Exposure

On nudity, violation, and reclaiming the right to choose what we reveal

Exposure

by Sadie Kennedy

When I was seven years old, walking to first grade at the school two blocks from my house, a man pulled up next to me in a tall white pickup truck. I was walking along the far end of the fenced grounds where we played kickball during recess. There were a few kids playing basketball at the other end of the field, but nobody else was around. I didn’t notice the truck at first, parked on the street beside the schoolyard, but when he saw me, he drove straight up to me.

Maybe he knew that I walked there every day, had seen me every morning, and knew what time I would arrive. Who’s to know? Maybe he just hoped a little girl would show up, walking to school alone.

“Hey little girl,” the man said. “You’re so pretty, I want to kiss you right where you go pee.” I couldn’t see his hands, only his weird smile that made him look like he had sharp teeth, that were dripping with saliva. He started to open the door. I ran as fast as I could in my mary janes.

I found the only person I could think of to tell – a kid in my class whose father was a police officer. He was playing basketball with the other kids. His father had introduced himself, in uniform, to our classroom earlier that year. This boy had never been particularly nice to me – he singled me out when we played dodge ball, and threw the ball at me so hard it left a bruise. He laughed the loudest when the volleyball hit me in the face and gave me a bloody nose. But when I told him what had happened, he helped me find a teacher and give them a description of the man in the truck as best I could.

I didn’t get to walk to school anymore, and had to get up extra early to be driven to a friend’s house so I could ride the school bus with them. It felt like punishment. I decided it was okay because they had MTV and we didn’t have cable at home, but I missed the autonomy of walking myself to school.

At recess, my best friend, Victoria, used to hang from the monkey bars upside down, swinging from her knees, her long skirt dangling over her face and arms. Her undies, speckled with little pink flowers or yellow daisies, would hang there making it look like she had underwear for a face. I was always embarrassed for her.

“Don’t you care that all the boys see your underwear?” I asked.

“Why would I care?” Victoria answered, her voice muffled under her skirt.

This was the same girl who ate a raw potato with salt every day for lunch, and I chalked it up to the fact that she was simply very different from all the other kids. She was that girl that Prince writes about in his song “Starfish and Coffee” – If you set your mind free, baby, Maybe you’d understand. I didn’t understand how she could be that free, but I dreamed of being as unafraid as Victoria, brave enough to hang from the monkey bars on the days I wore a skirt.

The first time I actually saw a penis, it was my own father’s, as he was getting into the shower. I was a toddler and the strange dangly thing waved far above my head. I reached toward it but wasn’t tall enough to reach it. I asked him what it was. He explained the difference between the things we had between our legs and told me that he had to hold it when he peed, standing up, pointing it into the toilet, instead of sitting on the potty like me.

I didn’t think much of it, except that it looked like a fun thing to have, and that if I had one, I’d probably helicopter it regularly. In my teen years, my mother would tell me stories of my father dancing around only in his socks, bouncing his penis like he was on a trampoline. As a teenager, I’d turn bright red, yell “Mom! Why do you tell me these things?!” She thought it was funny. By then I wanted to forget that my father even owned a penis. Ew! Gross.

The second time I saw a penis was in kindergarten. I had gotten out of class early, and sprinted to the bus to get my favorite seat – the back seat, where we would turn around and taunt the cars behind us. It was a coveted spot. I rarely got to sit there, so this was a special treat. The driver had gotten off the bus to smoke a cigarette across the street, so I was alone in the back of the bus.

Joey, a boy that got picked on by most of the other kids, got on the bus a few minutes later. He made his way toward me. I rolled my eyes, thinking, He better not try to sit next to me. As he approached me, I realized that he had opened the fly of his pants and had taken out his penis, and was waving it at me, laughing. “Look at this,” he said. “Look. Look.”

I screamed, and pushed past him, running down the aisle and off of the bus. I didn’t tell anyone about it, I just waited for my friends to show up and we had to sit in the back seat opposite Joey, who had taken the seat I had been sitting in. I tried to pretend he wasn’t there. Even though Joey kept looking over trying to catch my eye, I wouldn’t look at him. I sat with the kids who picked on him for the rest of the year. We would tell him there was a witch that lived under the seats who fed us pizza, but he couldn’t have any. He believed us, and climbed on the floor of the bus crying, looking for the witch.

