I See Naked People

I See Naked People Megastars baring all, 'Girls Gone Wild,' nudists next door. Where is America's fascination with nudity taking us? By Michael Leahy – The Washington Post

[Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30524-2003Oct28.html ]

Sunday, November 2, 2003 At this junction where American hedonism was about to run into American squeamishness, on a dusty road in Maryland a hundred yards down from his cabin, Mike Transparenti, retired insurance agent, waited naked for a representative from Baltimore Gas & Electric Co., which had promised to send out someone to inspect Transparenti's electric meter. "Naked" in this case is not a figurative description. Mike Transparenti was not, for instance, naked in his angst over his meter, or nakedly betraying his irritation with the size of his utility bill. He was just Mike Transparenti, a naked man, and he stood next to me out in the middle of this dirt road alongside some woods, and together we waited for the man from the power company. "Are you warm?" he asked. "Would you like anything else to drink? Hot day." It was still summer. I had on khakis, an Oxford shirt, a loosely knotted tie and a pool of sweat running down my shirt. Transparenti had gray chest hair and no tan lines. He had a genial, subdued bearing, and in retirement had grown a thick Papa Hemingway salt-and-pepper beard, but all this belied his ingrained zest for thoroughness and efficiency, which explained why he wanted to deal pronto with his old electric meter. He is a detail man, and even in retirement, at 57, he gravitates toward projects, loose ends, work to finish -- tough habits to break. Without telling the whole world about it, he largely concentrates on enjoying himself, spending most of his summers right out here, at the Maryland Health Society, a name that sounds like a think tank's or a state medical clinic's, like anything other than what this place is. He joined MAHESO (pronounced: Ma-HEE-so) in 1996, and became its president five months ago. These days he happily rides herd over its 100 acres of woods and hiking trails, marked with 22 cabins, that back up to the bucolic Patuxent River, in the town of Davidsonville. He smiled genially at a nude long-legged blonde striding toward us, briskly closing the distance, 20 feet away, 10 feet, five feet, prepare to dock. Hi. "Nice day," she said to Transparenti. She added that she was thinking of taking a swim today. And Transparenti said, "Well, have a good one," and she moved on down the dusty road. Here came a grinning pair of elderly nudists, tanned a kind of nutty brown everywhere and waving, and Transparenti waved back, calling out something about condiments and a barbecue, and then, "See you Saturday." He stood there on his own version of Main Street, saying he felt a breeze on himself. "Beautiful day," he added. "Good just to hang around." His passion had begun with a recollection: an image of himself swimming nude as a little boy at a YMCA pool. No experience had ever felt better, and, on vacations, decades later in the Caribbean, he had tried a couple of nude beaches, and then dared to set foot in a nudist club back home, and then at MA-HESO, where to spend a weekend left him feeling more relaxed than two weeks anywhere else. It was his life now. He could see the BG&E truck now, spewing a little gravel and making its way through the MAHESO gate, and, smiling, he waved toward the driver and, in a reflex, smoothed his silver hair. The driver, a man named Kimberly Hayes, in turn took a look at the waving man and thought this: WHAT THE HELL? THAT GUY IS BUTT NAKED.

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The BG&E truck stopped. Then, slowly, it moved forward. Transparenti kept waving. The various parts of him bobbing, he strolled quickly toward the truck. But Hayes wasn't getting out yet. He coasted to a stop, rolled down his window. He nodded uncertainly at Transparenti, who said pleasantly, "Thanks for coming out. Nice to see you." Hayes nodded again, intent on looking professional. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay." He was composed, but his head was on a swivel, trying not to fix on Transparenti. He glanced at the woods and Transparenti's face and his steering wheel, then his face and the woods. "It's our electric meter," said Transparenti. "We're the fourth cabin on the left." "Okay, uh-huh, uh-huh." Hayes's head lolled from left to right, and it was then that he caught sight of the action around a large pool, where about 10 nudists, most of them women, were sunning themselves on chaise longues and benches and padding around the deck. From behind his darkly tinted, wraparound safety glasses, he looked without appearing to look, which is voyeurism in a perfected state. And with the look came a realization. Once up at Transparenti's cabin, trudging along the side of the house where the meter was affixed, Hayes softly remarked, "This is a nudist colony, isn't it?" A lot of outsiders refer to the place as a nudist colony. The term has that communal, utopian, hippieish, 24-hour-sex-forall vibe. Transparenti smiled affably, radiating the old insurance man's diplomacy, correcting without correcting. "Yes. A nudist club." "A nudist club," Hayes repeated. "Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay." It was then that Hayes realized he had just taken a quick look up and down Transparenti's body to see everything, and wondered why he had done this, and after fretting about this, decided not to think any more about it, but then he thought about it. It was hard not to look. Hayes declared the meter obsolete and offered to replace it with a current model. "Really appreciate your taking a look at it," said Transparenti, who, as an expression of gratitude, invited the meter inspector to a MAHESO event that weekend. There would be roughly 100 partying nudists at the annual Nude Bull Roast, and, besides, he was always looking for new members. "Lots of food. Swimming. We'd enjoy having you, if you'd like to come out." "Okay, uh-huh." Hayes didn't think that was likely to happen, but he remained professionally appreciative. From behind his safety glasses, he looked Transparenti straight in the eyes, finding this was already becoming easier. It was weird, he thought, how fast the impulse to look at everything wore off. Hayes wrapped up his work, got back in his truck and drove out. "When I got back to the guys I worked with," he said later, "they kept asking me, 'See anything nice?' But, you know, once I got over the initial shock, it was kinda routine. There were a lot of naked people, but how many can you look at -- you know what I mean? I'm thinking now it might have been more special for me, a little erotic maybe, if they'd had a little piece of clothing on. A little clothing, and you'd wonder what they look like maybe." But Transparenti understands that -- despite Hayes's non- chalance -- his passion for nudity still strikes many Americans as, in a word, creepy. And not everyone is as broad-minded and courteous as Hayes. He thinks that to understand nudism it is important to experience it. "Do you think you might want to try it?" he asked me. "Try?" But I knew what he was getting at. "It might help you understand." "I'll certainly think about it." He often heard that line.

