It’s your world and you can change it! That’s the message to youth from the outspoken author of The Harrad Experiment — and the weapon he urges is … nudity!
The Naked Crunch
Though I write what many people describe as Utopian novels, I do not believe that man should waste his time striving for the perfect society. A more realistic approach is to take some facet of our living as presumed human beings and see if as a personal decision we can define how we believe man should or could function in a specific moral and ethical framework. Not only isn’t this as simple as it may sound, but no matter what area you may tackle you will quickly find yourself embracing changed thinking and concepts in other areas.
Perhaps, for example, you know exactly how you feel about being naked. Yet, if you were sitting here with me as I type this, naked, I’d wager that like most people in this society your attitude to human nakedness might prove to be quite ambivalent. In the past year musicals and plays with little to offer except sex and nudity have opened on the New York stage amid protests from the critics that the whole business of stage nudity is not only getting boring but, worse, naked human beings going through the motions of copulation in front of a live audience are obviously “not doing it” and hence exalting impotency. At the very least they fail to create an empathy with the audience. Be that as it may, since there is more than a casual relationship between nakedness and copulation (particularly in the neuroses of the older generation) it is instructive to review what progress western society has made towards nudity in the so-called Sexual Revolution. If he wanted to see what a female looked like naked, without marrying her, a young man used to have two choices: the burlesque show if he was living in a city where one existed, or the Public Library Art Section under the surveillance of some old lady — who was well aware that the pimply faced young man was getting a faint erection looking at naked Goyas or Tintorettos, but of course, even if she had been sympathetic, couldn’t have dared to enlighten him that the truth was most women did have hair down there. The only other recourse available to a young man a quarter of a century ago was the National Geographic which (with the conviction that Africans weren’t human anyway) occasionally revealed some black beauty with her breasts uncovered.
But what about naked with her legs open?
Since then Pets and Playgirls have at least made it apparent that the female body is beautiful (and also given the somewhat false impression that it is more readily available than it actually is). But the old mystery remains: what does this delectable configuration of plateaus and valleys, of breasts and buttocks, the human female, look like with her legs open ? For better or worse, through the efforts of the American Sunbathing Association, who pursued their belief that the human body was not obscene to the Supreme Court (and won!), the mystery has been plumbed. Now, to the surprise of legitimate nudist organizations (who were also aware that nakedness came with pot bellies and shrunken breasts) the young man of 15 or 16 (and his father, who is still pretty naive) can buy in certain stores photographs of the genitals of beautiful young females. With his face buried in the new crop of crotch magazines, the young man might even wonder if the rumor wasn’t true that the female genitals look like an emasculating snatch that could snip off his penis in a twinkle.
So now, in 1969, here is the sum total of where we are nakedly at.
An avalanche of magazines devoted to picturing the male and female genitalia, sold only in areas like the Combat Zone in Boston or 42nd Street in New York City — the crass depiction and the environments where the magazines are sold reinforcing the past-30 attitude that no matter how you slice it nudity and sex are dirty and obscene.
Few general magazines and newspapers and no television shows permitting nudity in any form.
Motion pictures known as nudies (fully available in the same run-down sections of our big cities) concentrating on female breasts and male and female buttocks but never showing genitals. After several hours of prurient leering and pseudo-violence (the violence is only pseudo because the producers are not sure how far they dare go in the area of aberrant sex) these films often conclude with platitudinous remarks about the wages of sin.
Slightly higher-class movies such as I am Curious (Yellow) still unable to escape the dilemma that copulation is dirty; and even in one scene using a copulating couple to symbolize the old curse of “go fuck yourself.”
Live theater, largely in New York and a few major cities, occasionally going the whole route and using the nakedness of the cast and the promise of copulation before a live audience as the drawing card.
Now, I ask you, as a young male or female, single, not yet committed to marriage but quite likely involved with some member of the opposite sex, isn’t our culture still quite sick on the subject of nakedness and copulation? The answer can only be yes, and the truth is, that while we are supposedly in the midst of (or have already passed through) a sexual revolution, the older generation, responsible for this ludicrous situation, is still trapped in the neurotic religious and moral thinking of the past.