A few years later, in second grade, I cringed and groaned as the bus driver made us all have assigned seats. He sat me next to Joey. I ignored him every day, pressing myself against the side of the bus to get as far away from him as I could. Joey was unruly, and often got in trouble for running around in the aisles while the bus was moving. One time, the bus driver slammed on the brakes so hard that Joey went flying down the aisle, rolling all the way to the front of the bus and down the stairs, landing at the front door. I’m pretty sure the driver did it on purpose. After that, Joey sat quietly next to me, and didn’t bother anyone for the rest of the year.

I would have hated that bus driver, except that he had what I considered to be very nice forearms. He’d roll up his sleeves to the elbow, and I’d smile a little every time he reached for the intercom to yell at Joey or one of the other obnoxious kids. I didn’t understand why I liked this man’s arms so much, but it made me forgive him for sitting me next to Joey. After all, we were near the front, where I could see his arms every day. I loved it when he wore short sleeves and I could see more of his bicep and shoulder. As a young adult, I ran into him once at a store, and recognized him instantly because of his arms.

Before I was even a teenager, at eleven or twelve, men in cars would begin to whistle at me on the street and ask me for a date. I looked older than my age, but I definitely didn’t look eighteen. More than one of these men had their hands hidden from view. By this point, I knew what that meant. Me and my friends would give them the middle finger and tell them to “Fuck off,” but this only seemed to encourage them. Sometimes they’d even ask us to kiss. “I’m going to go call the cops,” I’d yell. “I got your license plate.” This always made them drive away.

In seventh grade, the boys starting going further than just showing me their genitals on the school bus. They would pull me into the stairwell, trying to kiss me, rubbing their groins against me with something warm and hard inside their pants. I responded to this by kneeing them all in the balls. It surprised me that word didn’t get out, because other boys kept trying it, until I started to wonder if the boys actually enjoyed being kneed in the balls. Maybe they had a little club where they told each other which girls were willing to hurt them.

It turned out that wasn’t the reason they kept pulling me into the stairwell. One of them had spread a rumor about me that I had slept with 22 people in 2 days, after I told a friend I had lost my virginity, and they all thought that I would just let them do whatever they wanted to me. I must have kneed at least seven boys in the balls that year. I started hoping they would try.

One time, when I was nineteen, riding the city bus through Uptown, I looked out the window, into the car below. We had stopped at the light. The man in the car had his pants open, and was working himself, his penis in full view of the bus, but not to anyone on the street. I couldn’t see his face. In retrospect, I should have gotten his license plate and reported him, but I had to look away. I felt so grimy, like I had been violated. I wondered how many people in the city had looked out a bus window and saw this man. I wondered how many people on my bus had seen it along side me, and chose to just look away.

I grew up afraid to be exposed. My own naked body frightened me, even though there was nothing wrong with it. Maybe it was from having these men and boys expose themselves to me so inappropriately, almost violently, or from having been sexually assaulted at a young age. Maybe it was the repressed Midwest culture I grew up with, that rarely exposed flesh in public unless it was in a sundress or shorts. I wore baggy T-shirts, and rarely exposed my legs above the knee.

I wore only one-piece bathing suits, and was always a bit jealous of the few girls I knew who would wear bikinis to the lake. When, in my mid twenties, I wore a string bikini for the first time, I felt so exposed that I spent the whole day on my belly, and brutally sunburned my back. Every time I stood up, I covered myself with a towel. When I went into the water, I ran from the towel to the lake, submerged my body completely, and ran back to the towel, covering my torso. I sat on the sand in a wet towel wrapped to the armpits.

This would eventually change. In my mid twenties, I got a full body tattoo of a Japanese phoenix that went from my collarbones to my knees, covering my breasts and abdomen with wings and flowers. Large peacock feathers trailed across the bend of my hips and down the front of my thighs. At first it was very awkward to stand in just my underwear in front of the artist, who drew the tattoo on with a marker for hours before tattooing it. But soon, the pain of standing there for four hours while he drew became my biggest concern. I forgot I was topless. My feet hurt from standing still.