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Our forefathers got off to a bad start with nudity. Unlike in so many European cultures, where nudity has always been idealized, serving as the inspiration for countless portraits of deities and military heroes, here it was just another wild foreboding frontier, on the other side of which might lurk damnation and disgrace. Puritan modesty in the American Northeast, and evangelical fervor in other parts of the Colonial land about the need to sublimate the libido, doubtless played a role in the disfavor of exposed flesh. But so, too, did 18th-century American artists who, according to some art historians, looked for ways to distinguish the portraits of prominent Colonial settlers from the depictions of Native Americans. While one group of Colonial artists depicted Indians as barely clothed, in what they regarded as a celebration of the natives' physicality and freedom of body, another group sought to ensure a flattering contrast by rendering distinguished Colonials as elegantly attired models of modesty. It was nothing less than an effort to characterize nudity as the way of a savage, and the clothed as pious and enlightened. "The view of Native Americans' nudity made it much more difficult to imagine nudity as a normal state . . . ," says Jennifer Roberts, an assistant professor of art and architecture at Harvard. "There would be no classical nudes for that group of Americans." Through the 20th century, nudity and semi-nudity remained the foreboding frontier, to be divisively crossed, over and over. A glimpse of ankle, knee, thigh: Each, in turn, prompted the familiar arguments about immodesty and lasciviousness, complicated in the second half of the century by the arrival of feminism, which railed against "objectification." But even there, ambivalence wafted. Was something like the miniskirt exploitative or empowering? Was it a celebration of freedom and beauty, or just another tool designed to liberate only men seeking more pleasurable objects to ogle? Nowhere were the cultural wars over nudity fought more fiercely than at the gates of the entertainment industry. The full nudity of the late-'60s American theater productions "Hair" and "Oh! Calcutta!" -- so stunning at the time as to signal the collapse of American morals for some observers -- now seems old, if anything, a testament to how blase we've become with actors disrobing onstage. Unlike New York playwrights and theater producers, who enjoyed a certain license, network television executives couldn't overcome the resistance of mainstream audiences to nudity until 1993, with the arrival of "NYPD Blue," which, in showing naked backsides and employing a shadowy nudity during love scenes, prompted many ABC affiliates to preempt the show. Whether it was the reaction to Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazines in the '50s, or Jesse Helms wanting to place a fig leaf over nude sculpture in the '90s, the furors serve as a reminder that nudity remained synonymous with sexuality and something forbidden. But the illicit titillation that once turned us on so easily now seems to have lost much of its force. The old nudity seems to have fallen out of commercial favor -- not because it arouses, but because it doesn't. And as the turn-on of full nudity has slackened, the marketers have simply looked for a way to recast nudity, to discover the new titillation in the old ways -- the comeback of an old vaudeville strip dance with fans and boas, or the amateur playing the role of the professional and revealing little but just enough. The new nudity is not Mike Transparenti's nudity. It isn't nudity at all, in the strictest sense of that word. It is only halfnudity, or sometimes nine-tenths nudity. The semi-nude of the moment is Britney Spears, captured in a series of photos for the November issue of Esquire magazine, part of a pictorial titled "Women We Love." Many of the images pay homage to a photographic style identifiable for half a century with sexual icons: We see the curves of things but generally not the things. The most discussed semi-nude photo in the package is of Spears wearing nothing but panties and some strategically placed necklaces. As a term of art and journalism, the phrase "strategically placed" has been around for decades, signaling now, as at its inception, a coyness. That the term endures indicates that a culture's coyness endures. The guise remains the great American paradox and tease: beauties covering the very things that they most want to accentuate. Amid all the contradictions, it is a hardly a surprise that yet another wave of entertainers anticipates having it both ways in talking about the pose. On the same pages as her Esquire photographs, Spears tells the world that she has put her record label on notice: "Look, if you want me to be some kind of sex thing, that's not me."