If mixed nudity were legal in public…
Our current inability to solve the problem of human nakedness and remove the human body (yes, God’s work if you believe in God) from the ugliness and the gross commercialization of man and woman’s deepest potential response to each other (the devaluation of man who is supposedly superior to the animals) could be solved by permitting mixed public nudity in school gymnasiums, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., public beaches, public pools and parks and for that matter wherever any person found it more convenient to be naked than wearing clothes. Overnight the sad nudie movie, the slick film with the X rating, and the crotch magazines would disappear. For the first time since the Greeks the dignity of the human naked body would be restored.
This distressed area of where it is proper to be naked, and whether my nakedness or your nakedness is an invasion of someone’s privacy (mental equilibrium) and whether as a shocking consequence we might occasionally be exposed to the spectacle of an erect and virile male, is the ideal challenge for the young male or female activist, to force social decision, to take a possible step toward Utopia now!
If you are really a member of the so-called honest generation, the generation that has questioned the lopsided approaches of the past, can you dare to face the children you will eventually have without demanding an end to this neurotic behavior towards nakedness? Will you bring up your children in a society that satisfies its voyeuristic needs by buying nudie magazines or attending restricted movies? Or should you do a little soul-searching and ask the question that gets to the root of the problem. Isn’t it the uptight, hung-up, past-30 generation you have found so exasperating that is performing the configuring act of selling your generation photographed nudity and copulation but forbidding you to be naturally and casually naked? Ask yourself — before it’s too late 15 or 20 years from now when you’re the older generation — is this the kind of world you want your children to experience?
Now, before the counter-revolution sets in and censorship clamps down on what little progress has been made, both the black and white students of America should set aside the last few weeks in May in every college year (and those who aren’t in college should join them) and on warm spring days walk out of their dormitories naked, play together on every campus and in university grounds naked, and do this purposely as a protest — a protest against the generation that ignores the dictum of the Supreme Court, and panders by accepting violence and the sex tease in all of our arts while building new monuments to their neurotic belief that the sex act and the human body are basically ugly and dirty and that sex without commercial titillation would be a bore.
My guess is that if enough young people not only in the colleges and universities but in the high schools united in an annual Spring Festival of Nakedness it would occasion the biggest belly laugh the students have been able to perpetrate on the Establishment — who, in the area of sex and nudity, have proven they don’t know where they’re at. Would the policeman in his cruising car arrest the naked youngsters? Would the university faculty side with the administration or would they too doff their clothes? Best of all, what would the television networks which have given up life for a world of simpering conformity do? Would they have to tell the cameramen that live coverage above the waist was okay for the males, but not the females? Maybe they would be reduced to pleading with the peaceable naked students to cover their breasts and genitals so they could record the event for the fine citizens of our country who still believe that man is conceived in sin.
What would happen if you and millions like you convinced the world that nakedness was not shameful? But rather, it was quite healthy for human beings to see each other in all ages of life, naked and humanly fragile. Graduating high-school seniors would quite likely exchange naked pictures of each other and enjoy looking at them later, since the human body doesn’t change as much as styles. Males and females would wear different beach costumes designed to protect themselves from the sun’s rays and not the glances of others. Facially homely females would find it easier to attract a male since their total body would compensate for their facial short-comings. Males would discover that small-breasted women naked were just as physically attractive as their better-endowed friends. Television, magazines and the theater would depict the human being naked where it was logical for him or her to be naked, and the world of men and women would discover it was just a mite easier to be defenseless with each other, and drop the role playing.
“On warm spring days, black and white students should walk out of their dormitories naked, play together on every campus naked, and do this purposedly as a protest. And annual Spring Festival of Nakedness would occasion the biggest bely laugh the students have yet been able to perpetrate on the establishment.”
