Humanities & Cultures

[...]For more than a century, the cultural norm in the United States was that nudity was acceptable—at least within same-sex environments. Over the past couple of decades or so, that idea has largely dissolved. This sort of nudity is so rarely discussed that we don’t really have vocabulary for it. The term nonsexual nudity feels inadequate, because for some, changing in a locker room could carry a charge of eroticism. Communal nudity is no better, evoking images of orgies or nudist colonies rather than once-routine forms of unclothed life. The fact that the practice never really had a name suggests how unremarkable it once was.

This decline partly reflects shifts in the culture: In a world that recognizes a wide range of gender identities and acknowledges attraction across those boundaries, the old mainstream assumption that same-sex facilities were inherently asexual—and therefore appropriate settings for nudity—no longer holds. At the same time, broader conversations about consent, sexual assault, and vulnerability, as well as the ubiquity of phone cameras, have raised questions about the discomfort or even legal liabilities that such spaces can create.

Although these changes are largely positive, they also introduce a new reality: Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves. Without exposure to the normal variety of bodies, we may become less comfortable with our own, more likely to mistake common characteristics for flaws—and more inclined to see every bare body as an inherently sexual object, making nudity even more charged.