Naked

Nakedness was an unexpected and unusual theme of this week.

Last weekend, one of my favorite friends invited me on her annual birthday trip to the nudists' colony on the River Cam, for a naked swim with a bunch of her friends. Whoa. Honestly I was more concerned about the temperature than about the nudity, but when her birthday turned out to be a gloriously sunny day, I got talked into it. Funny that when everyone's naked, it doesn't matter, and you forget about it!  What a surprise. There were groups of naked old guys hanging out on the grass in the gated nudists' colony, with a shoulder-high shrub between them and the fully-clothed punters on the river. They said hello and offered to share their bottle of wine. (!) We declined and went straight for the water, which was, according to the nudists' official blackboard, 7 degrees C, 45F. OMG. It was not so much swimming as being shocked and gasping and desperately trying to not swallow the notoriously polluted water. We stayed in about three minutes, which the regulars on the grass said was about normal for this time of year. My friend was satisfied that she'd marked her 25th birthday with her usual annual swim, and I didn't have hypothermia, and none of us got the 24-hour vomiting bug that people who drink Cam water get, so overall it was a success? Funny how different things make different people happy... it was kind of idyllic to swim in a river and then to sit in the sunshine with your friends - and some strangers - for some peace and natural drying-off. And no wet swimsuit to deal with. :)

Today my college offered a life drawing class, which means drawing a naked model. I have a friend who does a lot of modeling for art classes like this, and talks about it as very calm and art-focused and not sexy. I didn't really believe her, but life drawing classes are a bit of trend in Cambridge lately and I really like to draw, and - let's face it - I was really curious. So ten of us sat in the Clare Hall meeting room this morning with a pile of paper and pencils, one art teacher, and one naked woman. My friend was right that it's amazing how quickly you forget that the angles and negative space you're drawing belong to a person. However, the teacher kept breaking the sort of unspoken denial of that fact by looking at our drawings and saying things like, "No, you've done her breast all wrong, it's got more of a peak to it" and "Measure the nose-to-bottom distance carefully"... but everyone kept their focus and there were no giggle outbursts (though I came close - when the model sneezed. Have you ever seen a naked woman sneeze? Apparently I hadn't! It is a whole-body experience.). But honestly, I'm not convinced that the class would have been different - besides being less awkward - if we'd drawn a bowl of fruit. Trying to get perspective right and measure proportions and sketch in shadows is really fun, whether you're drawing somebody's armpit or a coffee cup. Also, I suspect that there are rarely male models in drawing classes, and that doesn't seem right. If women are going to be objectified in the name of art, men should too. Although I wonder how the class's attendance rate would have been affected if we'd drawn a still-life instead of someone naked?

It's funny how few naked people I've seen. Not on TV, I mean, but in person. We always had individual locker rooms in high school. I don't remember being naked with my brothers, to swim or play in the bathtub or whatever. Is this an American prudism? Germans are well into nakedness, such that kids rarely wear anything at the beach and both their parents tend to wear only Speedos. The French and Spanish are similar. The Brits are more like us - they wear full wet suits at the beach, but more for reasons of temperature than modesty I suspect - but even they have a nudists' colony on the river Cam. Maybe my experiences with nudity this week are one more step in my Europeanification?

An unpleasant feeling of nakedness also happened this week, with the arrival of my first job rejection. Ouch. Sending an application detailing who you are as an employee, as a scholar, as a person, feels revealing, and makes you vulnerable. Then when that application is not wanted, you feel personally violated. Right? This could just be me, and everyone says it gets easier as you get more rejections (really?!), and of course the worst thing you can do is take rejections personally, but still... it's hard not to feel naked in front of a selection committee. And not in the interest of beauty, like art models, or the liberating joy of a German kid at the beach, but in the self-centered hope of getting your onlookers to hire you, despite your vulnerability. Strange. And awful. I'd rather jump in the Cam naked every day forever than face another slim envelope saying "thank you for your application but...".