Germans get it. We need to stop being so hung up about our naked bodies

I sometimes take my clothes off for money. There’s usually 10 or so people with me when I do, and it’s a good way to earn some money on the side. And before you start getting ideas, I don’t get naked for that reason. I’m a part-time life model. I stand on a crate for two hours, holding a cloth or something, while a bunch of strangers scribble me into a sketchbook.

It’s a good gig. The artists are fairly chatty beforehand, making it easier for me to drop my undies and lock into a pose. It also does a lot for my body confidence, as you would imagine, being able to present myself like this. But I haven’t always been so comfortable in my own skin as to want to expose it to a circle of pencil-sharpening randos.

Nudity is the stuff of nightmares for most Australians - but for Germans it’s about connecting with nature.Credit: Gabriela Medina

This is mostly because I am relatively tall, and grew to that height fast. I have a pretty lean figure as a result, with a tendency to evaporate food almost as quickly as it’s eaten. Because of this, my dad once referred to me in passing, when I was 12, as a bag of bones.

And like many innocuous things said to children, this has haunted me my entire life.

Even now, approaching my 30s, it’s hard to see past that stretched, pale teenager looking back at me in the mirror. A few years ago, I decided I needed to course-correct the way I felt about my body, to try to see myself the way others saw me. And so I applied for my first life modelling class and have kept it up since.

Through these small, detailed sketches, I can appreciate I’m not that skinny, actually. My shoulders aren’t as bony as I think they are. And my ass looks OK.

Some of the sketches from an art class that Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier posed for.Credit: Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier

Honestly, some of the sketches are gorgeous. I get the chance to take a quick peek before the class finishes. I like to take snaps of the art on my phone – they are small, important milestones in my changing relationship with my body.

Of course, for many people, the idea of standing naked in front of a room full of strangers for two hours is the stuff of nightmares. One of the reasons is the high beauty standards that are generally upheld in Australia, home of the “summer-ready” beach body.

For a country stereotyped as one endless summer, in which everyone is chronically topless and impossibly fit, flat stomachs and surfer’s biceps are the prevailing qualities of attractiveness. It becomes hard for anybody who doesn’t look like a Home and Away cast member to feel comfortable taking their kit off.

A finished artwork based on a nude sitting.Credit: Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier

The months leading up to summer are stuffed with Instagram ads and gym membership discounts, promising six-week fitness programs to burn away those winter kilos. It propagates shame toward flat bums and soft bellies, enforcing the notion that only those at the peak of fitness deserve to be seen without their top on.

Another reason is the broadly shameful attitude toward nakedness in Australia. Save for a handful of exclusive beaches and the odd nudist colony, there are few places here where public nakedness is acceptable, let alone celebrated.

A solution to this collective prudishness around our own bodies would be to consider German attitudes about public nudity. The nationwide social movement known as FKK – Freikoerperkultur, or “free body culture” – has been practiced in Germany for nearly 130 years, and no part of it is contingent on how shredded your stomach is.

I remember my first experience of Germany’s attitude to nudity when living in Cologne in 2018, walking my bike through a park to find an elderly couple reclining in the sun. There were uni students, small children and sky-facing daydreamers all sitting nearby and none of them cast a sideward glance.

FKK culture is about connecting to nature and being comfortable within yourself as a rejection of the growing industrialism of modern society. It’s a way of being that strives to dismantle the restrictive standards of body beauty in popular culture, in which round-tummy retirees are granted equal entry to broad-shoulder postgrads with bulging pectorals.

It isn’t just restricted to specific cities, either – whether you’re walking through a park in Munich or swimming in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin, you’ll see locals comfortably sunbathing without a thread of clothing.

This universal attitude of openness to bodies of all ages and sizes definitely has a place in the exclusionary beach-body culture of Australia.

I think us Aussies would do well to take the lead from our German neighbours and strip without shame this summer, regardless of whether you’re “summer-ready”. The only downside is that if being naked in public were no longer that remarkable, I’d be out of a job as a life model.

It’s a price worth paying, I think.

Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier is a freelance writer and reviewer based in Melbourne.

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