During the tattoo process, I dissociated so fully that my body felt like it didn’t belong to me. I covered my face with a hoodie, unconcerned with the people who were coming in to talk to the artist and could see my fully exposed breasts. I was far more concerned with people seeing my facial expressions, the grimaces I made when he ran the machine over my rib bones, or the tears that escaped from my eyes when he spent two hours outlining my sternum. The body was just the body. What I was afraid of people seeing, was my emotions.

The tattoo took about a year and a half to complete. I sat multiple days at a time, traveling from Minneapolis to Austin, Texas, and staying in hotels, where I soaked their white sheets in ink. By the end of it, I was no longer afraid of people seeing me naked or in a bikini. I’d pull a new friend into the bathroom at a busy bar, pulling my dress up to my neck in front of strangers so they could see the whole tattoo. I started wearing cute underwear and bras because I knew other people were going to see them. I loved black light night at the bowling alley, because the tattoo had black light reactive ink, and the whole thing shimmered in the purple light like one of those acid posters from the sixties.

Imagine a whole bowling alley watching me show off my full frontal tattoo! Gone was the shy girl who had to run from the towel to the lake and back again.

A year or so after finishing the tattoo, I participated in a piercing ritual with the late Fakir Musafar. Fakir, in his seventies at the time, was a curator of body modification rituals for National Geographic.

For the ritual, I got hooks put into my chest beside the phoenix wings, and a cheek spear that went from one side of my face, through my mouth, to the other. A rope was tied to the two hooks, with a carabiner attached to it, so that I could hook myself to a scaffolding and pull against it. Later in the ceremony, I danced with my partner, who held the rope and pulled on it to the rhythm of the drummers. Near the end, all of us dancers hooked our carabiners to a ring and pulled outward from it together, dancing in a heightened ecstasy and clarity that was far too beautiful to describe in words.

There were many other topless women in the room with me. We all wore sarongs around our waists. We sat this way together, waiting for our turn with the piercers, and I remember thinking how nice it was to be with friends in this way, unconcerned about our chests being exposed. There was something so liberating about meditating this way, preparing internally for an experience that we all knew would be intense.

An audience had been invited to witness the dance, and they entered after we had all been pierced and had each had time to pull in solitude against the scaffolding. The initial pulls were painful but intensely pleasant at the same time, and my tolerance for pulling against the rope grew and grew, until the feeling was entirely pleasant, a clear and intense openness of heart and mind. After some time in solitude, I went to join my husband in the group of dancing partners. I didn’t notice when the onlookers entered the room. There were about 75 of them, circling the dance floor, and they were there for a half hour before I noticed.

I was in total bliss, experiencing the divine in a way I had never known it before. I danced with my arms outstretched, feeling like I could take the whole world into my heart, I could see how all of it was part of the same energy that was coursing through me. There was no judgment of good and bad. It was full surrender, full acceptance of all that is. A bright, crystal clarity that connected me to everything.

Some of the dancers were part of the local BDSM community, and at one point one of the women removed her husband’s leather thong and started jerking him off while they danced. I remember thinking, “Wow, sometimes God needs to be a husband and wife at a piercing ceremony, getting kinky in front of witnesses.” It never occurred to me that it would be inappropriate, the way it had with the men in cars. I remember thinking at the time that I was shocked it didn’t bother me at all. My husband, however, was uncomfortable, and kept turning me away so I wouldn’t have to look.

A few years later, after my husband and I left Minneapolis, moved to LA and then to Maui. We had been to Hawaii on vacation and made some friends in the tattoo community. It was easy to get work, as there were always plenty of tourists getting tattooed. After selling almost everything we owned, we boarded a plane and flew to our new tropical home.

For the first time in my life, I saw women shopping in the grocery store in micro-bikinis that barely covered their nipples, with nothing but a tiny triangle in the back that rested between their buttocks. Pumping gas, my friend visiting from Minnesota exclaimed that the women at the gas station with their children wore less clothing than the strippers who worked the club next to his apartment building in Minneapolis. By this point, I didn’t think anything of it. This blew his mind. Wasn’t it inappropriate? “It’s just a body,” I told him, “and it’s the hottest place in all of Hawaii. Anyway, they just came from the beach.”

