The Bare Bottom
In a small town near France’s southwest coast.
The streets weren’t imbibed with the sultry heat of summer. It was grey and cool, and thin rain came down like spittle every now and again. The town was a beach town and all activity was the kind that was healthy, happened outdoors and filled the lungs with fresh air.
The weather therefore kept everyone confined to the patios of their rented mobile holiday homes, lined up like overlapping teeth along the canal.
When the clouds scattered, the families took to the bicycle paths with backpacks and foldable nylon chairs and dogs in trailers hitched behind them. We watched them from the porch of my sweetheart’s family home. Adolescent boys catwalked their bikes without wearing helmets.
The teenagers who weren’t riding walked clumped together down the street in clothes containing varying degrees of elastane. Onlookers were exposed to midriffs and loud, generally comestible French rap clamouring out of portable bluetooth amplifiers.
Dispelling the inertia felt impassable, but at some point I stood up laboriously, threw the towels into a wicker basket and announced that we were going to the beach. Mild to severe protesting. One got left behind playing video games.
We walked down to the lake, stroking the soft leaves of the mimosas, leaving fugitive imprints in the sand, occasionally tripping over an exposed root. Aside from a neighbour reclining in his lawn chair with eyes closed, the pretty little path was deserted, visitors being unfamiliar with this back route.
We turned left, then right to regain the main road and all its temporary denizens. We ritualistically took off our flip-flops and carried them in one hand across the sand, looking for a spot to set up amongst the clusters.
My eyes scoured the stage anxiously, and I briefly despised myself as I thought vaguely about Nabokov and wondered which of the young women splayed suggestively in the sun were the Lolitas. There was nudity of the matronly type as well, but the gravity-driven downward sway of the middle-aged breast did not affect me. My gazed swept the beach like a laser scanning a retina for abnormalities, looking for vice, locking onto the first signs of danger in the form of exposed nulliparity.
The asses, this year, were particularly bare. In addition to the tops. The eroticism of the French beach was perhaps more ardent for having emerged from confinement. The youthful bodies on display were of a single morphological type: slim-thighed, small-breasted and brazen.
I steered us to a patch of sand as though navigating an obstacle course, trying to direct the middle-aged but unfortunately not myopic eyes of my companion towards innocuous distractions such as inflatable flamingos and screaming children. My mouth ran on commenting about nothing while my head went about its business of creating bile. My sweetheart inevitably followed my agitated stare, and arguments ensued about who had seen which ass first and why.
“I’m not interested. I’m only looking because you’re looking so conspicuously,” he said. I didn’t believe him, thinking his statement a convenient way to blame me for his palpable interest in the liberal buffet of unabashed, youthful, female nudity. He was potentially, in my corrupted imagination, the protagonist of a pervasive, mildly subversive literary or cinematic genre I felt sure I was on the cusp of experiencing, the one that exhibits the seduction of the mature man, with gratuitous detail, by the calculating, unscrupulous nymphet.
What are the alternative plot lines, when women are rewarded above all for their youth and beauty and face irrelevance when they stand quivering at the cusp of acceptable weight or age? How did women come to monopolize the iconography of perceived regeneration, good-health and eternal life, warding off the slow descent into decrepitude of the older man with long, tanned, depilated limbs?
Effrontery.
I lay sullen and flat like a frying egg on my beach towel, wondering if I was envious or righteous or swaying, intoxicated, between the two. The dénudé is often evoked as a form of liberation for women, the antithesis of the burkini, for instance. But like the burkini, it is subject to the other’s gaze, and the reception of either is not within the parameters of the wearer’s control. If it were acceptable to walk around city streets nude, the dénudé would lose its eroticism. It would be like wearing a t-shirt and jogging pants to the beach.
But we do not walk around city streets nude. Titillation is therefore an expected outcome of going topless at the beach, even in France, where the practice is far more common than in North America. How, then, is this anything other than a burkini, as perceived by its detractors, only with its imagery insidiously inverted? The state of undress is outlined just as starkly as a full-body swimsuit by the perception of onlookers, with the desire to reveal as opposed to conceal. Under the pretext of liberation, young women reduce themselves to the barest common denominator.
Of course, seduction presents an unquestionably straightforward, pleasurable and effective trajectory.
I waded into the warm, shallow water wondering whether the ground I was standing on was shifting and whether I would lose my footing. I stared with sanctimonious prudishness off into the distance, my back to the crowds. I had never defined myself, at least not publicly, by my body, had never stripped myself of my principles. I had always shown courtesy to others, regardless of gender, both professionally and intimately, by choosing modesty in dress, speech and action.
The lake wrapped itself around my calves as I brooded priggishly over the bad manners, the insouciance - a euphemism for the je m’en foutisme - of the young women provocatively prostrate behind me, hoping to brown despite a churlish sky.
I sank my head underwater to quell the swelling annoyance, resentment and insufferable sense of moral superiority that had me in a stranglehold, leaving me feeling ancient, dull and envious, at the surface-ripened age of forty-two. The bottom of the lake was clearly visible beneath the water’s transparency. A few tiny fish darted back and forth, occasionally a pebble or a seashell was swept up in the gentle movement of the waves, but for the most part the sand lay soft, unblemished and eternal under my weightless, concealed body.
Since returning from holiday to a land of the clothed, I’ve decided that I’m going to be bored with this topic and lay it to rest. Indefinitely would be delightful, but my sense of realism tells me it will work itself out otherwise. Why, I wonder, do I even care?
Before I move on, I would love to hear your thoughts. Anyone else struggling with feelings of irrelevance or transparency? Anyone else’s fully-covered posterior wedged between perceived moral and social justification, and plain, unbridled envy? Anyone else over the age of thirty-five feel like an open sore?
For a compelling video essay on Envy, watch ContraPoints’s most recent offering, below.
Maybe you should do a whole series about nudity around the globe! Northern Europe would definitely be an interesting chapter. I've read that public nudity has been on the decline throughout Europe for a number of years, so that could be an interesting angle of approach
It's a pretty considerable counterfactual, but this strikes me as perfectly encapsulating what my various reactions would be were I a woman in a similar situation.