Naked at Lunch (15 page)

Welcome to Cap d’Agde.

…

German and Dutch nudists had been coming to this isolated beach in the South of France for years. Unlike glamorous beach towns like Nice and Cannes on the French Riviera, the southern coast of France was mostly rural and undeveloped, and the sleepy town of Agde, not far from Montpellier, was the perfect place to practice naturism without anyone noticing. Naturists would pay a small fee to a local farmer, pitch their tents in the olive groves by the beach, and frolic au natural in what was a very rustic environment. In the 1970s, the French government began looking for a way to promote the scenic coastline of the relatively unglamorous Languedoc-Roussillon region, while local officials had been looking for an opportunity to relieve northern Europeans of their cash and improve the local economy. And so Cap d’Agde—which is about six miles from the town of Agde—was officially designated as a naturist beach in 1973. A plan was hatched to build a family-friendly village that would appeal to French as well as German, British, and Dutch naturists. That meant keeping exhibitionists and voyeurs to a minimum, so they designed a series of large apartment complexes, along with the amenities of a small resort town, and surrounded them with serious security. The naturist village, which includes a large campground, is surrounded by a ten-foot-tall wire fence and you have to buy a pass at a central security office to go in and out of the various checkpoints. There are guards stationed at entry points, as well as “park rangers” patrolling the grounds for unauthorized guests with telephoto lenses.

It’s the opposite, philosophically, from Vera Playa. The Cap, as it’s called, is not open to anyone wandering in, it’s enclosed. But it’s not as if you’d ever need to leave the enclosure. In many ways it’s more like a real city than Vera Playa.

The area is massive. It holds close to forty thousand visitors a day during the high season. Imagine Wrigley Field filled with naked people. Or maybe don’t. But you get the idea. The place is bustling with activity. There are almost two hundred different businesses in Cap d’Agde, and because it’s in France, most of them seem to involve delicious food. There’s a fishmonger, a couple of charcuteries
for pâté and sausages, and a few cheese shops. I counted three supermarkets and maybe a half dozen bakeries and wine stores. There are “caterers” where you can pick up prepared food and beaucoup bistros, bars, pizzerias, and other restaurants. You can get your hair styled, ink a new tattoo, get your nipple pierced, do your laundry, buy sunscreen, and perhaps purchase that fetish wear you’ve been craving, all within the gates of the compound. Most of the rules are simple and similar to any other nudist resort: nudity is encouraged, photography is not allowed, sit on a towel. After that, pretty much anything goes.

The centerpiece of the development is a massive apartment complex called Heliopolis, named after the nudist island paradise built by French naturists Gaston and André Durville. The architecture is allegedly influenced by the French architect Le Corbusier; it is open and airy, giving optimal sunlight and sea view to each of the eight hundred apartments, and even cooler, it’s shaped like a gigantic letter C. The structure is five stories high and all the apartments are stacked at an angle, meaning each apartment terrace is exposed to direct sunlight all day long. It’s curved and sloped and futuristic-looking in the best possible way. It reminded me of an alien space station in one of the
Star Wars
movies. There’s a groovy dormitory vibe to the place, like what you might find in Isla Vista, the beach area adjacent to the University of California at Santa Barbara. In fact the apartment I rented for the week looked a lot like some of the utilitarian flats I’d helped my daughter move into when she went to UCSB. Which means it was not luxurious, but perfectly workable.

When Heliopolis was first built, the C surrounded a large pool and tennis courts, but in a move to maximize profit, the recreational area was scrapped and another complex, a tacky hotel called Le Jardin d’Eden, was built. You’ll recall from your Bible studies that the Garden of Eden was where Adam and Eve used to live, although I don’t think God would’ve put them in a swingers’ motel and expected them not to taste the forbidden fruit.