My attitude changed again when my friends took me to Little Beach, the designated nude beach on the island. Next to Little Beach is Big Beach, a long, vast expanse of sand filled with tourists playing in the waves. At one end of Big Beach there was a rocky cliff, which, when approached, revealed a path almost like a stairwell that had been worn into the rock. We climbed up to the top of the rocky outcrop, overlooking all of Big Beach and providing a view of the whole ocean and the nearby islands. Then we descended down the other side, into a smaller beach that was protected on all sides by cliffs.

Hundreds of people danced all day on Sundays to a drum circle that never stopped playing from morning until sunset. After the sun went down, the fire twirlers came out and the party would continue with a few of the drummers staying to accompany them. About half the people were naked or topless, the other half in bikinis or swim trunks. It was mostly men who were completely naked, although there were a few women, mostly elderly hippie women who had been doing this since the sixties. The young women went topless, sunning their breasts while creepy men stared at them from their towels.

I noticed the creeps right away. I had thought that it might be fun to take off my top, but I quickly changed my mind when I saw the men gawking, trying to let the women know without speaking that they were not averting their eyes. One man pulled his towel up a few feet from a trio of topless girls, and just lay there on his belly staring them, pressing himself rhythmically into the sand. The women seemed to be enjoying that someone was looking at them.

I asked my friends if we could set up somewhere away from these gawkers, and we found a fallen tree which provided a little shade, away from the main group. We all cheered as a pod of dolphins came to join the drummers, playing in the waves for an hour until they swam off. My friend and I ran to the water, diving under the large waves that were pounding the shore, just so we could be a little closer to the dolphins. We took off our tops in the water, but put them back on before stepping back onto the sand.

Tourists sometimes found the beach, and took pictures until someone politely asked them to stop. It was understood that people could snap a quick photo of themselves with friends, but that photography in general was not acceptable. Most people complied. We got a picture of our group together, and we all laughed later when we realized there was not a single naked person in the photo.

One of the elder hippie men had us laughing all day. He spun his penis like a helicopter to the music, swinging and swinging it while he talked to various friends. Beautiful elder women with long silver hair, draping breasts, and wrinkles, would stand next to him chatting, as his penis twirled and twirled. He smiled at everyone, completely relaxed, and danced like that the whole day, spinning his genitals in the sun. I’ll admit my inner child was a little bit jealous.

When we left the beach that night, we climbed the rocky cliff, now illuminated by torches held by the hippies, a full moon lighting up the ocean. I quietly told my friends that while this experience was magical, I didn’t think I wanted to go to Little Beach again anytime soon.

I didn’t mind people showing their bodies, but hundreds of naked bodies at once was a little too much for me. I told them I preferred the micro bikinis and the tiny red leather “banana hammocks” that the German tourists wore in town. That day, I had seen more penises and vaginas than I needed to see. Apparently, I had found a limit for how acceptable nudity was to me. It stopped at a hundred white hippies on the beach, with a couple creeps humping the sand.

Many years later, I moved back to Minneapolis just before my fiftieth birthday. I noticed immediately how covered everyone was. I often wear a string bikini in the summer, comfortable in my own skin, and people here will often comment on how brave I am. It’s partly because the pattern of the bikini blends exceptionally well with my full body tattoos, making it appear that I’m naked from a distance. I’ll admit that I find some satisfaction in this, and also that I frequently forget that the suit has this effect on people. I’ll be confused by their reactions, until I remember. “Oh yeah, the bikini.”

Nudity was entirely different when I had a choice. I could choose whether or not to go to Little Beach, where to place my towel, whether or not I took my top off. I could choose how much of my body I was comfortable exposing. Even the piercing ritual, standing in front of strangers topless, hooks in my chest, was safe because I had chosen it. I couldn’t choose what those men in parked cars did when I was a child, or how it affected me.

Nakedness itself wasn’t the problem. It was the feeling of someone else deciding for me, acting as though they were entitled to my attention, my emotions, or my body.

Exposure isn’t about the absence of clothing. It’s the absence of choice.