Letters From the Terrace

An Atlantic article landed in my feed this week about the disappearance of communal nudity in America—how locker rooms now have private stalls, how generations are growing up never seeing an ordinary naked body that isn’t their own, their partner’s, or algorithmically perfected on a screen. Reading it from Barcelona felt like reading dispatches from another planet.

Yesterday at my neighborhood pool, I watched an elderly woman, stretch marks mapping her belly, lower herself into the water beside a young mother nursing her baby poolside. Two teenage girls swam laps, their small breasts barely concealed by their suits. A middle-aged man in a Speedo that left nothing to imagination did his backstroke. Nobody stared. Nobody clutched their pearls. Nobody hustled anyone away to protect them from the corrupting sight of human flesh.

This is my life now. But it wasn’t always.

I grew up believing that to look at a woman “in the wrong way” was to commit adultery in my heart. My former wife and daughters would steer me away from the occasional rebel who went topless on an American beach, as if my gaze itself was dangerous, as if I couldn’t be trusted around the unclothed female form. Once, at a beautiful Florida resort, the host welcomed us with “The only rules here are no rules,” and my heart quickened with possibility. My wife was mortified. When a woman later removed her top at the pool, revealing what I can only describe as stunning beauty, I was transfixed—not with lust, but with the simple reality of her form. My wife ordered me to leave immediately.

Ordered. As if I were a child who couldn’t be trusted near fire.

Here’s what the purity culture architects never told me: their system doesn’t prevent sexual harm—it incubates it. When every glimpse is forbidden fruit, when the body itself is treated as inherently dangerous, that energy doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. It twists. It finds outlets in the dark.

The Catholic abuse crisis isn’t despite celibacy and repression—it’s the predictable outcome. Same with evangelical youth pastors who spend years teaching teenagers that their bodies are shameful, then violate those same bodies. The shame creates the secrecy. The repression creates the obsession. The forbidden fruit doesn’t just taste sweeter—it becomes the only fruit your mind can fixate on.

Barcelona has taught me the alternative. When bodies are just bodies—saggy, small-breasted, stretch-marked, aging, sometimes stunning—the artificial charge dissipates. Beauty is still beautiful, but it’s not electrified by prohibition. I paint nudes now, watercolors of the human form in all its ordinary glory. Not because I’m lusting, but because bodies are worthy subjects, because the unclothed figure has been the vocabulary of art for millennia.

Occasionally Gina catches me staring at someone particularly beautiful and laughs: “You’re staring!” It’s playful, trusting. The opposite of mortified control.

What Americans have lost, the article argues, is our baseline for normal. When the only naked bodies we see are our own or digitally perfected fantasies, we lose our sense of what actual humans look like. We mistake common characteristics for flaws. We see every bare body as inherently sexual.

But when the erotic is allowed to be natural rather than repressed, when the body is sacred rather than shameful, something extraordinary happens: desire finds its proper place. It flows. It doesn’t need to erupt in harmful, twisted ways.

This is what my theology of the erotic has always been reaching toward—not the elimination of desire, but its liberation into wholeness. The naked body isn’t a provocation. It’s not a sin waiting to happen. It’s simply what we are: flesh, beautiful and ordinary, aging and alive, worthy of both reverence and casual indifference.

The truth I’ve learned on Barcelona’s beaches and in its pools: freedom doesn’t corrupt. Repression does.