These notes are from some musing that I did a little while ago about the changing relationship I have had with nudity. Some of it is straight along the "it's all healthy good fun" line. And some of it acknowledges a wider spectrum. And keep in mind, I'm just talking about me.

"We had Playboys around the house, and from a very, VERY early age, the associations they caused felt exactly as good as you'd imagine, even if age-appropriately unfulfilled. Still, there was no way I could NOT associate nudity with pleasure. It didn’t take much advanced reasoning to identify what was different about Playboy and why it got different results: the people in it were naked. Thus, I associated anyone being naked, including myself, with something positive and elevated. Clothes of course were a default state, but my thought -- then and now when wearing them -- is that a special and powerful state is possible by removing them. That thought can still distract me from almost anything, rescuing any moment from the mundane. People would recommend nudist camps, but that sidesteps the point. I get the social importance of nudist culture and its devotion to wholesomeness. I'm on the team. But sometimes in my mind it explodes into a denial of the Other Side. 

"Anyway, a few years later, around late pre-adolescence, I was fascinated with a Superman comic where he was shot by some kind of alien weapon. The people of Metropolis thought he was dead because only his empty costume came fluttering to Earth. I don't remember what the punchline was, but it wasn't as interesting as the implication. And the implication that maybe this costume was useless and superfluous. Somewhere, it implied, he was kicking ass with no barrier. With no disguise or lie. The story I imagined really conjured up something other than vulnerability. There was a story-driven necessity (whatever it was) for nudity to a point that the costume didn't matter. In fact, he already made a ritual of taking off one layer to reveal a sense of confidence. Why not both?

"Psychotics, I am told, sometimes manifest a sense of delusional self-importance by disrobing during mental breaks. I get a little of the reasoning. I know that I feel more confident and more myself when nude. Not because it’s natural, but because it has an almost occult, evocative power to intrinsically acknowledge the (sshhhhh -- erotic) energy we have along with all of our other qualities. Clothed, we can call upon all but the primal dimensions of who we are. That makesit feel like a weaker, rather than stronger, state. Fractured. Filtered. 

"But nudity is the state that allows us to include one more dimension and exclude nothing. How we are taken by others in that state? That’s another matter. That, in some ways, is up to them. But the inner power of nudity is something I’ve always felt, and I feel it more and more as I age."