G. K. Wuori

There’s a difference between skinny-dipping and swimming naked.
Skinny-dipping requires boldness and daring, perhaps a summer night and companions goofy enough to talk themselves into a corner where the only exit is a swim in the buff.
Of course skinny-dipping can also be romantic. Love occasionally likes its practitioners to walk along the edge – a public pool at midnight earns you more points than some hidden, backwoods pond. It can also be called one of the few things that’s truly outrageous without any promise of impending doom. Lovers need those kinds of memories, and the nice thing about skinny-dipping is that it doesn’t require the lovers to have had sex, nor need it be implied that a skinny-dip promises sex. All it promises is a quick view of the other lover’s body, with even that sometimes (though not always) befogged by night or shrubbery or perhaps the general merriment of additional companions.

Swimming naked, however, is a much more serious business.
Back in high school in the early sixties we had to swim naked in our physical education swimming classes, our pool a warm and steamy construct down in the basement of the school. Moving from ninth grade and junior high on up to tenth grade and high school, one of the first things a boy heard was that the boys had to swim naked in high school. That was boys, by the way. As far as we knew the girls got to wear suits and didn’t have to swim naked – and we would have known if they swam naked. Really, we would have.
If nothing else, however, hearing this was how you learned to begin bargaining with God. Could He please let you know really soon that this was just a nasty rumor? Or, if not, could He please bless you with something nicely contagious like whooping cough or ringworm or trench mouth, just a little something to get you banned from any sort of sharing of fluids? Really, just keep me out of there and I’ll happily play right field in baseball forever.
That fear undoubtedly had something to do with the body’s being regarded as a shameful thing, particularly for those of us who’d gone to Catholic elementary schools where modesty was seen as a high virtue and a gesture as innocent as a quick crotch scratch was regarded as sinful.
The prospect was also seen as a violation of an ethos sacred to the adolescent psyche – that of being cool. Cool was your hair oiled up in macho magnificence. Cool was clothing, the right jeans with cuffs folded up a half inch, just enough to reveal your white socks. Cool was a jacket collar flipped up and shirt sleeves folded up twice to just above your wrists.
How in the hell could you be cool naked? How could you show mastery over your colleagues without a single hair on your chest and only the occasional whisker showing up on your cheeks?
Truthfully, I was probably somewhere in the middle between the jock-exhibitionists (and they were that) and those guys who were literally dying in a full body blush as we stood around the edge of the pool for roll call. That is, I knew those first few times that I could handle it, and that eventually it would get easier as the self-consciousness faded. What continued to perplex, though, was why we were doing this in the first place.

Class reunions and occasional conversations with old friends from those years have yet to reveal the reason behind why the boys had to swim naked.
It could be that for high school officials the prospect of several hundred swimming suits in varying stages of drying hidden away in lockers already containing gym clothes nearing life-form status was simply too much to bear.
I believe the subject of hygiene came up a few times in these queries, but when we asked, we got snippets of information, never a full answer. It’s hard to imagine what level of health and wholesomeness would be forever denied us by the wearing of a swim suit. Not only that (early feminists, we), but if our buck naked dips brought us somehow closer to God, or at least the God of hygiene, why was that trip denied the girls – imprisoned as they were in swim suits we boys were pretty well convinced they’d look better out of anyway?
Was it a question of simple authority? Could be.
Back in the early sixties the country still bore all the cultural leftovers of having recently completed two wars: World War II and Korea. Many of our male teachers were veterans of one or both of those wars, and, in spite of their education degrees, I think their model for dealing with any group was a military one. In our P.E. classes we had uniforms. We lined up for roll call and shouted out our names with a “Sir!” (for some teachers) as punctuation. We were silent as Don or Gary or Dick stood in front of us scowling. Fitness would be neither pleasant nor fun.
Authority was important back then. A recognition of that had gotten us through those two recent wars. People needed to understand who their betters were and to accept happily the leadership of same. That idea applied in the microcosm of the family and the macrocosm of the world and pretty much anywhere in between.
Such lessons, too, are never taught in either one moment or one context.
Enter swimming, but one chapter in the book of obedience.
Nothing, of course, makes you less able to rebel against authority than having to stand before it naked. You are not cool. You are not unique. You are vulnerable. If, absent swimming class, you tend to feel forever naked whenever confronting authority, so much the better.
This, again, was the early sixties. Perhaps in a future piece we’ll see if those lessons “took.”

G. K. Wuori © 2009
Photoillustration by the author