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Hollywood and Broadway, especially, have become attuned to the growing commercial and artistic sense that, as a tool of titillation, the old nudity and eroticism won't do. The new nudity turns, as often as not, on revealing aging characters' ordinariness and desperation. The plump, naked Kathy Bates trying to seduce Jack Nicholson in a hot tub in "About Schmidt," and a nude 53-year-old William Macy earnestly toiling at lovemaking with Maria Bello in "The Cooler": Those are scenes where nudity is reinvigorated by its use as the instrument of last chances. A touted theatrical production from last season, Oscar Wilde's "Salome," saw Marisa Tomei, in the title role of the princess temptress, keeping her audiences guessing, night to night, about whether she would keep her top on or rip it off, during her Dance of the Seven Veils for her character's wicked stepfather, Al Pacino's lecherous King Herod. Tomei claimed not to know what she would do. She said she would let herself be moved by the spirit of each performance -- a bit of suspense that left a portion of theatergoers returning in hopes of seeing what they had missed. "What made her dance charged for the king was the same thing that made it charged for the audiences -- the uncertainty," says Estelle Parsons, the play's director. "They're tired of gratuitous, expected nudity -- they've been through all that. Nudity for nudity's sake just feels done, you know? I never knew and never asked Marisa whether she would be taking off her clothes at a given performance, so I was in the same uncertainty as the audience. I liked it that way. I just wanted her to be true to the reading and have this powerful woman feel power over Herod, power over all of us." Only 30 years old, Joe Francis already has made a fortune off finding a niche in the nudity marketplace, convinced that Americans are no longer nearly as interested in films of pornographic sex or full-frontal nudity as they are in videos of attractive, often skittish young American women simply taking off some of their clothes, on camera, often highly ambivalent about it. Their hesitancy appeals to Francis. He loves the commercial prospects of the wholesome girl, tempted. He understands the benefit when she expresses some reservations on camera before she dares to cross a line that she herself has drawn -on the other side of which, the audience can believe, she realizes what it is like to feel wild, defy a taboo and receive nothing more for it than a tank top. It is what sets his series of low-budget "Girls Gone Wild" videos apart in the marketplace and has made him a millionaire many times over. Joe Francis is selling naughtiness. And a viewer doesn't get the self-conscious naughtiness of porn films or Playboy magazine, where almost all the models and actresses, says Francis, are enthusiastic pros. It is necessarily one of nudity's last frontiers, thinks Francis, because nudity alone isn't interesting enough anymore -people have seen all the flesh you are ever going to be able to show them, and it doesn't shock nearly as much as it once did. "Our woman is a young woman who is very innocent and wouldn't typically pose for anything," he says. "Playboy magazine likes to say it gets the girl next door. But it gets the girl next door who went to Hollywood, slept with the guy, and went with him to the Playboy Mansion." He is not Beavis but a businessman. Having graduated from the University of Southern California in 1995 and having kept his eye on the college scene since, he thought several years ago that he could take advantage of America's enduring indignation and fascination with even partial nudity. The premise of his videos always has been simple: Take a camera around to bars or clubs on the edge of American college campuses, or to beaches and other venues where college-age women gather on spring breaks, and offer them a "Girls Gone Wild" tank top in exchange for exposing their breasts or, in the case of the especially malleable, disrobing entirely. In its mix of the mundane and the raw, the typical GGW video seems home-movie amateurish -- a lot of giggles, a lot of waiting, finally the event. That it feels unedited and crude, thinks Francis, helps to explain its appeal. He finds himself on the defensive sometimes. In a case pending in Florida, he has been charged with criminal counts that include obscenity and conspiracy to use a minor in a sexual performance. Authorities claim that a GGW crew filmed at least 30 underage girls last spring and that Francis encouraged minors to lie that they were 18, alleging as well that he paid two of the girls to fondle him, charges he has vigorously denied. He's aware that critics liken the "exploitation" of his videos to films of homeless men beating each other up for booze and a few dollars. "Only in America would there be people lumping together sexuality and violence," he says. "If you ask me, we're still a Puritan society."

