A Comparison of Pro- and Anti-Nudity College Students on Acceptance of Self and of Culturally Diverse Others (Report‪)‬

In contemporary United States, social nudity is not accepted by the majority of people. In all 50 states, strict laws prohibiting nudity in public places exist with very few exceptions. Those exceptions typically include when social nudity occurs on private property (e.g., privately owned "nudist resorts") or on slivers of well-delineated public land designated to be "clothing-optional," such as small sections of public beaches. Clinical psychologists generally view nudity within the family as "pathological" (Negy, 2004; Okami, 1995), and a recent analog study has found that college students tend to perceive an adult to have sexually malicious intentions in an ambiguous situation in which the adult is nude with an unrelated minor in a private swimming pool (Negy, Ferguson, & Orooji, in press). Despite pervasive public concerns over social nudity, there is a dearth of studies on the consequences of social nudity or even on nudity within the family. Further, the handful of studies that have been done has failed to find demonstrable evidence of deleterious consequences for those who practice family or social nudity. For example, Story (1979) compared self-concepts related to body image between preschool children whose families self-identified as nudists and comparable preschool children whose families self-identified as non-nudists. Children in nudist families had significantly more positive self-concepts related to their physical appearance than children in non-nudist families, with boys from both types of families manifesting higher levels of self-concepts than girls.