Cap d’Agde claims to be as family friendly as Vera Playa—and perhaps it is during the school holidays—but I found that a little hard to believe as I sat outside on a warm Monday night, eating Thai food, drinking beer, and watching the parade of middle-aged men and women strolling by. There is a uniform look to the people here. During the day most everyone is naked, or wearing a sarong or beach cover-up or wrap of some kind, but at night people get dressed up. The men wear typical resort wear—shorts or white slacks and polo shirt—and the women wear the skimpiest, most revealing clothes they can find and teeter around on ridiculous stiletto heels. This was different from the swingers in their fetish gear; this was the going-out-to-dinner clothes. I imagine that you dress for dinner and then, if the mood strikes, you put on your swinger outfit and hit the clubs.

As a karaoke performer belted out American pop songs,
********
I looked around the patio in front of the 1664 Café, and was struck by the sensation that I was attending an academic conference. If you can imagine your high school math teacher dressed as an extra on
Miami Vice
and your English teacher dressed like a hooker, then you’re getting close to what I was experiencing. Forgive me, Ms. Thompson, for imagining your 1974 self in a silk dress with a neckline that plunges down to your pubic bone, but I’m working on a metaphor here, which is something you taught me how to do in English class. Everywhere I looked there were badonkadonks stuffed into skintight miniskirts, rascally nipples sticking out from the gaps in fishnet dresses, the always elegant bra-and-feather-boa look, and bony torsos beneath diaphanous blouses.

Which is not to say that everyone was of a certain age. Cap d’Agde is mixed. There was a representative cross-section of modern Europe here. Black, white, old, young, fat, thin, you name it. The beautiful people were here too. I watched a couple so strikingly good-looking walk by the
pétanque
area that the players stopped playing and stared with their mouths open, cigarettes dangling off their lower lips. During the day it was common to see naturist families with children and packs of topless teenage girls on the beach; it’s a very freewheeling nudist scene.

But at night the kids are out of sight, the adults come out, and Cap d’Agde becomes a kind of sex-fantasy fantasy camp. The women are dressed to embody the male fantasy of what a sexy woman looks like when she’s on the prowl for sex. And, hell, for all I know the women feel sexy dressed like that, attracting the male gaze, being in control. It could be a turn-on, for sure.

Ultimately, it all seemed pretty harmless. A little sunburned sex anarchy in the South of France. Exactly the kind of anarchy Émile Armand had in mind when he wrote his manifesto on revolutionary nudism in 1934.

…

Émile Armand was born Ernest-Lucien Juin Armand in Paris, France, in 1872. He was an anarchist, a passionate hedonist, a writer who promoted nudism, antimilitarism, and free love, which he called
la camaraderie amoureuse.
In other words, he was an all-around counterculture superstar. It shows in photos of him. He’s got a wicked gleam in his eye and a mischievous smirk; with his slicked-back hair and cool mustache, he looks like the kind of troublemaking libertine who could seduce anyone he wanted. Apparently he did.

A child of the Belle Epoque,
he was raised in a time of optimism and relative prosperity. The arts were flourishing: painters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard were working in a postimpressionist style, authors like Marcel Proust and Colette were changing popular literature, and the fashion world was introducing the idea that the ideal woman should be waiflike and have a boyish figure. Bohemian cabarets were popular in Montmartre and women were dancing the cancan at the Folies Bergère. Bistros, bars, and café society thrived.

As they often are, these urban delights were built on the back of an impoverished underclass. Workers were organizing, socialism and women’s rights were the talk of the town, and as a son of a participant in the doomed revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871, Armand was bound to have radical ideas. In his late twenties he began actively writing and editing several anarchist journals:
Le Cri de Révolte
and
La Misère
. He was outspoken and unabashedly fervent in his beliefs and basically caused a ruckus whenever and wherever he could. Armand was thinking about many of the same things that Edward Carpenter was, at roughly the same time, and it was Armand who echoed Carpenter on the uselessness of society when he wrote
Life and Society
: “Society, no doubt, is the crowd that screams ‘Hurrah!’ at the parade of the crippled from the last general slaughter.”