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With colleges back in session, the "Girls Gone Wild" crew traveled to Boston for a one-night shoot in late September, just another stop on a tour taking GGW to 44 cities in 55 days. Francis dispatched one of his chief lieutenants, Bill Horn, to the scene, and now, a couple of hours before the evening shoot would begin, Horn was dining alfresco at a Boston eatery and snickering on his cell phone. On the other end, another GGW employee had casually floated a name as a possible host for a GGW video. "Over my gay dead body is that person ever getting near us," Horn boomed, laughing. "I will sleep with a girl before O.J. Simpson hosts 'Girls Gone Wild.' " He muttered goodbye, hung up and adjusted his trucker's cap, which said "Girls Gone Wild" on it. Now and then other diners, mostly men, furtively glanced his way. "For a long time, I'd get these stares and think, I'm being cruised by hot guys," he said. "But then I realized they're just looking at my hat." For a video project so dependent on libidinously panting male viewers, Horn was an unlikely presence. He was like a man in the candy business who had no yearning for chocolate, and for that reason never got distracted, intent on scrutinizing the product for possible flaws. "She'll never make it anyway," he would say of a woman, "not our type, not cute enough, not innocent enough, not enough of the girl-next-door type." Out of his personal element, Horn, at 31, treasures Francis's formula for what it is -- a professional gold mine. "I'm not part of our demographic," he observed. "But I love success." GGW has made Joe Francis a baby mogul with a business worth about $100 million, but now GGW wants to catapult from simple nudity on videotape to something bigger and far greener. The company's branding plans include a potential GGW apparel line, to go along with a planned chain of "Girls Gone Wild" restaurants. Only in America, Bill Horn agreed, could a guy leave his job as a production assistant for a video company and, five years later, turn himself into the semi-nude video king. "I have some Dutch friends who are amazed that GGW makes money at this," he said. "They ask me, How can a tape of girls mostly just showing their breasts be such a huge cultural phenomenon? But if you say something is bad about the body, a lot of people are going to want to see it. People want to go wild. Girls want to go wild." Happy at this thought, he looked around, ordered another beer, contemplated a night of filming women in Boston, and laughed. "Going to be wild." I arrived at the Bull Roast in loose white summer pants that looked just right for playing croquet with Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and a tieless gray-striped summer sports shirt that my wife had purchased for me out of the Bourgeois Collection. Is there anything more pointless than dressing neatly for a nudist barbecue? Not long after I arrived, a couple of striking nude women approached me, smiling. "Nude," of course, is superfluous. On some semi-conscious level, I wrote "nude" just now probably to suggest the potential awkwardness of the situation and get you jazzed, but in truth I didn't feel anything like that. There is an inverse relationship between the number of people naked in a place and how charged the air feels -- an indication that eroticism is all about context. One nudist at the Washington Monument would evoke Lady Godiva and spark a stampede; 10 at a nudist club is a group swim. One of the women gestured at my sweaty collar and, laughing, asked me how I was feeling "under all that." "Now what are we going to have to do to coax you out of those clothes?" the other asked, as her friend strolled off to get me some water. You will have to trust my reportorial instinct when I say that her question, in tone and substance, was devoid of even a scintilla of sexual suggestiveness. It sounded maternal -- like that of a camp counselor asking a young greenhorn what it would take to get him to do the very thing that would make him feel better and also more comfortable around the other campers. "I'd get burned," I said. "There's suntan lotion around."

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"Well, who knows," I said. "Think about it." "I'm always thinking about it." Transparenti knows how best to woo people to nudism because he has seen what doesn't work elsewhere. His wife, Fran, was rattled during their first visit to a Washington-area nudist club, when the club personnel insisted that they get naked before even receiving a tour of the facilities. "After that, she didn't want to go to any nudist club for quite a while," Transparenti remembers. "Here, we don't throw people in the deep end right away. We never want people feeling pressured." He realizes that people close to him have doubts about his corps of fellow naturists. He had a falling out with his oldest son, who, according to family members, did not understand why his father and mother were spending so much time away from the rest of the family just to be with nudists. "I can't help it if he's uptight about it," Transparenti says of that son. The loving-yet-frustrated tone of his voice makes it feel like the generational axis has been flipped -- the father unable to understand the hang-ups of his progeny. His youngest son, 26-year-old Marc, while appreciative of how nudism seems to have made his father more loving and patient around his mother, is concerned that his parents regularly bring their youngest grandchild, his 7-year-old niece, to the club. Marc doesn't fear for the child's physical safety in any way -- doesn't worry, for instance, about such things as child abuse -- but he wonders what the effect might be on a child so young. "She's only 7," he says. "I wonder about the long-term effects on her. Could the experience make her into an exhibitionist or more promiscuous? . . . I worry about it." He believes that his own nudity ought to be reserved as a sight for his wife, and hers for him. Nudism would leave him vulnerable to trouble, he believes. "I'll tell you, I'm married, but if I was spending a lot of time around naked women, I'd be tempted," he says. "I just wonder if my father's eyes will wander. I'm full of questions, I guess." His questions echo in pockets of America. A Republican congressman from Florida, Mark Foley, has been crusading for oversight of children at nudist camps, and to bar their attendance at any camps not requiring parental supervision. "Politicians