Part 1: The Messy Truth of Women’s Biology in a Clothing-Free Life
The Bodies We Don’t Talk About: Periods, Pregnancy, and Menopause in Nude Spaces
Naturism sells itself on a simple promise: come as you are, and you’ll be accepted. I believe that promise. I’ve watched it work, on myself, on nervous first-time visitors, on people who spent years hating a body that turned out to be perfectly welcome the moment they stopped hiding it.
But “come as you are” has mostly meant shapes and sizes. Tall, short, soft, scarred, tattooed, aging, all of it, welcome. What it hasn’t fully reckoned with is the body in motion: the biological realities that move through nearly every woman’s life, often for decades, that don’t hold still long enough to simply be accepted once and left alone. These things most women will live through, some of them more than once, and I found the community has almost nothing written about them.
This 2 part series looks at these moments, and it isn’t written entirely from the outside. Some of what follows is deeply personal, including my history with periods severe enough to make naturism, for years, simply impossible. And an honest, still unfolding account of what menopause is doing right now to a body that had already done most of the work learning to love itself. Some of it is built from research, because not every chapter of this is one I’ve lived. Pregnancy, in particular, is written from my personal experience before living clothes free and adds what naturist women have shared and what the medical reality actually is.
What ties it together is a single, simple question naturist spaces haven’t really asked: if a community is going to claim it accepts all bodies, does that acceptance hold up against the full reality of women’s biology, or does “all bodies welcome” quietly mean “all bodies welcome, as long as they’re behaving themselves”?
I don’t think anyone built this blind spot on purpose. Some of it is probably that it never came up. But some of it is probably that nobody particularly wants to. Women’s biology isn’t comfortable to talk about, in or out of clothes. And a community built around comfort with the body doesn’t automatically mean comfort with everything a body does.
But… this is me… bringing it up anyway. Because everyone needs to know.
The Shift Nobody Warns the Kids About
She’s spent every day that summer of the year she turned 12 at the pool without giving her body a single thought. But today, as she steps off the deck, she catches a glimpse of her reflection in a glass door. Something in her brain snaps shut. Her chest suddenly feels massive. Her stomach feels exposed. The innocent, unbothered freedom she had twenty minutes ago vanishes, replaced by a cold, prickling panic that everyone is looking at her.
A girl in that moment might be silently asking herself, can they tell? Are they looking at me? Why does this feel wrong all of a sudden?
She freezes at the edge of the towel rack, her heart hammering in her throat. Her instincts might be screaming at her to cross her arms, to hunch her shoulders, to dive into the water where no one can see her, or to grab her towel and sprint straight to the washroom. In her mind, she may already be reaching for an excuse to give her parents, I’m tired, my stomach hurts, I just want to go back to the trailer, anything that gets her out of being looked at without having to explain why.
She isn’t trying to be difficult, and she isn’t rejecting the lifestyle. She’s a kid caught in the middle of shifting hormones and outside messaging arriving at the same time, suddenly feeling completely naked in a way she never has before.
If a parent or a club tries to push past that moment with a cheerful “Nobody’s looking at you, sweetie, we’re all equal here,” it doesn’t reassure her. It risks invalidating a very real, terrifying feeling that her body is no longer entirely her own.
Before a woman ever has to navigate a resort on her cycle or handle a hot flash, she has to make it through this exact transition, from being a child in a naturist space to being a developing girl. For families raised in the philosophy, this is often the moment where everything shifts. The outside world’s messaging about what a woman’s body is supposed to look like starts creeping in at the exact same time her own body is changing in real time, and even in a community that means well, a developing girl can feel uniquely perceived, even if nobody is actually looking. It’s a delicate transition that requires real grace from parents and the community, specifically, a total respect for her choice if she suddenly wants to keep a top or shorts on for a weekend, a season, or a few years while her sense of self catches up to her biology.
There’s also the first time this happens to a young girl, and it deserves its own mention. A first period is disorienting and embarrassing under any circumstances; most girls want privacy, familiarity, maybe just their mother and a closed bathroom door. In a family naturist space, that same moment can feel exposing in a completely different way: no clothes to quietly hide a stain under, no easy way to disappear from a group until it’s sorted out. For a girl who’s still new to her own body, that combination can be genuinely frightening, not just awkward.