After natural nudity open coitus…
The question is can the single generation, brought up in all the guilt tradition, with all the hang-ups of its fathers and mothers, create an entirely different heterosexual environment for its future children? If you who are members of this generation can’t do it, are you willing to face the fact that all the rebellion and challenge of your youth was simply a tempest in a teapot? Will you have to face your children and admit that when the chips were down you too retreated into the sleazy shilly-shallying and half-truths of your parents?
If you dare to create a world where nakedness is a natural casual part of everyday living, you will make it possible for a new young, single generation (your children) to move on to the next phase, which may not turn out to be a sexual revolution at all but a civil war between those of your generation who remain trapped in the attitudes of the past, and those who are deeply committed to the necessity of deep vital changes in all our interpersonal approaches (the world in microcosm) to solve the problems of faltering blundering global society. If you do succeed and the world moves into a new realm where the visual delight of seeing the naked male and female, in youth and age, is a common occurrence, the concomitant breakthrough would be to create a world where males and females actually experience coitus as an equally normal part of their physical and emotional life in an environment that surrounds the act of love with the deep joy of a shared experience.
This kind of world, a small Utopia, is within your grasp. But you can’t wait! Now, while you are young, while you are single, you must define the kind of sexual world you really want to live in. For the first time possibly in the history of man, sex as enjoyment, sex as a relief from tension, sex as the profound joyous discovery of the intimate person of the opposite sex, without fear of pregnancy and without commitment of marriage, is a possible way for the young single person to grow into life.
But the potential is a long way from the reality. My guess is, despite the belief that the young, single generation is reveling in pre-marital sex, the truth is that the young male at the height of his sexual powers at 18 or 19, and for the balance of his unmarried life, is still pretty much trapped in the world of his father. Very few females will go to bed with him without (i) a preliminary courtship or testing period. Much the old chase formula, foreshortened perhaps, since the modern female may not have as much staying-power as her mother; (ii) followed by the female being convinced, or (in the absence of a definite avowal of love on the part of the male) convincing herself that the boy really loves her. Thinking: “Now we have gone this far it won’t be too long before we’re married;” (iii) quite probably maintaining after the first capitulation that “we really can’t (shouldn’t) be doing this all the time,” or “too often,” ignoring or never being aware that the young male can and does need sexual intercourse a good deal more than he ever achieves it.
Creativity and the sex drive…
Can a male learn to think female or vice versa? Not only is it possible (all of us have varying components of the opposite sex) but one of the basic premises of a Harrad College is that males and females living together during their four-year undergraduate experience would actually discover as a subconscious process the joy of viewing the world from the perspective of the opposite sex. This doesn’t mean, as some writers have predicted, that in the next 50 years or fewer we will only have one sex, a unisex with the special male and female characteristics amalgamated into a composite personality that is neither male nor female. No, rather I would venture that a new kind of premarital environment could emerge if your generation dares to create a world where the young male and female grow up swiving (you’ll find the word in Webster’s and it means what you think) as a normal part of their late adolescence and premarital years.
But to achieve this world you must decide how you really feel about premarital sex. Your parents’ generation literally believe that a man must earn his right to sexual pleasure. While a few of the more liberal have come to accept the inevitability of premarital sex, most of the older generation still look on it as a temporary indulgence. In their view it simply isn’t a part of your heritage, even if you find a partner with a similar need, to be able to make love if your body tells you you need to. Your parents have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the Freudian belief that man owes his material progress to the conscious repression of man’s instincts. This belief in the power of frustrated sexuality is amazingly deep-rooted. If you point to Picasso at 80 as a creative genius who has lived a full sexual life, you will be overwhelmed with the names of artists like Goethe, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Shelley et cetera who during most of their life were sexually at their wits’ end.
A writer I once knew told me that he had an agreement with his wife: when he was in the throes of creation, no sex. Sometimes this state of affairs went on for weeks, presumably making him a better writer. His wife, who was more creative than he, finally divorced him. Obviously if you accept and approve the view that we have reached the present heights of materialism by creating generations of suffering neurotics then you are not only going to replicate the world you are criticizing, but you are going to find it hard to agree with my belief that it is now possible for your generation to raise a new breed of children who from 16 (at least) will be aware of their sexuality and can release it with a deep interpersonal respect and wonder for the partner of the opposite sex.
