On a hot summer’s day, the idea of stripping down to your birthday suit is strangely quite appealing, but nudity’s not for everyone. Fascinated by what makes people want to commune ‘non-sexually’ in the buff, author and virgin naturist Mark Haskell Smith has reluctantly thrown himself into his subject in the name of research. And it’s very funny stuff.
His travels take him from San Francisco, where public nudity has recently been banned because certain members of the gay community took it too far, to French resort of Cap d’Agde, where pretty much anything goes, and even hiking through the Austrian Alps on the annual Naked European Walking Tour (NEWT).
Interspersed with accounts of these adventures is a potted history of naturism, which grew simultaneously in Europe and America as an underground movement interested in all things healthy – so vegetarians exposing their skin to the fresh air.
There is, it seems, only so much you can say about the reasons for non-sexual nudity and although Haskell Smith writes entertainingly, it’s unlikely this reader will be a convert anytime soon.