This is a moment where a parent’s calm matters more than anything a club could put in a handbook, but it’s also a moment where a club can help simply by making sure products are actually available and easy to find, without asking. So a mother isn’t scrambling to solve this for her daughter with nothing on hand.
The Bleeding Nobody Warns You About
When people think about periods and naturism, they usually picture a manageable inconvenience: a tampon, a menstrual cup, maybe a pair of bottoms on a heavier day (where allowed). I wish that had been my experience. For most of my adult life, it wasn’t even close.
I’ve always had heavy periods. Even as a young teenager, I remember being genuinely confused that stores sold panty liners and “light” pads and tampons. I couldn’t understand who they were for because I’d never experienced anything remotely close to a “light” day. I simply assumed this was what being a woman was supposed to be like.
When I was 14, my mom told me I needed another doctor’s appointment because they thought I might have cancer. At that age, hearing those words was terrifying. Thankfully, it wasn’t cancer. I was told I had abnormal cervical cells that could eventually become cancerous if left untreated. The answer was cryotherapy to freeze the abnormal cells. As a teenager, I honestly believed that once those cells were treated, everything else would finally become normal.
It didn’t.
My periods weren’t just heavy… they were relentless. While my friends complained about having their periods for a week every month, I often felt like I had only a handful of days each month when I wasn’t bleeding. There was no predictable cycle. I never knew when it would start, how long it would last, or whether I’d make it through the day without flooding through whatever protection I was using.
By the time I was 17, the blood loss had become so severe that I was blacking out. I passed out repeatedly and made several trips to emergency rooms. Every time, I was brushed off. Never examined. I was treated like a teenager who simply didn’t like having her period. I was told it was normal. Eventually, I started wondering if maybe they were right. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I was going crazy.
After weeks of feeling weaker and weaker, I decided to try a women’s hospital clinic. Surely, I thought, if anyone understood women’s health, it would be there. I remember sitting in the examination room, exhausted and pale, waiting for the doctor. When he walked in, I explained everything. One of the first things he said was that I looked incredibly white. Then he asked if he could perform an internal examination.
I almost felt relieved. Someone was finally going to actually examine me. He stepped away while I undressed behind the curtain. As I removed my clothes, blood poured onto the floor. I remember standing there crying because I knew… this couldn’t possibly be normal. The doctor couldn’t see me, but he could certainly see what was happening on the floor beneath the curtain. “Oh my…that’s not normal,” he said immediately. “Come out. Come out.” I cried even harder. Not because I was embarrassed, although I certainly was. I cried because for the first time, someone finally believed me.
During that examination, he discovered a growth measuring approximately 10 centimetres. Within a week I was in ssurgery. I was 17. One cyst was removed, but the larger one required the removal of my left ovary as well. I remember thinking, “Finally. This has to fix it.”
It didn’t.
The years that followed became a revolving door of surgeries and procedures. More laparoscopic surgeries to remove or drain cysts. More cervical treatments. More laser procedures. More appointments. Nothing truly solved the problem.
By the time I was 21, I had my two boys. I knew my family was complete, and I began asking for a hysterectomy. Every doctor told me the same thing. I was too young. That answer was incredibly difficult to accept because, at 17, I had gone into emergency surgery knowing I could potentially wake up with a full hysterectomy if it became necessary. Yet now, as an adult who knew she didn’t want more children and whose quality of life was being destroyed, I wasn’t allowed to make that choice.
Instead, year after year, different doctors recommended the same treatments. Birth control pills. Birth control injections. IUDs. Every single time I was told, “This will help.” None of them helped. If anything, hormonal treatments often made everything worse.
By 2016, at 39 years old, another gynecologist suggested trying one more hormonal IUD. I remember telling her I was worried because hormones had never worked well for me. She asked me to give it one year. “If things aren’t better after a year,” she said, “I’ll approve a hysterectomy.”
I agreed. A year passed. Nothing changed. I was still bleeding heavily. Still unpredictable. Still organizing my life around bathrooms and still avoiding outings because I couldn’t trust my own body.
Then came the night at work that finally broke me.
