They’re Not the Same Thing. They’re 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 they’re 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 it’s intimate, that intimacy is about vulnerability and acceptance. Horizontal. Everyone human, everyone quietly wondering if they remembered sunscreen.
Sex is something else entirely. Not “more intimate nudity.” A different structure, a different meaning, a different set of stakes. For us it’s one of the most private things that exists. Certainly not because we’re ashamed of it, but because it’s ours. There’s 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.
We’d genuinely love a world where nudity was normal. Not permitted everywhere or forced on anyone. And not without context… just unremarkable. Where a human body didn’t 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 that’s not a contradiction. That’s 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 didn’t choose to be part of it. That’s not the same situation. Treating them as if they’re 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 we’ve already established did not go well.
What This Actually Looks Like in the Real World.
We’ll leave you with something that happened recently. This isn’t 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 we’ll 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 couple’s response? We’re translating the French, but the spirit was: “We don’t give a damn. If no one sees, then what’s the problem? It’s 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.”
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 it’s 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: “Pest, when it’s been in the genes of Man for thousands of years” and then the mock, “We are the French Naturism Federation, so yes, it is our fight. Sorry, Napoleon, but you’re outdated lol. Your fight is pointless, turn the page, get used to the idea.”
Bold strategy.
Of course we couldn’t stay out of it. We replied: “If nobody sees, what’s the problem?” 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 didn’t get any likes from their fans of course.
“If nobody sees” doesn’t 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 isn’t a location, they were using it as a permission structure. And when you need that specific permission structure to do what you’re planning, you’ve already told us everything about how you actually see the relationship between nudity and sex.
They haven’t separated them. They’ve 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 isn’t because sex is shameful or because these are bad people having a bad time. They’ve 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. We’d agree. It’s everyone’s 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 doesn’t 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 we’re more comfortable arguing for?
We have our own thoughts. Strong ones… 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.
Part 2 lands in a few days. In it 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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