What Men Don’t See

My follow up to Corin’s article and the comments that followed

Corin wrote about how men can help women feel welcome in clothes-free spaces. When I read the draft, I knew what potentially would come in comments. I thought about the reactions from some men, and started writing this in advance. Corin finished the article that said her side and it was published.

It went as well as you’d expect, which is to say… mostly great. And then the Reddit comments I expected started happening. So let’s talk about what men don’t see. Here’s what I have to say after seeing the responses. And it’s less charitable than hers.

One comment in particular I knew would come because they always do when a woman has an opinion. A guy took issue with a line about male “standing”. The idea that when a man tells another man to knock it off, it comes across differently than when a woman says the same thing. His read was that this “standing” is just a nice word for the implied threat of violence. Men defer to other men, he explained, because they’re quietly calculating size, confidence, and willingness to escalate before anyone opens their mouth.

I replied that men can talk to each other without resorting to violence. He came back with a longer, better-argued version of the same point. I thought about that for a few days instead of firing off round two. Mostly because he wasn’t entirely wrong, and I hate when that happens.

Welcome to risk assessment

What nobody in that thread said out loud is the sizing-up, or the reading of a stranger’s temperament, the running mental calculation of is this person safe to be near… women do that everywhere, all the time, fully clothed, before their coffee’s even ready. It isn’t a special insight about naturist spaces for her. It’s just another day.

What that commenter stumbled into, without quite realizing it, is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a threat assessment for once. And his conclusion wasn’t “huh, huge if true,” it was “well, that’s just violence then, so let’s not ask men to do the labor.” Which is a shitty way to opt out of a conversation the second it stops being comfortable.

I’m not going to pretend the escalation dynamic he described doesn’t exist between men. It does. But noticing it for the first time because it’s aimed at you, and using that discovery to argue that men shouldn’t have to hold other men accountable, is not the gotcha he thinks it is.

The water you’re swimming in

I need to say the actual word here… it’s misogyny. And I’m not talking about the abstract kind you nod along to in a documentary. I’m talking about the kind that shows up in our inbox to Corin daily… between a subscription renewal and someone asking about Boo. The kind that decides, what she’s to be “used for”… before she has said a single word.

Most men who show up in naturist spaces and behave themselves think that’s the whole job. Show up, don’t stare, don’t corner anyone by the pool… collect your gold star. And to be fair, that clears a bar that apparently some men can’t actually live up to. But it’s a low bar. Clearing it doesn’t mean you understand the room you’re standing in.

The room is patriarchal by default. Not by anyone’s individual choice, which is exactly why it’s so easy for a guy to miss.

Nobody in that thread built the resort screening policy that treats single men like a liability line item. Nobody personally invented the fact that women pre-filter every interaction because the potential cost of guessing wrong is higher for them than it is for you. The system was already running before any of us walked in naked. Taking your clothes off doesn’t make it magically go away.

That’s patriarchy doing what it does… setting the defaults so quietly that the men benefiting from them experience the whole thing as neutral.

Misogyny is the specific comment, the specific stare, the specific DM. Patriarchy is the reason those things are cheap to do and easy to shrug off. You don’t get to understand one without the other.

​I keep coming back to that commenter’s “standing” argument. He wasn’t wrong about the mechanism. Men do size each other up, run the calculation, and decide how much deference to hand over. He just never asked who that performance was actually for.

​It’s rarely about the two men in the exchange. It’s for whoever else is standing around watching. It’s the exact same reason catcalling happens in packs far more than it happens solo. The woman walking by isn’t the audience; she’s just the occasion. The guys are performing for each other.

​That dynamic only works if a man already feels like the space is his to perform in. That’s the part nobody in that thread said out loud. A man reading an article about what makes a woman feel comfortable and hearing “attack” instead of “information” only makes sense if he assumed the room was his by default. Take that assumption away, and the piece is just an article. Getting called out for that isn’t oppression, it’s just the first time the default got said out loud.

​Online, it doesn’t even take much to feel proven right. One upvote or like makes him feel validated and they ignore the hundred people scrolling past in silent disagreement. The algorithm doesn’t show him the hundred who shook their heads and kept scrolling; it shows him the one who clicked a button. That single click starts to feel like consensus. He walks away thinking he won the exchange, when all that really happened was one other guy felt the same defensive impulse and hit a key.

To the single guys: I hear you, and it’s still not about you

A few of you wrote in about how exhausting it is to do everything right and still watch a woman leave the pool area thirty seconds after you get in it. I believe you. I’ve heard versions of this from enough men now that I don’t think you’re lying, and I don’t think you’re the villain in Corin’s article.

But the part that stings a little is the caution isn’t a review of your personal conduct. It’s a policy she’s applying to every man she doesn’t know yet, because the alternative is finding out the hard way which category you’re in. You didn’t earn that caution and you also didn’t cause it. Some other guys, in some other places, at some other time did the ground work for you. Now… you’ve inherited a reputation you didn’t build. Welcome to being generalized about. Women have been living there the whole time.

The frustrating truth is that you can’t argue your way out of a filter that isn’t about you specifically. What you can do is be boring and consistent long enough that the filter has less to work with. And stop treating “she left” as a referendum on your character.

“Don’t be a creep” was never going to work

I want to defend this phrase for about one sentence and then bury it, because both things are true. It’s not wrong, exactly… it’s just useless as instruction, because “creepy” gets defined after the fact by how it lands, not by a checklist you can follow in advance. Corin struggled with this part when she read it. That it’s genuinely maddening if you’re a guy trying to get it right, and I don’t blame anyone in that thread for being “sick of hearing it”.