look for causes," says Transparenti. "They probably think we're everything that we're not." Nudist clubs are not exactly teeming with political radicals or the decadent. A survey conducted by the marketing firm Claritas Inc. and sponsored by the American Association for Nude Recreation, found that most renewing-AANR members tend, like Transparenti, to be upper-income Republicans with hobbies common to suburbanites, such as golf and hunting. Nudists are a growing bloc. Nationally, they pump about $400 million annually into special resorts and cruises, and their membership numbers have climbed from about 40,000 in the early '90s to more than 50,000 today. Most members are married, with children. That is the case at MAHESO, where the ratio of families to singles is about 60-40. Foley suggests naivete might be the culprit. "It is possible for some of these people -- who I'm sure are very nice -- to trust so much in nudist clubs that they do not have a clear understanding of the risks that children might be exposed to," he says. Foley chairs a congressional caucus that deals with issues of missing and exploited children. Implicit in his statement is the view that one can spend too much time in Shangri-La; that one can fail to notice the peeping Tom lurking just outside the gate, or inside it. "I want people to enjoy their rights, but I want families protected, too." At the Bull Roast, a tall, slim woman, naked but for a cooking apron, approached me. At 53 and a mother of three, Joyce Beegle has been a MAHESO member for seven years, since the day when, miserable about it, she finally gave in to her husband's urgings and came to the club, dreading the thought of what was about to happen to her. There are so many stories like Beegle's around MAHESO and other nudist clubs that the wives' quandary has been hung with a name that sounds like a psychological condition: reluctant spouse syndrome. Beegle had had a particularly bad case. "I was driving about five miles an hour and just praying for rain . . . ," she recalled of her first time. "On my first day, I took off my clothes, lay on my stomach on my towel on this bench and I did not move. I mean, I didn't move or flinch for hours .

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. . But I had to get up sometime. I remember some men who came up to me, wanting to make sure I was comfortable. It was the first time when men were really talking to me and looking at me. I started getting a little comfortable right then." After relating that story, Beegle disappeared back into a pack of nudists sipping beers, listening to a wry deejay, whose voice boomed out of speakers: "This next one is ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man.' " "I always liked that one," said a pale naked guy who smelled like a trough of suntan lotion. On a Saturday morning, a small, quiet crowd of strangers gathered in the Smithsonian's brightly lit Hirshhorn Museum to look at a mass of polyester resin titled "Big Man," an arresting, double-life-size sculpture of a man sitting in a corner, a glowering, hairless, fat, middle-aged bald giant who is, most of all, naked. Nakedness, nudists say, is not at all nudity, which is purity, the ideal. Nakedness, they insist, signals a man bereft -- of means, joy, love, restraint, serenity or privacy, or perhaps all those things -- which in sum is a very sad thing but not at all their thing. Naked describes somebody like "Big Man." Certainly, he looks miserable, unless he is meant to be menacing. Perhaps moved by this confusion, many visitors reach out to pat him, sensing the sorry life manifested in his sallow skin, the pouty curl of his lips, the tension in his bent toes. His genitalia serve only to remind you further that he is in a bad state, utterly exposed. His "nudity" becomes incidental to his pain. Ron Mueck, an Australian sculptor working these days in London, created "Big Man." "He's big, but his vulnerability belies his size," says Ned Rifkin, director of the Hirshhorn. "People can understand that. Some days they feel important and powerful; other days, they feel utterly unimportant and powerless. So, in looking at 'Big Man,' the voyeur goes through a self-examination, too." Voyeur: Rifkin uses the term often. "The more realistic an artwork is and the more risque any nudity feels, the more complicit you, the voyeur, will feel in studying it," he says. "It is not at all like being alone at home looking at something on your television. There are other people around you at a museum. You have to deal with the idea that you are looking at it, and that they are seeing you look at it, just as you are watching them maybe as they look at it. That makes the experience different." When finished looking at the sculpture, some people shyly moved away from "Big Man," laughing self-consciously. A pack of school-age children walked by, glancing wide-eyed at "Big Man" and then at you, an adult peeping so intensely. You imagined their questions, even reproach. Rifkin was right: You felt complicit in your voyeurism. When, if ever, do you get past that? Joe Francis's assistant, Bill Horn, didn't know how receptive Boston might be to "Girls Gone Wild." "It's a city that's kind of intellectual," Horn said, investing that last word with a hint of trouble. "I'm not sure there're a lot of party schools around here. It's not like Arizona State." In Tempe, so many Arizona State sorority women and other locals shed clothes that the cameramen couldn't get a break. All the Florida spring break beaches along the Atlantic and the Gulf could also be relied on. But Boston seemed to have a greater feminist consciousness than those places, Horn thought. And Boston had a large Catholic community, too. Boston was a question mark. Around 10:30, at a hotel in Boston's Back Bay area, he met the GGW crew -- three cameramen, a 25-year-old production coordinator named Mia Leist and a 340-pound security guard who formerly played the line for the University of Rhode Island football team. Everyone except Horn wore black "Girls Gone Wild" T-shirts to go with their caps. Leist led everyone a few blocks to a bar-restaurant called the Pour House, where the crew found no women. Bewildered, Horn shouted, "Somebody go wild, please. For the love of God, go wild." The next stop was just outside Fenway Park. The crew trekked down the street, with the cameramen sharing favorite sports moments and GGW trivia. Cameraman Dana Pustetta asked brightly, "Hey, when did we have our last motherdaughter combo?"