While Armand wrote about many subjects, his point of view tended to be refracted through a lens of what he called hedonistic individualism; in other words, Armand was focused on things that made him feel good. Like sex. Lots and lots of sex. He was years ahead of the hippies and their maxim “If it feels good, do it.”

But what makes Armand unique among philosophers of the time is his focus on using sexual liberty as a way to individual freedom. And he wasn’t just shouting about freedom for straight people. He supported gay, bisexual, and transgender sexuality rights. Armand wrote about rehabilitating “nonconformist caresses,” which, you know, sounds like a fine idea. If it feels good everybody should do it with everyone they want to in the way that they want. Of course he had to deal with some blowback from monogamists, and to that end, in 1926 he published
Le Combat contre la Jalousie et le Sexualisme Révolutionnaire.
You can probably translate that without my help. That he was writing about these issues in the 1920s seems in itself pretty remarkable.

In 1934 he published a manifesto called
Le Nudisme Révolutionnaire
(
Revolutionary Nudism
)
.
How could an avowed hedonist
not
want to be naked? And, being a nudist, how could he
not
write a manifesto? But
Revolutionary Nudism
is a great read. It could be one of my all-time favorite manifestos.
⁴¹

In the introduction, Armand glibly dismisses groups who use nudity for health reasons, and discounts the people who want to restore humanity to an Edenic state of innocence as crackpots. “It seems to us to be something else entirely than a hygienic fitness exercise or a ‘naturist’ renewal. For us, nudism is a revolutionary demand.”

For Armand nudism is, individually and collectively, among the most potent means of emancipation. The manifesto is broken into three main points. The first is an affirmation. Just a reminder to his readers that they, and not the church or the state, control their individual bodies. The second part is a protest “against any intervention (of a legal or other nature) that obligates us to wear clothes because it pleases another—whereas it has never occurred to us to object that they do not get undressed, if that is what they prefer.” And then he wraps it up by calling for liberation “from one of the main notions on which the ideas of ‘permitted’ and forbidden, of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are based. Liberation from coquetry, from the conformism to an artificial standard of appearance that maintains the differentiation of classes.” Armand wanted to liberate us from any constraints and called for the “release from the prejudice of modesty, which is nothing but ‘shame of one’s body.’”

It’s hard to argue with a well-written manifesto, which I think is kind of the point of a well-written manifesto. But I really like Émile Armand. His ideas are profound and his call for hedonism and sex as a means to individual and societal liberation is something I think we still need to hear in our modern society.

…

I’m not sure Armand ever went grocery shopping in the nude, and I am positive that I never had before I visited Cap d’Agde. But I needed to eat and everyone else at the market was naked so, you know, when in Rome. So I went. Me, my shopping bag, and my flip-flops. I felt like an early man, a hunter-gatherer headed out to forage for sustenance. Of course I was foraging in French markets where they treated the produce and cheese with the same care Tiffany handles its jewelry, but I was naked. It seemed like a risky adventure to me.

First I went to the greengrocer and bought lettuce, olives, yellow plums, fresh figs, some cherry tomatoes, and a cucumber. Has a grocery run ever sounded so exciting? Were the other people in the store naked? Yes, everyone but the employees was pretty much as naked as I was. Were there “hot” women and “well-hung” dudes? Why yes, I seem to recall that there were plenty of both. Did it infuse squeezing the tomatoes with an illicit frisson? Did looking at the vinegar selection become compellingly erotic? Not really. Although I will admit I was incredibly self-conscious squeezing past people in the crowded aisles.

My wife demanded photographic evidence of this excursion, but when I asked the cashier if she would take a photo of me she blew air through her lips in that curious French way and said, “
Cochon
.” Which means “pig.” I didn’t ask for a photo at the bakery, it was too crowded, but I did get a nice little quiche with Roquefort and a fresh baguette.