Is Nudism a 'a bare-all individualism that sees constraints as obstacles to fulfilment'? Scott Heppell/AFP/Getty Images

ChristianityNudismPuritanismsocialistsSocietyUK
February 12, 2025   6 mins

I don’t think I’m the only one feeling a little as though we’ve all been through the looking glass, in the era that began with 2016 and has just culminated with the Trumpian Revolution. In that light, I positively got whiplash reading about something that felt as though it had been parachuted in from 2002: a Caribbean cruise for American naturists.

I struggle to imagine anything more boomer than a nudist cruise. It is surely the Platonic form of boomerism. “The Big Nude Boat” set sail last week from Miami, carrying some 2,300 passengers for an 11-day Caribbean cruise. At the time of writing, it’s docked at St Lucia, and its passengers are halfway through (according to the onboard activity guide,) “the Nakation Of A Lifetime!”.

There’s certainly something disorienting about finding a subset of well-off Americans (with, judging by the naked group photo in the activity guide, boomers well-represented) is apparently so oblivious to the prevailing economic and political chaos they’re merrily casting off both the moorings and their underwear. But my double-take wasn’t just for how strange it feels, against the Trump hullaballoo, to read another headline about hedonistic oldies spending the kids’ inheritance on cruise holidays. It’s that it all feels so retro.

This is partly because social nudity — the practice of meeting, socialising, playing sport, or simply sunbathing with nothing on — is very much a boomer thing, having reportedly struggled to recruit younger nudies. But it made me wistful, too. For the style of nudism embodied by these boomers represents a distinct American synthesis of earlier countercultures, that I think we’re going to miss, once they all sail off (possibly naked) into the sunset.

The first modern nudist club was founded in 1891, in British India, by a British imperial bureaucrat named Charles Edward Gordon Crawford: he and two friends would gather, in “nature’s garb”, by the Tulsi Lake in northern Mumbai. But this wasn’t just a handful of eccentrics bored in an overseas posting: the chilly climate of Britain had its share of clothing-optional oddballs too.

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These tended to cluster around the progressive and vaguely occult-tinged Fabian circles, where post-Christian spirituality mingled with socialist ideals and eugenicist dreams of “improving” the “race”. Crawford, the Indian colonial naturist, corresponded with the Fabian literary luminary and gay activist Edward Carpenter — who moved in the same bourgeois socialist circles as Havelock Ellis, a progressive intellectual, sexologist, and eugenicist who was also enthusiastic about life in the altogether.

Ellis, in turn, wrote the introduction to Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy, published by the American sociologist, criminologist, eugenicist and nudism evangelist Maurice Parmelee in 1923. Imagine an international network of utopian progressives, who espoused every imaginable whacky idea later blamed on the hippies — but with none of the hippie exuberance, just a relentlessly bourgeois, po-faced British bourgeois asceticism.

Across the North Sea, though, the yearning to get back to nature could take an altogether more fiery turn. Whereas Britain had had a good century and a half to get used to being industrialised by the early 20th century, Germany only industrialised in the mid-19th century. Many Germans found the radical changes this forced on the culture and landscape bewildering — and the result was a heartfelt backlash. This produced a flourishing of German Romantic art and poetry, often harking back to pre-Christian Germanic myth; it also also spawned Freikörperkultur — free body culture — which sought to return to nature through practices such as healthy eating, fitness, nude sunbathing, and hiking societies such as the Wandervögel youth groups.

“Naturists have long lamented that their pastime is declining in popularity.”

As with the Fabian fusion of eugenics and nudity, German Romantic naturism also sometimes came with a side-order of unnerving race obsession. The early nudism advocate Heinrich Pudor, for example, wrote several influential Freikörperkultur books such as the 1893 Nacktende Menschen (Naked People) and 1906 Nacktkultur (Naked Culture), in which he extolled the physical and spiritual benefits of vegetarianism, nudism, and racial purity. By the time Leni Riefenstahl made her famous documentary on the Nazi Olympics, the nude or semi-nude body beautiful was widely embraced not just by political eccentrics, but also by an ascendant fascist regime for which athletic nudes signified health, power and “Aryan’  racial purity. Pudor’s later writing was overwhelmingly antisemitic, with titles such as Iron Ring, True German, or Swastika.

As the Fabians showed, though, social nudity isn’t necessarily fascist. Even in Weimar Germany, socialist nudity flourished alongside more fascistic subcultures: these idealists saw themselves as rejecting bourgeois Imperial Germany, and embracing the basic egalitarianism of “nature”: a version of Freikörperkultur that endured in East Germany long after the war. It wasn’t so much that it was either a far-Left or a far-Right thing: nudists just tended to extremes, whichever way they leaned. Meanwhile, if the Norwegian Pearl’s naked American boomers teach us anything, it’s that America’s managed something extraordinary after the war: synthesising these twin European countercultures, via the Sixties counterculture — a synthesis that, now, is fading with the generation that birthed it.

