The nude beach Anthropology project

A few years ago I was in my Jr year in college and I was living in an apartment with a room mate and his girlfriend at the time. She was taking an anthropology class and her assignment was to go to a place where people gather, make observations, conduct brief interviews, understand the culture of the surrounding environments, take notice of any norms or values or shared beliefs amongst the people within that setting. She chose to go to a nude beach and examine it. She wasn't a naturalist and neither was her boyfriend or I. The only problem was that she didn't have a car to get to the nude beach over an hour away and although her boyfriend had a car, he was totally against the idea. "Why don't you pick a different setting?" he would ask. Totally turned off by the idea of nudism, though he was kind of a hippie-ish dude, I think he had a phobia of ugly bodies.

I talked to her and said that I would be interested in driving out there. I had been to a nude beach before and I thought this would make for a very interesting and insightful project. She agreed to come with me, we kept it secret from her boyfriend and drove out there.

It would have been a much better day if the weather was 10 degrees warmer, but there was a select few people out there to talk to and gather information from. After talking to a few people, they convinced us to take off our clothes too. It felt very weird at first but I began enjoying it later.

It was great. Many people just said they liked being naked for the sake of comfort, and never really had a deep philosophical reason, but some did.

I remember one woman said she liked the nude setting because you cannot stereotype someone based on what they wear. All forms of materialism are gone, and without clothes bound to your body, you are physically liberated.

It turned out to be a great project and report. I think helping her with this anthropology report opened my mind further to nudism. She and her boyfriend have long since split up and I lost contact with both of them, but I wonder if this little project impacted her the same way it did for me.

 

If it did maybe she would have looked you up knowing you also are comfy in the nude if she became more into it.

 

Interesting story. No way of knowing now that you've lost contact with her, except of course to maybe visit the nude beach and you never know, she may be there lapping up the sun. My gut feeling is that if she was only nude as part of the fact-gathering exercise for her project, then it has passed into proverbial folklore and she is a textile more than a nudist. Still, we can't really draw a firm conclusion.

 

Like you, there are some people whom I'd be interested to know about, how things turned out for them. I'm inclined to think this was probably a one-off.

 

I dunno how she turned out. Haven't seen her in 3 years. I stopped using facebook about a year ago. I got tired of people posting updates every 20 minutes about themselves and photo albums of getting drunk at crowded bars. It got old and stale.

If someone was to interview you on a nude beach while working on a similar anthropology project, what kinda things would you tell them?

 

I've never been to a nude beach, or nude anywhere else except for the bedroom privately, but I'd like to go to one. For me, being nude is being comfortable with my body, and accepting everyone else's. I like the idea of being free, and liberated I really enjoy being naked in my own house, and I hate putting clothes on after!