Naked party

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A naked party is a party, primarily taking place on college campuses or with college-age people, where the participants are nude. The parties have gained prominence in recent years.

[edit] History

While the roots of naked parties come from the nudism movements and campus streaking, the modern "naked party" movement appears to have its roots at Ivy League campuses, such as Yale University. [1] The student group The Pundits are anecdotally credited to reviving this on a wider scale, and Brown University as well as Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been known to have student groups host them.

Naked parties have been noted as rather polite events, where sexuality and sexual overtones are often frowned upon. Even with these unwritten rules in place, there have been issues with alleged sexual assault. With this noted, even some more notable names, such as Barbara Bush, George W. Bush's daughter, has been linked to parties at Yale. [2]

[edit] Controversy

The spread of naked parties has sparked international controversy. Students are not always initially comfortable with the idea of their school being associated with them, [3], and these concerns have been discussed in different works of literature, such as Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Natalie Krinsky, who turned her on-campus sex and relationship column into a novel, Chloe Does Yale, where the main character remarks that "Yalies shouldn't be naked. That's what the University of Miami is for. We are smart. Smart people are not attractive people." [4]

Religious groups have attempted to have the parties banned in some municipalities [5], and an oft-cited column in Christianity Today called "What to Say at a Naked Party," which cited concerns about sexual assault and objective morality. [6]