Compared with us tourists, the bona fide beach naturists were easy to spot. Older, whiter and fairly mixed in gender, they showed an affinity for equipment-dependent recreation — their games of horseshoes seemed like catastrophes waiting to happen — and barbecues. They appeared invigorated by the plain fact of one another’s naked company, an excitement they expressed with a flurry of wholesome activity. The rest of us tended toward a more slothful nakedness; we swam, we sunned, we had picnics of cheese and wine. We did what we would normally do at any beach, albeit while avoiding eye contact with one another’s areolas.

My friends and I hardly followed the naturists’ chaste, no-judge code to the letter, but the more we visited, the closer we approached a sense of ease. The discipline of public nakedness rewarded our efforts in proportion to our degree of exertion, the euphoria of being in the moment a direct byproduct of battling the innate and unignorable weirdness of our collective situation. Off the beach, I was a distracted, ruminating mess; my therapist, annoyed by my self-conscious inability to “body scan” during guided mindfulness exercises, swiftly fired me as her patient. But on the beach, consumed with the task of pretending this was normal, I was able to attain what I assume is something like Zen. Naturism required so much effort that, somehow, it worked.

Maybe naturists truly believe it’s possible for a body to just be a body — that by imposing a neutral state of mammalian coexistence, people can fake social equilibrium, if only for an afternoon. I can see how, for some, there is power in the notion that your body is enough. For my friends and me, over those summers, naturism came to be something we tried on; less a worldview than a means of believing, momentarily, in the escapability of bodily burden. Such utopian nudeness takes discipline and rules, both of which naturism handily provides. And I suspect, for many, a result of this laborious reorientation might resemble “being present.”

Nakedness doesn’t democratize social experience, as the naturists seem to suggest. Instead, it offers something better: a shared preoccupation. It’s so awkward to act blasé about being naked around other people — people who are also, themselves, naked — that there’s nothing left to do but submit en masse to the social and afferent novelty. Take in the warmth of the sun on your bare butt, skinny-dip unaccompanied by a sneaky sense of thrill, try not to stare at anyone’s penile jewelry. It’s easier said than done.