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"Panama City," the answer came back. Pustetta smiled. "That was a good city." The crew stopped at a club on the corner. "Bill's Bar and Lounge," read the sign. A couple of robust skinheads with goatees stood on the other side of a rope in front of the club, alongside a young woman with brown-violet hair and a biker's jacket. The woman took one look at the cameramen in their "Girls Gone Wild" T-shirts and jerked her head away with theatrical contempt. Bill's Bar and Lounge did not have the preferred GGW vibe; it did not have, say, sorority women with 'dos that looked right off the cover of Town & Country, or any shy 19-year-olds projecting innocence with a hint of temptation. Behind the rope a young woman with short spiked blond hair flicked a cigarette butt in the direction of the cameramen. Then she spat on the sidewalk and pointed in the direction of Fenway. "You want to go back that way, you don't want to be here," she said to the crew. "This is looking kind of hard core," Horn whispered. But the crew had its 340-pound bodyguard. And maybe the skinheads weren't malevolent skinheads; maybe they weren't skinheads at all. Maybe they were just big balding guys who had gone all the way and shaved their heads in an effort to hide their baldness, or maybe they just liked the feel of nothing up there. Their look raised some of the same questions that nudity did. Were the men's hard, hairless skulls simply an expression of a pure and natural style, or a threateningly aggressive look? Everybody was about to walk away, when a smiling brunette in jeans and a sports jacket stepped out of the club's front door, smoking a cigarette, averting her eyes and taking a spot along the rope. She looked perfect: attractive, conservatively attired and shy. Her mustachioed boyfriend draped a proprietary arm around her, which was the instant before he noticed the crew's T-shirts and began screaming: "Dammmmmmmnnnn, 'Girls Gone Wild,' 'Girls Gone Wild,' 'Girls Gone Wild.' Oh, mannnnnn, oh, mannnnn. I want one of those shirts. Give me one of those shirts. Karen, check this out. 'Girls Gone Wild.' " He turned toward the cameramen, gestured at his girlfriend. "She'll do it for you. Do it for them, Karen. Show them what you have, baby. 'Girls Gone Wild.' Oh, mannnnnnn." "Here we go," Horn said softly. "Hi," Pustetta called out to the couple. Pustetta and another cameraman, both armed with GGW tank tops and T-shirts to give away, started moving at once, their cameras hoisted, ready. The brunette giggled, took a quick drag on her cigarette, and shyly hid her head against her boyfriend's shoulder. He whispered in her ear. She laughed girlishly, which encouraged the crew, but then she shook her head no, no, no. Her boyfriend was aghast at her reluctance. "Karen, whadda ya doin'? Just show 'em. Ya look so haht." He turned for support toward the cameramen. "Tell her. Ain't she looking haht? You look haht, Karen. Tell her she looks haht." "You do, you look hot," one of the cameramen said to the woman. "Very cute, very hot." "You look great," Pustetta chimed in. The glib Pustetta was one of the best at luring women, genuinely affable without ever being smarmy. "You're pretty, you look great. We'd love to film you, but only if you want to." He looked at the boyfriend. "Only if she wants to. We want everybody comfortable." The woman shook her head, looked down. The boyfriend waved his arms, yelling now. "Karen, they give you a shirt if you do it. They give you a 'Girls Gone Wild' shirt. It's famous. You do it real quick and then ya done. Baby, you look wicked haht. Just show 'em." He wheeled. "You'll give her a shirt and me, too, right?" Sure, the cameramen said. If she does it.