About twenty minutes after changing my protection, I suddenly bled so heavily that my work area looked like a crime scene. I couldn’t leave because someone had to relieve me first. When my female coworker arrived, the look on her face said everything. She was in complete shock. Fighting back tears, I told her, “Let me go get cleaned up. I’ll come back and clean all of this.”
I showered at work, changed into a clean uniform, cleaned up the blood, finished my shift, and at four o’clock that morning I called my doctor’s office. My voicemail was simple. “I need an appointment urgently. A hysterectomy is my only option.”
She called me back later that day and a referral was sent.
By then, Kevin and I had been together for a few years. He had watched me living through this. His own experience being misdiagnosed with migraines before eventually discovering he had a brain tumour had taught him the importance of asking questions, gathering information, and advocating for yourself. He asked if I wanted him to come to my appointment.
Absolutely. Before that appointment, I called nearly every woman in my family. By then, many of them had already undergone hysterectomies themselves. I asked about their symptoms, their diagnoses, their surgeries, and their outcomes.
I walked into that appointment with family history, years of medical records, and Kevin sitting beside me. This time, I wasn’t going to leave unheard. Finally, after decades of asking, I was approved for a partial hysterectomy.
My uterus was removed in May 2017 leaving one remaining ovary. It changed my life.
People often think of heavy periods as an inconvenience. They don’t think about organizing your entire life around the nearest bathroom or about missing events because you’re terrified you’ll bleed through your clothes. They don’t think about the exhaustion from chronic blood loss, the fear of passing out, the embarrassment, or spending years wondering if the doctors are right and maybe you’re just weak.
There is no version of those years where I could have walked into a naturist space. It had nothing to do with body image or being uncomfortable with nudity. The blunt reality was that I couldn’t trust my own body. Naturism asks you to trust your body in front of other people. For years, mine gave me no reason to believe it would.
Today, after my hysterectomy, that fear is gone. The freedom people often associate with naturism finally became possible for me. It wasn’t because I became more confident in my body. It was because I finally had a body that wasn’t constantly betraying me. People don’t always realize how profoundly chronic gynecological conditions affect quality of life.
I do.
I lived it.
What Clubs Rarely Say Out Loud
For women with a typical cycle, the actual mechanics of a period at a naturist resort aren’t complicated like mine were. A tampon or menstrual cup works exactly as it would anywhere else. A pantyliner or period underwear under a pair of bottoms works too (if allowed), and it should be said plainly: not every woman wants to insert something. Pads are a real, valid choice, not a fallback for people too squeamish for a cup. None of these require an explanation to anyone.
Where it gets harder is the mandatory nudity spaces within clubs or otherwise clothing optional resorts. Pools, hot tubs, and saunas are frequently the one place where “nude, no exceptions” actually gets enforced, even at clubs that let you keep something on everywhere else. That’s exactly the moment a woman on her period has the least flexibility and the most reason to want it.
Imagine what this actually looks like on a Saturday afternoon.
She’s standing in the hallway outside the main office, wrapped in a towel, waiting for a break in the crowd. The sun is shining, people are walking past on their way to the pool, and every single one of them feels like a spotlight. She scans the room, trying to make sure no one is close enough to overhear.
In her head, she’s already writing the apology: “I’m so sorry to be that person, I’m sorry to be the one ruining the vibe with my clothes, I promise I’m not usually like this.”
When the manager finally steps around the counter, she pulls him aside. She tries to balance “confident adult” with “apologetic rule-follower.” She leans in, lowering her voice to that specific, shamed whisper we all know. “Hey,” she says, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. “I’m just… I’m on my period. I really need to keep these bottoms on in the pool. Is that… can I do that?”
Her heart is hammering because she’s terrified he’s going to ask follow-up questions, or worse, tell her that she’s the exception that proves the rule. She’s already planning her exit strategy. If he says no, do I just leave? Do I just go back to the car and hide?
When he gives her a polite, brisk nod and says, “Oh, yeah, sure, that’s fine, just make sure they’re clean,” the relief is so sudden it’s almost dizzying.
The relief doesn’t last.
The residue of the shame doesn’t leave. She walks away feeling like an imposter in her own community, all because she had to psych herself up for ten minutes just to ask for permission to handle basic hygiene.