If you dare to create this kind of sexual world, man could enter an age of creativity and wonder and joy of living beyond anything the world has yet seen. While I can’t speak for the female, let me assure you that the myth that the sexually happy man is half-dead and phlegmatic is just that … a myth! If you want a tower built to the sun, or want to make a race against time, make up your mind: the potential of the man or woman who is sexually alive and complete in their driving instinctual needs represents a force that has never been tapped in this frustrated world of sin and taboo.
So, along with the casual world of human nakedness that is in your grasp, is the possibility for you to raise children in an entirely new kind of home environment. An environment where your 16-year-old son or daughter has his or her own room and your daughter can tell you without embarrassment, “Jimmy asked if he could stay overnight with me, and I said he could.” Or your son introduces you to Susan who walks around your home casually naked, acts like your own daughter, but is unafraid to tell you that sleeping with your son in his own room is much nicer than making love in the back seat of a car.
A daughter’s social testament, 1989…
Do you dare to create that kind of home life for your children? When you are in your forties will your 16-year-old daughter be able to say:
“I’ve played games, swam and tumbled with my whole family naked. Once I asked my mother and father why I couldn’t watch while they made love, and mother’s reaction, seconded by my father, was there was nothing shameful about coitus and they were happy that I had seen many lovely films of men and women making love, but the truth was most people found it embarrassing to be watched.”
“I knew what they meant. I enjoy myself naked. I like to watch people naked and wonder why they don’t try harder to keep the lithe bodies they had when they were young. I grin when I’m at the beach, or the Y, and my boyfriend gets a tiny erection. I suppose I could have intercourse in public but my mother and father are right: sexual intercourse is a private experience. I could do it watched, but I like it better when I’m with a boy alone and we can be tender together and laugh together and even shriek and tumble together at our own silly joy.”
“While I have had intercourse only with Jimmy so far, I expect to make love with three or four different boys before I marry. I’m discovering one thing about the act of sex: it’s much more rewarding and fulfilling when Jimmy and I use it as one of the many ways of discovering each other and the kind of persons we really are. Sex is holding each other naked too, and finding the world by losing it.”
“I have a keen sense of family. I’m convinced that what makes my family relate better than most is that my mother and father like each other. Because they like each other sex is especially nice. I suspect also if I asked them they would be honest and tell me that the Joneses (whom they have known for years) are ‘special’ and occasionally they sleep with each other’s spouse without rocking the boat of our family life.”
“As a matter of fact, my family and the Joneses are very much alive and thinking people who welcome me and my brothers into their discussions (but don’t force us) making us keenly aware of the thousand facets of living possible in a full life.”
“While I can’t evoke it exactly I sense my parents want me to develop my own uniqueness both as a female and a human being, not demanding love but giving it, not demanding security from anyone but giving it to those near me, and not taking myself and my own ego so seriously that I can’t step aside and laugh and chuckle at my only silly fears and failures.”
Is this the kind of daughter you want? If it is and you create her and an equivalent son (you may have to wage minor civil wars to do it) you will change your world not only in the area of warm, joyous sexuality but politically and economically too as a by-product of this new kind of man and woman. So start now and work towards small Utopias!
Admittedly 1969 ended a long time ago, but we’re pretty sure we still do not have many adherents to this philosophy. We’re actually pretty sure that if you show up to your college class naked, you’re going to get in trouble. (At most colleges you’d probably get cheers too, but that might be beside the point.) Bottom line – y’know, as it were – using nudity as a protest has never really caught on, except for the random “women should be able to bare breast too” sorts of things. … A quick search did result in a recent report on the topic from something called Worldcrunch, which despite sounding like a not very good breakfast cereal turned out to be kind of fun. If you have some time, learn some things. Bit of a click-bait thing, though, so use a modern browser.
