Students strip for newest, nudest trend

You look down and realize you’re naked. Butt naked. Buck naked, in fact, in a roomful of people.

It’s the recurring nightmare and entrenched anxiety of many. But for some college students, it’s a Saturday night.

Naked parties – where guests disrobe on arrival – are becoming increasingly more popular at colleges across the Northeast, including parties at Brown, Columbia and Yale universities.

However, students say the naked craze has yet to hit Boston University, perhaps due to misconceptions about the idea.

Naked party host and Bowdoin College senior Vanessa Lind said the stripped-down practicalities of the parties involve some partygoers dancing in a throng, with others sitting on couches and flirting amid sexual tension and a good supply of alcohol.

Basically, it’s your typical college party … but, naked.

Guests arrive clothed, and enter behind a sheet covering the door. They take off their clothes in a changing room, then move into the party – or they can stay there if they feel uncomfortable.

Getting an erection is a party foul, as is overt “checking – out.”

“You don’t want to be caught checking out someone’s naked body – that’s just awkward,” said Lind, who threw her third naked party this fall.

About a dozen people came to Lind’s first naked party two years ago. It became an annual house event, and this year, about 70 people came, she said.

Naked parties are not necessarily just for the exhibitionist or the nymphomaniac, but for people who are comfortable with their sexuality and bodies, Lind said.

“First thing, I associate it with an orgy,” College of Arts and Sciences senior Gustavo Sotelo said. “I’m not sure how far these naked parties go.”

But naked parties are less sexual than most people would think, and no more sexual than normal parties, Lind said.

“People aren’t coming to these parties for a hook-up,” she said. “I don’t feel it’s any more prevalent than at other parties.”

Although last year’s naked party ended with seven people in a dormitory shower room, Lind said nothing scandalous happened.

“We were having clean fun,” she said.

Lind’s housemate, Charlotte Carlsen, said naked parties are just as sex-charged as regular parties.

“It’s a little more sexual,” Carlsen, a Bowdoin senior, said, “but not overtly so.”

The prudishness of naked parties challenges the assumption that nudity is always associated with sex.

“Most people are hesitant about their bodies in front of other people, especially in front of people they don’t know,” Lind said. “There’s kind of the connotation that you can only be naked when there’s something sexual going on.”

College of Communication senior Katrina Alvarez said people have to become more comfortable with their bodies.

“We have to stray from that negative image of our sexuality,” she said. “Just ’cause you’re not clothed doesn’t mean you’re promiscuous or a bad person or slutty.

“It just shows you love your body – you own it,” said Alvarez, a contributor to Boink!, a sex magazine created by BU students.

While the idea of naked parties is becoming the latest college craze, Tufts University has been pioneering the concept for years.

For years, Tufts students have participated in an annual Naked Quad Run, where they strip off their clothes and streak through campus right before winter finals. After some students were injured in the 2002 run, Tufts administrators have taken measures to ensure the safety of the event, including making it a campus event through the student activities office, Tufts senior Sarah Lucas said.

“It is basically a huge mass of people running nakedn around our quad,” she said.

Lucas said two years ago the run, which takes place on the last day of classes in the fall, also took place on the night the university president was hosting donors at his on-campus home.

This caused some controversy, but Lucas said now he supports the run.

Some BU students said they thought mass nudity would take the mystery out of attraction.

“It’s hard to play hard-to-get at a naked party, don’t you think?” COM junior Cris Brinkerhoff said. “You kind of unintentionally see what people have to offer,” she said.

Sotelo said he is more intrigued by a covered body.

“I don’t see it as a social imposition that we have to wear clothes,” he said. “Seeing a girl in a short skirt is good enough for me. That’s what’s fun about meeting someone – leaving things to the imagination.”

Those who party naked said they feel less self-conscious about their body at a naked party – they cannot cover up body flaws and must embrace imperfections. Carlsen said naked parties attract people of varying body shapes and sexual preferences, and are of a relatively equal gender ratio.

“People came who I didn’t expect to come – every kind of body hanging out,” she said. “Definitely not just your stereotypically beautiful people. When you’re naked in front of other people you care less about how you look on a regular basis.”

The first time Carlsen went to a naked party, she said she did not entirely intend to go.

“I was completely sober, and I walked in and was like, ‘Holy cow’,” she said “But as soon as I got into the conversation and became less aware of being naked, the more comfortable I got.”

Some BU students agreed. Alvarez said she could see the appeal of a party, though she probably would not go herself.

“I think it’s an incredible idea,” she said.

Alvarez said the idea might be more empowering for women than men because she knows more men than women who are comfortable being naked.

“The female body has been portrayed negatively [by the media],” she said. “Take off your clothes, take off all this negative bullshit and learn to appreciate your body.”

There are practical considerations to think about, as well.

“Those rooms better be hot,” CAS junior Benjamin Anderson said. “I have nipples that could cut glass … when they’re cold.”

Brinkerhoff said he imagined nudity would break the ice and tension between people.

“Afterward, people would be a lot less awkward with each other,” she said, “because, well, I’ve seen you naked.”

CAS senior Adele Galebach said she would be uncomfortable with the idea of public nudity.

“I personally would not want to go,” she said. “I do not need to see my friends naked.”

But Galebach said she could see the appeal for others. She said she thought naked parties might attract “people who wished they had lived in the ’70s and want to kind of revive that era.”

“On a theoretical level,” she said, “it’s cool that people are comfortable with their imperfections and that it’s something liberating.”

But Soltero said he “highly, highly” doubted naked parties would sweep BU.

Many students said they thought naked parties could become a fringe theme party, but would not become a real trend on campus.

Though she thinks BU is conservative in many ways, Alvarez said she has been proven wrong before.

“I just don’t know,” she said. “BU’s surprised me.”

Brinkerhoff said she would be willing to host a naked party if others were interested.

“If I had a core group of people who were all willing to drop trough and be crazy,” she said, “then I’d do it.”

Both Lind and Carlsen encourage their hesitant friends to try it.

“It definitely has a very freeing feeling – an adrenaline rush,” Carlsen said. “I think being naked is something that’s very vulnerable – and it’s kind of exciting to feel vulnerable and at the same time very strong. [Also, you’re] breaking the rules a little bit.”

Many college students are not strangers to naked debauchery – the evidence is in skinny dipping and streaking or Spring Break in Cancun.

“[College] can be a time of free expression, a time of experimentation, a time of inverting customs of the wider society, or flouting and subverting them,” anthropology professor Parker Shipton said.

He said nude partiers may be trying to transgress social boundaries and norms.

“[Perhaps this is] a last hurrah before [students] go and stratify into investment banks and government hierarchies – a rebellion against all of that, that there’s another way to be,” Shipton said.

Writing instructor Gillian Mason is writing her dissertation in pornography and obscenity law.

“It [seems to be] a kind of structured environment where you can experiment with alternate sexualities,” said Mason, who said she is a “stodgy academic” with no first-hand experience in naked parties.

The “trend” of nude parties demonstrates to Mason “that we see sexuality as something that’s potentially frightening … that there’s something very potent about nakedness that needs to be contained in some kind of game-like form.”

The isolation of naked parties may serve as a foil that actually reinforces social constraints.

“So much of the sex we experience on a regular basis is funneled through television, or other media,” Mason said. “We tend to experience sex through commodities and maybe some people are looking for some kind of relief, some kind of connection.”

“It’s the lore of the naked party” that intrigues people and makes them want to go, Carlsen said.

“It’s something different,” she said.