That might technically count as a reasonable accommodation, but it also means every woman has to initiate that exact conversation, and carry that exact weight, at a moment she probably didn’t want to be explaining herself to anyone.
In the research for this piece, I couldn’t find a single club or federation online with a written policy addressing this. What I found instead were some consistent but informal: when clubs do make an exception, it’s handled quietly, case by case, usually by asking a staff member directly. That might sound reasonable in theory. In practice, it’s the hallway scene above, repeated at clubs and resorts everywhere, with no two women getting quite the same version of it.
A stated policy costs a club nothing. A line in the guest handbook, a sentence on a website, quiet signage in a washroom: “period products are available at the front desk, and bottoms are always permitted, in the pool or anywhere else, no questions asked.” That single sentence would do more for a nervous first-time visitor than any amount of body acceptance messaging on a homepage. Right now, the message women get is: your period is fine here, but only if you know to ask.
A Few Practical Things That Help
None of this should require an advanced degree in planning, but a few small choices make a period at a naturist space considerably easier. It helps to think of it as its own small kit, packed separately from the rest of your bag, so you’re never digging through sunscreen and snacks to find what you actually need in a hurry.
Start with the towel. A dark-colored towel, black or a deep navy, is worth having on hand specifically for that week. It does the same job as your regular one, but it won’t show a stain the way a white or pale towel will, and nobody needs to know why you brought it. Pack more supplies than you think you’ll need, at least double, and keep them somewhere easy to reach, a small bag by the door or clipped inside your beach bag, rather than back in your room or campsite. The goal is never having to make the walk of shame back across a crowded pool deck because you ran out.
If you’re not using an internal option, a liner or period underwear under bottoms gives an extra layer of confidence for a pool day or a long afternoon in a lounger. Period underwear specifically is worth the investment if you’re going to be at a resort for more than a day; it holds more than people expect, and it means one less thing to think about between changes.
If you do choose to use a tampon, it’s worth saying plainly: don’t spend a single second worrying about the string. It’s an entirely normal part of the anatomy of the product, and while it might feel exposed or embarrassing at first when you aren’t wearing a swimsuit to hide it, nobody in a naturist space is looking for it or giving it a second thought. If it gives you peace of mind, you can tuck it away, but your comfort matters infinitely more than trying to make a medical reality invisible.
There’s also a timing choice worth making before you arrive, not during the hallway scramble described above. If you know your cycle even loosely, a quick email or call to the club ahead of a visit, asking their policy in advance rather than negotiating it in a towel in a hallway, changes the entire dynamic. You’re not asking permission in the moment; you’re confirming something you already have a right to expect. Not every club will have a clear answer, but asking ahead means you find that out before you’ve packed the car, not after you’re already standing there.
If flow is heavier on a given day, there’s nothing wrong with choosing to sit rather than lie on shared furniture, bringing your own dark towel to sit on a lounger instead of the club’s, or opting for a chair instead of a shared bench. Small adjustments, not concessions.
Whether to use a pool or hot tub at all is a judgment call only the woman having her period can make, and it deserves to be said that way rather than glossed over. An internal option like a tampon or cup can make swimming manageable for a lot of women on an average cycle. But “manageable” assumes a flow that’s predictable enough to trust for the length of a swim, and not every woman has that. I didn’t, for years. If there’s any doubt, skip the pool that day. That’s not a failure or a missed opportunity; it’s just the correct call for a body that isn’t cooperating, and no one should feel pressured toward the water by an unwritten rule that everyone in a nude space is supposed to be using it. Sitting it out for an hour, or a day, is a completely normal way to handle a period anywhere. It doesn’t stop being normal just because everyone else happens to be nude.
There are two objections I expect this piece to draw, and both deserve a direct answer rather than a diplomatic dodge.
The first: some naturists get visibly upset when a woman keeps bottoms on in a space that’s supposed to be fully nude. And it’s fair to actually sit with why, rather than dismiss it outright. Naturism, for a lot of people, isn’t just about being unclothed, it’s about a specific feeling of collective vulnerability, everyone equally exposed, nobody holding anything back. There’s something genuinely bonding about that, and I understand why a person who’s built real peace around that idea might feel a flicker of something when they see someone covered. It can read, even unfairly, as a kind of holding back, a foot half out the door of the thing everyone else committed to. That reaction isn’t usually mean-spirited. It usually comes from people who love this community and feel protective of what makes it work.
