Bare All

I can’t say precisely when Sandy Bay first gained its reputation as a place much liked by sunbathers in complete undress. I do know, however, that when my friends and I, as boys, trekked to Sandy Bay, to catch kreef, we usually had the place to ourselves. Otherwise, we shared the beach occasionally with parties of amiable horse-riders which had come over the dunes from Hout Bay. The dunes were more extensive then and there weren’t any people resembling iguanas to be seen on the rocks at Sandy Bay.

My best estimate is that Sandy Bay began to become popular, fairly suddenly, as a hide-away for dedicated, or addicted if you like, nudists in the late 1960s. Why this happened then, indeed why this happened at all, I can’t say. Fifteen years later many South Africans had visited the place, and many more knew about it. Commercial operators of local excursions for South African tourists included in their itineraries a visit, complete with binoculars, to a look-out point to view Sandy Bay. The tannie and oompie kyk-daar brigades from the hinterlands came to stare and condemn. Sies! Skande! Official, and not so official, inspections of the place and its naked sun worshippers were made by dominees and civil servants, some displaying two-tone bodies of the boere-tan variety. Needless to say, these custodians of the morals of die volk proclaimed, with gravitas nogal, that a local Sodom and Gomorrah, of the kind they had witnessed at Sandy Bay, had no place in South Africa. Indeed, they had a point in part.

Their point, in part, was based on not insignificant numbers of perverted, depraved, and even criminal, people who had taken to visiting Sandy Bay, as a consequence of its prominent publicity in the late 1970s. The publicity was fuelled by widespread media reports of multiple police raids aimed at detaining nudists while sunbathing or even swimming. Anyone not wearing a “cossie” was arrested by what can be called swarms of comically histrionic constables. The “perpetrators” were taken, jammed in police vans, to the “cop-shop” at Hout Bay where they were charged for public indecency. A fiasco, all lacking in dignity and decorum, caused not least by more than ample exposure of décolletage and derrière. All so hamfisted, degrading and plain stupid. It was a lot worse than a comic B-movie scenario.

A punctilious administrator of the Cape Province at the time had vowed publicly to rid Sandy Bay of all indecency. He held nothing but excoriating contempt for nudists. His words of asperity, and the deeds they inspired, backfired. Decent people, particularly families, gave up visiting Sandy Bay and indecent people moved in, whether nudists or not. In 1982 the Cape High Court ruled that appearing nude at Sandy Bay did not constitute indecent behaviour. Mrs Grundy caught a klap. This landmark judgement stands today, as does another historic arrangement, made in the 1990s, that provided the foundation for Sandy Bay to become incorporated into the Table Mountain National Park. There is now better control over antisocial behaviour in the park as a whole, and Sandy Bay in particular. Still, however, muggings of the innocents continue, and there remains a body of febrile thinking that regards nakedness as a sine qua non of a sexually lurid lifestyle.

What is it that makes certain people take off their clothes in public? You will have to put that to psychologists. I don’t have the answer(s). All that I can say is that skinny dipping, and sunbathing in the nude, can be both pleasant and liberating. That, at least, has been my personal experience. And, I would surmise that it applies to many genuine nudists and naturists as well. Put differently, for them nudity seemingly is not linked to either exhibitionism or narcissism or both.

What is the difference between nudism and naturism? Nudism is a derivative of nudist. Nudist, my dictionary says, is a person who goes naked wherever possible. I’d guess, therefore, that many, if not most, of Sandy Bay’s so-called nudists are not the real hard-core deal, but rather “ordinary” people who simply enjoy the pleasurable sensations of swimming and sunbathing in the nude. I can’t see anything lewd, even indecent, in that, if it is done alone or in groups of like-minded people, of the same or mixed sex, in places that are secluded from immediate and easy public viewing. Naturism, on the other hand, is defined as the worship of nature or natural objects. It is often treated synonymously with nudism. However, a nudist isn’t necessarily a worshipper of nature and nor is a naturist necessarily a nudist. So much for lexicology.

Nudism has been espoused for thousands of years by groups of, often deemed to be eccentric, people on the fringes of mainstream society. They have done so for a variety of reasons, including, for example, better health and better sex. Little, if any, empirical evidence exists for backing these promotions. In the last one-hundred years or so literally hundreds of relatively harmless associations embracing nudism as a life-style have come and gone in Britain and Europe.

The ancient universities, not surprisingly, were prominent centres of secret societies practising nudism in Victorian and Edwardian times, giving themselves such highfalutin titles as the English Gymnosophist Society. “Gymno” means bare or naked, stemming from the Greek gymnos. More particularly, a gymnosophist is a member of an ancient Hindu sect given to wearing very little clothing and practising asceticism and contemplation. To be a gymnosophist in subtropical India is one thing, but to be one in Oxford or Cambridge is another. Real commitment would have been required to bare all there in the days before central heating. Even so, I struggled to keep warm in Oxford for most of the year, when wearing thick woollies was de rigueur. The English gymnosophist societies were harmless enough. Certainly, one shouldn’t conflate them with the Hell-Fire clubs which were secret centres of debauchery and depravity for aristocrats in eighteenth century England.

Like many other cultural phenomena, the “isms” attending both nudists and naturists have been subject to the development of cultism of the extreme kind. However, I’ve no knowledge of any significant radical cults of nudism or naturism in the Cape Peninsula. So, my earlier conclusion stands that decent people who visit Sandy Bay go there primarily to enjoy the exercise, scenery and sun. And, for many to do so while naked is an exhilarating experience, with or without their BlackBerries. Let’s be tolerant and keep things that way. Let’s keep really indecent people, who behave in antisocial ways, out of Sandy Bay.

While I’ve written that nudity and nudism are increasingly tolerated in the western world, there is no mistaking the fact that they constitute an enduring eccentricity. Why should this be so? A primary, all powerful, factor is vested in the beliefs of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religious complex. In short, starting with Adam and Eve, nudity is a state of shame. A view of the naked human form is a sin. A trap sent by the devil. And so on. Sex is paramount in all of this, of course. But, visiting a nudist colony is not like viewing a skin-flick, paging through a pornographic magazine, or scanning an exhibition of paintings of nudes deliberately created to convey sexual beauty in an erotic way. No, visits to nudist resorts will disappoint voyeurs, because there is hardly anything erotomaniac about the goods on offer. Quite the contrary in fact; there being little to titillate the imagination, “… in light of the plasticities, protuberances and pendulosities of the human body”, as A.C. Grayling has put it. Indeed, many if not most nudists have bodies that they wouldn’t want strangers to see kaalgat in any place other than a nudists’ colony.