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The guy turned back to his girlfriend. "This is your once-in-a-lifetime thing. Just do it, Karen. Why you bein' this way? Just do it. Right now, Karen. Do it. Right now." She was still laughing but shaking her head. "I don't want to, I don't want to." It wasn't going to be happening here. Leist directed the crew to a neighborhood near Boston University. She was, in some ways, the most improbable participant here, an assured young woman presiding over the seduction of other young women. "The work is what it is," she said casually. It was a job, a way to support herself while she pursued her big dream of making movies, having already produced her first -- a short film that had recently debuted at the Boston Film Festival. "I get a lot of people asking me, 'Don't you feel bad working for that [the GGW videos]?' " she said. "But we're not exploiting anybody here. I know why a lot of these women do it. They want their 15 minutes of fame. They want to look sexy on camera. It's just bodies." After the van had dropped off the crew a short distance from BU, about a dozen excited young men gathered as a blonde with baby fat began seriously contemplating exposing her breasts, on a street corner, in exchange for a tank top, nudged toward this decision by one of her friends. She was well into the game, having already identified herself to the cameramen as Katie, "18-plus." The milling men called out for the young woman to do it, do it, do it -- not screaming, not even chanting, but calling to her, prodding. She looked unsettled now. It was what Pustetta liked least about being outdoors. Pustetta had seen male hordes surround women in so many cities and on so many beaches that he had come to view the guys as tracking wolves waiting to feast. He worried as much about the possibility that the girl would grow intimidated and walk away as he did about her well-being. But Katie wanted that tank top. On the other hand, she reasoned, why would they give her a tank top for free, unless being topless even for just a moment was weird and maybe belittling? She glanced at the milling guys. "Why are they around?" she demanded. "This is weird." Much of the tapes' appeal derives from these moments, from seeing the woman grapple with her tension. Cameraman Tim Curtis was saying, "You look great, very cute. Are you ready? You look great. As soon as you're ready and you do it, I'll give you the tank top. You look cute. All ready? Got it right here. You know you want the shirt. Ready?" "I'll look dumb," she answered. But not to do it, she thought, would mean never getting the tank top. She pulled up her top for a second, a second and a half, no more, and exposed her breasts, and then quickly pulled it down again. Curtis said he didn't get a good shot and asked her to do it again: "Come on, you did it once already." But he had gotten the shot, and she knew it. Now she demanded her tank top, grabbing for it several times as Curtis held it away, finally yanking it out of his hand -- stretching and ripping it slightly. Then she ran, squealing. She had her trophy. Curtis had his footage, the only catch of the evening. But, almost as soon as they had it, the crew realized that the footage of Katie wouldn't make it into a GGW video. She hadn't signed a consent form, and, besides, Bill Horn noted, she probably wasn't cute enough or innocent-looking enough -- not a woman with the right attitude, not their type. They had the right semi- nudity in her footage, but nothing marketable. Sometimes, Horn said, nudity got you nowhere. Matt Jarrett takes off his clothes for a living. He has a girlfriend, but he spends most of his professional hours watching other women watch him as he dances and strips down to a blue-and-white thong at bachelorette and birthday parties. He has a favorite move quite popular with audiences -- "I like to call it my patented Matt Jarrett move," he says -- in which, with the guest of honor seated on a straight-back chair, he performs a handstand on the front edge of the chair, his exposed buttocks facing all of the female partyers except the honoree, who receives the closest view of the inverted Matt Jarrett and the front of his thong, which would be about six inches from her face. He is the rare male stripper who then breaks into handstand pushups, up and down, up and down, all that motion prompting ecstatic screams. "They get pretty wild for that one," he says.

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One recent night found him at a crowded club in Cherry Hill, N.J., scheduled to work two bachelorette parties, beginning at 10 o'clock. The first was for a bachelorette who had no idea her friends had hired a stripper. Jarrett appeared out of nowhere in a tuxedo, just staring for a moment at the woman, who had been led by her friends to a straight-back chair in the center of the club's dance floor. Then he began slowly shedding and flinging clothes to a mix of recorded disco and hip-hop. The woman grinned and covered her mouth with her hands as he rubbed up against her. "Oh, gosh, oh, gosh," she exclaimed, shock fusing with pleasure. Jarrett performed his handstand while at least 50 diners and bar patrons, mostly women, rushed from the other side of the club to have a look. A cacophony of squeals followed. A few upstaged males insolently shook heads or feigned indifference by staring at a baseball game on club TVs. A second bachelorette, whose friends had not thought of hiring a stripper, dared to rush onto the dance floor, wearing a veil on her head and a glow of happy lust on her face, patting Jarrett on his bottom, doing it again, and again, finally turning to grin in satisfaction at her friends. This unanticipated bachelorette, raven hair askew and carrying a drink wherever she went, periodically accosted him for the next hour, until her friends, recognizing her hunger, finally huddled and hired Jarrett on the spot. Near the end of the private shows he invited the partyers to demonstrate their pleasure by placing tips in his thong and most of the women eagerly did this, though with an unmistakable restraint in nearly every case, tucking in the bills the