The Habits of Bathers
SOME members of the sect of Doukhobors have just been punished with terms of imprisonment varying from three years downwards for parading the public roads naked after the manner of their community ; the Polish police have raided a colony of nudists encamped in what might have been supposed to be the sufficient remoteness of a mountain-top 6,000 feet high, and arrested their leaders ; Dr. Bracht, the Prussian Dictator, has issued stringent regulations against the undue exposure of the body and prescribed the character of the bathing-costumes to be worn by both sexes ; citizens of this country are being fined from time to time in local courts for undressing on the open beach or walking from their lodgings to the sea in bathing-dress and mackintosh ; and our livelier daily papers are finding the age-long conflict between the puritans and the iconoclasts a fertile topic of popular controversy.
All of which points to one conclusion at any rate— that a subject which for various reasons tends to be avoided is better discussed by sensible people sensibly than dogmatically by persons suffering from precon- ceptions or furtively by persons suffering from complexes. The subject, bodily exposure partial or complete, is dictated by the days in which we live. Ideas, in this respect as in others, are changing, and it is idle either to ignore the fact or to try and stifle the process. Far better to study it objectively and attempt to direct it, starting with a reasonable readiness to believe that developments making for greater freedom may quite as well be for the general good as the general ill. What is at issue, in a word, is how far it can be held legitimate and proper to expose the human body to view. That is a large question. It involves the theatre, the music-hall and the film. It involves the new or revived cult of nudism, which appears to advocate nakedness, within certain limits, for the sake of nakedness. And it involves sea-bathing and sun-bathing, where the exposure of the body is simply a means to an end whose legitimacy and desirability no one would question.
It will be enough to consider here this last aspect of the problem, partly because it raises immediately prac- tical issues and partly because it entails no very searching exploration of the elusive pathology of sex. It is ridiculous that a question so universal in its implications should be settled, so far as this country is concerned, by the varying and for the most part unreasoning pre- judices of some hundreds of rural and urban district councils, with the common law in the background to be invoked in grave extremities. It is time some general working philosophy was evolved. Bathing is the most wholesome of all summer recreations for some hundreds of thousands of the citizens of this country, and there is more prurience than principle in most of the annual outcry about the inadequacy of the costumes at this or that popular resort. Let us get down to the elements. The ordinary man, bathing alone on a desert island, would simply take off his clothes and get into the water. So, no doubt, would the ordinary woman. A group of men together in such circumstances would probably do the same, a group of women less probably. But the islands on which we live are far from desert. They are, on the contrary, exceedingly crowded. Round their shores there is little solitude, and there are many reasons against the complete exposure of the body in casual company. Many, probably most, people prefer not to be seen with nothing on, and appreciate a convention which prevents the question from being raised. Many others, on aesthethic rather than moral grounds, prefer not to see other people with nothing on. For that reason any obtrusion of nakedness is improper, and the Doukhobors of Canada, though the penalties imposed on them may be excessive, have only themselves to thank if they walk naked on the public highways and get punished for it. The Polish police, on the other hand, are carrying zeal very much to excess when they scale a mountain to interfere with a group of persons who in their practice of nudism seem to have been at particular pains to find a retreat where their abandon- ment of their clothing could jar no one's feelings. As for this country, if half a dozen persons of one sex or both, and all of like mind, happen on some totally secluded cove or lake or river pool, and choose to bathe un- habited, that is their own affair and no one else's. But to do it in the open view of other people who must be presumed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to hold the general opinion on such matters, is without excuse. The law quite properly protects the casual onlooker from having nakedness thrust on him, and in the present state of public sentiment the law is right.
Whether the present state of public sentiment is the permanent state cannot be determined. Opinion does not stand still. A generation ago unfortunate feminine bathers disported themselves in serge skirts and stockings. Half a generation ago mixed bathing was something between a scandal and a revolution. To-day it is gradually being realized that there is nothing indecent about the human body or any part of it, however adequate the reasons may be for not exposing it promiscuously to public view. Starting from that the two schools of thought can at least discuss their problem soberly and constructively, even if they cannot yet arrive at an agreed solution. Oxford University bathes naked. So do many public schools in their own baths, and few can doubt that in such cases openness is more wholesome, as well as more natural, than concealment. But to those who contend, in all seriousness, that the same applies even where the two sexes are concerned, on the ground that the attraction of the unfamiliar disappears when the unfamiliar becomes matter-of-fact, it must be replied that that thesis, though arguable, is far from being proven, and that a false move in this sphere might have unhappy results. Till the ground has been far more widely explored, partly by rational discussion, partly by the removal of restrictions in selected spots, and public sentiment is plainly such that no abuse of liberty need be feared, the general conventions prevailing to-day must be maintained. But not in excess. It is true that semi-nakedness can often be more disturbingly provocative than complete nakedness. It may be true that a minority of women of the sillier type deliberately don exiguous costumes for undesirable reasons and wear them in obviously in- appropriate places. But the busybodies on sea-fronts who compute the total area of bare back revealed by the modern swimming costume and write to the papers about it agitate themselves without a cause, and the district councillors intent on devising vexatious restrictions in the supposed interests of a morality which bathing customs in this country do nothing to threaten are mis- directing their diverse talents deplorably. Our coasts this summer have been making healthy minds as well as healthy bodies. The troubled Victorian who sees licence in any step towards a fuller freedom may take heart. Here and there restraint may be needed, but in the main the move is all in the right direction.
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