HOWSKI OF SUTKOWSKI
  • Home
  • Blog du moment
  • Music
    • My Bands
    • My Album, "Natural Impressions," Lives Here!
  • Books
  • Whoski?
  • Writerly Deets

Under all these clothes, I am the nude sunbather

9/16/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
PictureFound photo of Walden Pond by Ian Smith.
It might not look like it to the naked eye, but I long to be the nude sunbather. There used to be one in every movie about sexual awakening — a woman on a terrace a few doors down. Happens to take off her bikini top. Thinks no one is watching. Likes the breezes on her skin. Can’t be bothered to use a pronoun.

The nude sunbather is always peeped by the neighborhood boys. She is the Mrs. Robinson archetype. Never is a nude sunbather depicted as simply a person enjoying the sun on her skin. She’s always an object. And often she’s considered too much woman — fearsome in her epidermal freedom.

​What would be great is to be the nude sunbather without the eyes on her. To simply be able to exist without the weight of a culture’s worth of judgments and attention. Just to be a body being itself in the sun.


After having a winter where my body was medicalized every day for a few months I started getting this huge urge to skinny-dip. I wanted to feel my body as a body in the world again. Something that naturally derives pleasure from being touched by a breeze. This human body in her entirety endured a lot. It would feel nice to treat her to that kind of gentle simplicity, as opposed to radioactive rays and the occasional needle.

​I would like to replace the feeling of having a physicist poke my nipple with a pen.


I think I’ve only skinny-dipped once — in the pool at an ex’s parents’ house, and that was fine, but I did it just because I wanted to be sexy and cool. I can’t say I had any real urge to do it. Now I do. But by the time summer was almost over, do you think I’d put my bareness into a body of water yet? No, of course not. Spandex on, like a respectable person.

What was I waiting for? Permission? Maybe. I think I was waiting for there to be no eyes around. I was waiting to be close enough to an unpopulated body of water at night. Preferably in the darkness of the new moon.

What is this strange feeling of not wanting to be seen but wanting to feel? It’s what advertising and our culture are designed to keep a woman from experiencing. But I don’t want to think about any of that. I just want to be nude. For a minute.

So I take my shirt off outside for a minute on the deck at my family’s beach house in the middle of the night. It helps. It is exhilarating. And it really turns my shit around.

Finally, appropriately (or inappropriately, depending on where you're standing), by the light of the most recent full moon, I get my nude body into a body of water known for a certain transcendentalist writer taking up residence near its peaty shores. My husband and my best lady pals and I creep from a secret parking lot, pull off our bathing suits (which we wear in case of chickening out), and wobble into the pond, averting our eyes to allow each other’s jiggly bits their jiggly, vulnerable freedom.

​And it is glorious.

Happy full moon! There’s still time to put your full moon into a body of water. But only if you feel like it, homes! I showed you mine so if you feel like it, show me yours. Except for you, Anthony Weiner. 

(By “show me yours” I mean tell me about your skinny-dipping escapades or when you’ve felt like you just needed to be a sensual beast in soothing environs.)

Picture
And speaking of jiggly bits at Walden, here's my husband exploring a virile rock formation up by Thoreau's cabin site.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Picture
    I insisted on having this kind of school photo taken in first grade and believed the serious face was a capture of my very soul. #soulphotobomb

    It's me, Jennifer Bernice (rhymes with "Furnace": it was my Granny's name) Sutkowski

    • More details about my writing here.

    Archives

    November 2022
    August 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    January 2022
    March 2021
    January 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    June 2019
    May 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014

      Sign up and get my free 10K Hours of Getting Funnier in 10 Min ebook!

    Gimme My Funny!
Like a tarot card wrapped in a pierogi swathed in a dream.
©2005-present Jenn Sutkowski unless otherwise noted and linked. No steal-y, no squeal-y. Privacy policy here.
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Blog du moment
  • Music
    • My Bands
    • My Album, "Natural Impressions," Lives Here!
  • Books
  • Whoski?
  • Writerly Deets