way somebody puts an item into a shredder, quickly and carefully, so as not to get fingers caught in anything dangerous. He thought that moment told the story of his appeal: Hiring him is a chance for a woman to feel like she is being daring, a little naughty, in an atmosphere where no one can stop her. Maybe she just needs to feel she has experienced the forbidden by staring at a nearly naked man not her husband or boyfriend. Among everything else, he sells illusion with his body. At 29, having been a male stripper for seven years now, he has seen so many women ogling him that he has come to believe that men and women react differently to the sight of strippers. His company, Amazingdancers.com, employs female strippers, too, and he has watched enough of his girlfriend's shows to know that male spectators have a different attitude and manner than most of the women watching him. Men tend to be quiet, even a little grim, watching a performance, hollering "Yeah" sometimes, but mostly just wanting her to get on with it, the difference between a slow, artistic striptease and a swiftly crude one meaning nothing to them. "Actually, they'd have a woman come out of the dressing room completely naked if they had their way," he says. The vast majority of women have no interest in seeing everything. Sometimes, floating on their happiness and alcohol, a couple of women in a group will cry, "Take it off, take it all off," and he will answer agreeably, "Really? Everything off?" But, in the same second, they will answer with alarm, "No, no, no, no . . ." It makes him think that the marketing of nudity over the last century has so concentrated on the female form and so linked it with sex, that men going into strip clubs like these want only full nudity -- while women still are conflicted over the propriety of checking out the male body. This means something else for him and his girlfriend, he thinks. "Male strippers are kind of put on a pedestal," he says, meaning men are regarded by a fair amount of women and even some men not just as eye candy, but as fit performers with an exotic skill. "Women strippers are just strippers; they're just people who take off their clothes for men. They don't get nearly the same respect." He had finished his Cherry Hill performances and now he sat after midnight in a nearby diner, eating a slice of pizza, before heading off to his last show of the night. His cell phone rang. It was his girlfriend saying hi, checking on his schedule. "Got one more, got one more," he said. She said something on the other end, and he laughed knowingly, mumbling, "Yeah, always one more." The calls from those who dream of a flirtation with the forbidden never stop coming. Mike Transparenti and Joe Francis exist on opposite poles of American nudism, one a subdued practitioner of a lifestyle, the other a savvy profiteer. But Joe Francis has enjoyed hearing about MAHESO and Mike Transparenti, with whom he agrees on at least one point. "We're getting a little healthier as a culture about nudity," Francis says. "That's

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good for everybody, for us, for nudists, for young people who won't be hit with the same hang-ups in the future maybe. But we're still 15 years at least behind Europe." He does not sound entirely displeased. "So that means people are going to keep getting angry, and excited, about girls taking off a bikini top." He prides himself on having no limits, on being a kind of 21st-century libertine, but even Joe Francis sometimes cannot hold back his squeamishness about alternative lifestyles. "I'm not sure, but I don't think I would want to be at a nudist club," he said recently. "You gonna do it?" "Do it?" I asked. But I knew what he meant. "Just do it," he said confidently. I could suddenly understand why so many of those coeds had gone wild. "I don't know." "I know you're going to do it. I can tell." "No. I don't know. Everybody keeps telling me I should. Maybe." "You're going to do it." "I don't know. Boy gone wild, huh?" He clucked his tongue, then said a nudist club definitely wouldn't ever be to his liking. "It sounds kind of cultlike, and I don't think I would want to be part of a cult. When it comes to nudity, I just would like to see us have free, normal expression." He likes normal, as it turns out. He just has his own version of normal, which stops well short of watching large numbers of adults of all ages get nude together and walk around like it's no big deal. On the other hand, Mike Transparenti, born of insurance, raised on conservative Catholicism, feels something slowly changing, something profound that will in time usher in body comfort and banish sexual exploitation. He sounded very happy, as we sat together one afternoon at MAHESO. "The Bull Roast was very successful, a nice turnout there," he said. "And we had a good luau, too. The teri-yaki chicken made everybody who tried it happy, I thought." With his zest for organization and memory for detail, he ticked off the future: "Got the Barely Formal coming up and a '50s dance. Busy time. Bring your wife and son. We'd love to have you." He laughed. "Always looking for members." I thanked him, in the way journalists do, politely and neutrally. But when I got to my car, I did something very unneutral, because I'd already braced myself to do it. I'd already told myself that after I took everything off, I would walk naked across that dirt road to that pool, hurriedly jump in, hurriedly jump out, maybe do a banshee scream, walk back dripping wet to the car, throw my clothes on, and exult on my way home, because I had done it. I would have a story to share for a long time. I would juice this ending. I looked around, unbuttoned my nice striped shirt and took it off. I began undoing my belt, and abruptly stopped. It was then that I realized why I was doing this, which was no different than why those young women on "Girls Gone Wild" did it -- to get that tank top of a thrill, to step over the line. It was not what this place was about. What it was about remained beyond me. I put my shirt back on and drove home, the squeamish American.

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