It was Germans who brought nudism to America. Kurt Barthel, a German, founded the American League for Physical Culture in 1929; two other Germans — Katherine and Herman Soshinski — founded the American Gymnosophical Association the following year, with the help of the indefatigable Maurice Parmelee. But the Puritan culture of East Coast America had firm ideas about confining one’s eccentricities to the private sphere. Nudists were persecuted: when, for example, the American League for Physical Culture hired a gymnasium and pool in the New York City for a clothing-optional social event, neighbours called the police.

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And well into the postwar period, a penchant for nude sunbathing could still bite its advocates on the tender parts. Having returned to the public sector in 1938, taking up a string of government jobs, Maurice Parmelee eventually found himself an early victim of cancel culture, in 1952, at the hands of Congressman Martin Dies. Dies accused Parmelee of “subversion”, for his views on socialism and nudism, and forced him to resign from the Railroad Retirement Board.

Meanwhile, though, a more vitalist form of nudism — less Puritan restraint, more Germanic nature-worship — was heading West, in search of open spaces to express itself. Its foremost exponent was, of course, another German: a man named Wilhelm Pester, the so-called “Hermit of Palm Springs”, who fled his native land in 1906 to escape the military draft. Pester lived in the Californian desert, largely naked save his long beard or a wrap, making his own sandals and foraging for raw fruit and vegetables.

Like many other nudists, Pester lamented our modern disconnect from nature, declaring that “All man’s troubles, sickness, anxieties, and discontent, come from a departure from nature”. He advised a lifestyle centred on fresh fruit and vegetables, sunbathing, and avoiding stimulants. But out in the relatively wild of the West, the naturism he trailblazed began to fuse the egalitarian and vitalistic strands that had characterised it in Europe, aided by that most characteristic of American values: bare, naked individual freedom.

When the Sixties counterculture erupted, the Pester look — bearded, near-naked, sandal-wearing — was suddenly everywhere, especially in sunny California. Hippies danced naked in Golden Gate Park; nudist and “clothing-optional” communes and resorts mushroomed. And this Californian iteration of returning to “Nature”, half life-loving, nature-worshipping German Romanticism and half Puritan liberty, represented less and ascetic pursuit of “gymnosophy”, or ethnonationalist triumph of the will, than an absolute commitment to (even hedonistic) self-expression, as an absolute moral right. For example when Berkeley tried to ban public nudity in 1998, attendees at the naked protest held signs with messages such as “Our Bodies Are Freedom of Speech”.

And this is surely the iteration of public nakedness that, in turn, found its way to The Big Nude Cruise: a bare-all individualism that sees constraints as obstacles to fulfilment. For this fusion, of German vitalism and English Puritan freedom, became the keystone sensibility of the postwar counterculture: a belief that we need only shed our constraints and embrace our Nature, and all will be well. But of course once embraced, all such natures were instantly commercialised: hedonic freedom swiftly came to mean not reconnecting with nature but buying stuff. Richard Branson, is perhaps the paradigmatic example of this in practice: a boomer who began with yeah-man hippie values, and ended up very, very rich.

Branson has a whole Caribbean island to be naked on, if he so desires. But for those boomers who didn’t do quite so well, yet still enjoy hedonic self-expression with their cocktail, there’s always the Big Nude Cruise.  In a sense it’s the perfect countercultural retirement option: an orderly, gatekept, crime-free and tightly rule-bound fortnight of comfortable, utterly conventional convention-smashing, aboard a luxury floating fortress with multiple dining rooms (but put some underpants on first).

But this style of nudism is also fading along with its boomer enthusiasts. Naturists have long lamented that their pastime is declining in popularity; even the socialist German ones tend to be over 50. One British nudist recently theorised that this could be downstream of the social atomisation that has attended our increasingly self-expressive, individualistic postwar culture — which would make Sixties-style hedonic nudism, ironically, another casualty of a counterculture that turned out to rely on the conventions it was busy destroying. California began cracking down on public nudity around the turn of the millennium.

And yet, if nudism always expressed a Romantic yearning for nature, it’s hardly though the 21st century is less high-tech than the world of Heinrich Pudor. So as the Summer of Love iteration of nudist subculture approaches heat-death in cruise-holiday form, we may be seeing its older forms stirring awake. Whether in socialist-coded “body positivity” imagery or online anons who “post fizeek” and advocate sunning your balls to boost testosterone, the political horseshoe is back — just, seemingly all online, at least for now. The consumer-boomer synthesis has had its day; we face a future of naked extremism.

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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