The fix isn’t a better rulebook. It’s the same skill women have been forced to develop their entire lives: reading a room instead of memorizing a script. Notice when someone’s shoulders come up. Notice when a conversation that was easy gets short. Be OK with apologizing when you made an error. That’s not a mystical female intuition, it’s attention, and men can build it the same way anyone builds a skill… badly at first, then less badly.

Rules and culture aren’t a choose-one menu

The resort pre-screening story from that thread… the one where single men need a character reference and their partner has to personally vouch for them by phone… is a genuinely miserable system to be filtered through. I get why it stings. Corin even mentioned it in the article not being fair.

It also exists because culture alone hasn’t been enough to make these spaces reliably safe. ​In our broader Western culture, women are taught from a young age to expect their bodies to be observed, judged, and rated whenever and wherever they are visible. When entering a clothing-optional or naturist space, the underlying fear is rarely about actually being naked. It is the anxiety that stripping away clothing simply amplifies those societal evaluations.

Until that changes, resorts are going to keep building gates and creating rules instead of trusting the honor system.

Getting mad at the gate isn’t going to move it. Being the kind of steady, unremarkable presence that makes gates feel less necessary might, eventually, for somebody who isn’t even you yet.

The reflex comment

I already know some of you read this far and had “not all men” loaded and ready before you finished the first section. I get the impulse. It’s not fun being lumped in with guys who actually are the problem. But we really need to stop this.

Think about what that reflex actually does. A woman starts talking about a pattern she’s lived with her whole life, and the first thing out of some guy’s pie hole is a correction. As if the point of her talking was to make an accurate statement about every man on earth, and not to describe her own experience. It was never a scientific claim. Turning it into one so you can dispute it isn’t defending yourself, it’s changing the subject to something more comfortable: you.

“What about men” does the same job. Corin writes about what makes naturist spaces feel safer for women, and somewhere a guy is typing “well what about the men who get falsely accused” or “what about men’s safety” like it’s a rebuttal instead of a completely separate conversation that nobody was trying to have. Both men’s issues are real. Neither one gets solved by hijacking a conversation that wasn’t about you specifically.

Doing this isn’t neutral. It’s not “just asking questions.” It’s the exact same defense-of-the-default I keep circling back to in this piece. The room is his, so any conversation that doesn’t center him reads as an attack that needs correcting. Every “not all men” is a tiny vote for keeping things exactly as they are, dressed up as fairness.

If you actually want things to change, the move isn’t defending your innocence. Nobody was talking about you specifically. The move is shutting up long enough to let a woman have an opinion. Even if it makes you uncomfortable.

I’m not the only one saying this

Around the same time all this was happening, I came across a piece from a fine art nude photographer named Kepa, writing about something that had nothing to do with naturism on the surface and everything to do with it underneath. He’d noticed that his female models almost always showed up with a safety plan, vetted him through other models first, told a friend where they’d be, sometimes brought someone along. His male models just showed up. No questions, no backup plan, no thought that anything could go sideways.

He didn’t chalk it up to women being cautious by nature. He’d been told directly by a model that she agreed to work with him because another model vouched for him first. That’s the same informal network the resorts formalize into a screening policy… except women built theirs first, on their own, because they had to, long before any institution caught up and put a name on it.

The part of his article that really brought some of what I said above home was he described being shown explicit images by another male photographer, bragging about crossing lines with a model, and Kepa said nothing. He’s the one who wrote about it, and he still owns that he stayed quiet in the moment. That’s the “not all men” reflex from a different angle. Not a comment this time, just silence when it would’ve cost something to speak up. I give him kudos for admitting it. Different corner of the nude world, same conclusion I keep landing on here.

The caution women live with isn’t paranoia… it’s pattern recognition. And the men benefiting from the silence are the ones best positioned to break it.

Worth reading if you have time: How the Threat of Sexual Violence Changes the Way My Models Show Up

So what was Corin actually asking for

Not a chaperone. Not a ban on single men. Nobody wrote that. A commenter invented it, put it in bold, and then got seriously angry at his own sentence. What she actually asked for was smaller and harder. Notice what you’re not noticing. Pay attention to whose comfort you’re managing.

That’s worth thinking about for more than a second. An article about how men can help women feel safer got read, by a few guys, as an attack on men. Not “here’s how to be welcoming,” but “they’re coming for me.” That’s not only a misreading of tone… that’s a lens. One where a woman describing what makes her comfortable automatically becomes a referendum on you. If your default response to “here’s what helps me feel safe” is “so you’re saying I’m not welcome,” that says more about the lens you are looking through than it does about the article. And it might explain more about your single life than the naturist life.

I do want to reiterate the same thing Corin said in her article. Most men we have met in naturism get it right. It’s really unfortunate that the few who don’t create an issue for all. But it’s everyones job to protect the space. To make it safe… for all.

I didn’t have to fight my way into understanding any of this. I got to watch it happen to someone I love, in real time, at close range, for years. Some men don’t get that vantage point, and I’m not going to pretend I would’ve figured it out on my own if I hadn’t.

I’m older. A lot of what I have learned came from dating, marriage, divorce, dating, and again… marriage… and listening. So take it from someone who finally understands… the discomfort you’re feeling right now, reading this, is a fraction of a fraction of what she’s carrying every single day.

Think about that before you write a reply.

Kevin

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