But it’s also not the reality of any naturist space, ever, not really. There are always going to be a handful of people with a towel wrapped around them, a newcomer easing in, someone who just doesn’t feel like it that day, someone recovering from surgery, someone simply cold. The fully, uniformly nude space some people are picturing when they feel that flicker of discomfort doesn’t actually exist outside of that one photograph on a brochure. One or two women in bottoms for a health reason isn’t the thing breaking the shared atmosphere, and even if it did shift the feeling slightly, that isn’t a woman’s problem to solve by explaining her body to a stranger. You be you, go about your business, and let her do the same.
The second: swimwear disrupts pool chemical balance. This one gets repeated often enough, usually by someone who sounds confident about the chemistry, that it’s worth taking seriously for a moment before answering it. Pool and spa filtration systems are built to handle constant biological input, sweat, sunscreen, skin, hair, saliva, from dozens of nude bodies at once. That’s the actual daily chemical load a naturist pool is designed around. A single pair of clean swim bottoms is a rounding error next to that.
If a single pair of bottoms in the water is enough to meaningfully throw off a pool’s chemistry, that pool has a maintenance problem, not a policy problem, one that exists regardless of whether the swimwear is there because of a period, a fresh tattoo, or someone simply not ready to be fully nude in the water yet. These objections usually have very little to do with hygiene or pool chemistry. At the end of the day, it comes down to discomfort with a woman setting her own terms for her own body in a space that says it already welcomes exactly that. It’s not a reason to deny an accommodation. It’s a reason to fix the filtration.
The Unpredictable In-Between: Contraception and the Science Experiments
While the general conversation around naturism assumes a woman’s cycle runs on a predictable calendar, the reality for most of us involves a lot of trial and error with birth control. Whether it’s starting a new pill, getting a shot, or switching out an IUD, the adjustment period rarely happens smoothly. Doctors love to hand these options out with a casual warning about “minor spotting,” which is often medical shorthand for months of complete unpredictability.
Picture it: you’ve just started a new IUD. Your doctor mentioned “some irregular bleeding for the first few months” in the same tone she’d use to mention side effects on any pamphlet, quick, routine, already moving on to the next instruction. What she didn’t mention is what that actually looks like day to day: no pattern, no warning, just the possibility hanging over every plan you make. You book a weekend at a resort you’ve been looking forward to for months, and somewhere between packing the car and unpacking it, you’re doing math in your head that has nothing to do with the trip. When did I last check. How many hours ago was that. Is today a risk day or a fine day, and there’s genuinely no way to know until your body decides for you.
In a clothing-free space, that kind of guessing game adds a layer of quiet anxiety to a regular afternoon that a clothed vacation simply doesn’t have. In regular clothes, unexpected spotting is a minor, private inconvenience, you notice, you deal with it, nobody else ever knows it happened. Nude, there’s no margin for that kind of privacy. It’s one thing to manage a heavy period you planned for; it’s another thing entirely to navigate a resort when your body might decide to spot without warning at two o’clock on a Tuesday, in a lounge chair, in front of people. It forces a kind of hyper-vigilance where you’re constantly keeping a pair of shorts on standby, checking in with your own body every hour or two the way you’d check a weather app, and eyeing a shared lounge chair with genuine suspicion before you commit to lying down on it.
Naturist spaces tend to assume you’re either on your cycle or you aren’t, a clean binary, on or off, that doesn’t leave room for the messy, months-long limbo where your hormones are simply trying to find their new normal. Dealing with a body that’s recalibrating shouldn’t feel like a logistical failure you have to quietly camouflage. It’s just another ordinary, occasionally annoying part of women’s health, and it shouldn’t cost a woman her peace of mind, or a weekend she was looking forward to.
That’s where I’ll leave things for now. The rest of this, pregnancy, postpartum, and what menopause is doing to me in real time, is coming in Part 2. It’s the harder half to write, the part I’m still living through as I write it, so it needed its own space rather than being rushed onto the end of this one.
Part 2 will come later this week. If any of what you just read felt familiar, you’re exactly who I’m writing the rest of this for.
Corin
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