To Sleep In the Nude or Not To Sleep In the Nude....That *WAS* the Question

Remind me to never ever try and conduct an unscientific little poll [like this] again, in person no less, without some geeky looking official badge, glasses that are taped together at the bridge and the requisite clipboard and number 2 pencil. Read on a bit and you’ll find out why.

While I could be blogging about the latest political scandals (when is there ever not a political scandal- as long as there are men in tacky suits out glad-handing for votes/money/sex, there will be political scandals), global warming, the price of gas (hey, it’s going down!), The British Royals touring New Orleans (so many comments I could make, so little time), or anything as all important as Paris Hilton’s new boyfriend…I have decided to tackle an even yet bigger far more important subject.

Sleeping in the nude.

Yes dear friends, for some reason my pregnancy addled brain has been wondering (and possibly wandering) about how this all got started. Not that I’m obsessed with sleepin’ nekkid. Quite the opposite. I don’t have anything against it (by the way, a fear of nudity is called gymnophobia or nudophobia – which I don’t have, just thought I’d toss it out there), it’s just that I’ve tried it, and can’t quite feel comfortable about it. It’s kind of along the same lines as sleeping with my socks on, I just can’t do it. I’m by no means a prude, it’s just that with my luck, there would be a fire on the night I decide to go au naturale and I’d not have time to grab anything more than the bed sheets to cover myself with and jump out the window. And I probably wouldn’t even have time for the bed sheet. And I don’t wish the sight of my naked self on even the hardiest of fire fighters. No one deserves to be that traumatized!

Not only that, but the logistics don’t work for me. By that I mean that I have a big butt. And it’s a scientific fact that not only do big butts take up more room, if you are a “tosser and turner” like I am, then your butt cheeks will, by the laws of gravity – or whatever scientific law is applicable in this situation – suck up the bed sheets. And if you’re pregnant like I am, when you get up to pee for the 25^th time in the middle of the night, and you’ve been sleeping nude, all that tossing and turning will have caused your butt cheeks to suck up the entire bottom sheet and possibly the top sheet as well, and you’ll drag them both into the loo with you.

This phenomenon never fails me.

So how did sleeping in the nude get started? Surprisingly, a Google search netted me zero on the matter. All I got were several sites which amounted to little more than porn. So being that I have no accurate historical data to go by, I’m just going to assume it got started with the cave man. Seems logical to me. Then I imagine, sometime around the thawing of the ice age, man got cold! Man discovered that sleeping on ledges of ice in the buff was a quite chilling experience indeed. Man then probably decided to add a little something between him and that frozen slab of ice.

Of course, that’s all supposition on my part. But at some point, folks starting stripping it all off again and sleeping in the buff. Once again I’m going to assume that it started, oh about the time of all those famous artists that were painting full figured women in the nude.

Heaven only knows how long those paintings took, and those women weren’t exactly small either. So, once Titian called it a day, all those ladies, still in the nude, and after a long day of lying around in a single position in the nude, probably just fell asleep in the nude. There was nothing decadent about it at the time, it was all quite innocent I imagine and done probably more out of being too tired from all that posing to go gather your many coloured robes about you again. Plus it was probably a hell of a lot easier when Titian stopped by in the morning to already be prepared. Ya know? But really now, look at them all lounging about in the Titian above. They look like they've just rolled out of bed, and the guy in front is just walking by and stops to wave and say good morning to the lounging ladies before going off to play "Troy" or "Gladiator" or some other historical event of importance.

So, we can blame that re-emergence of sleeping in the nude on the Italians. While Titian wasn’t the only one to paint famous nudes (and yes I am quite aware that he wasn’t singularly famous for his nudes, it was more his style and colour, hence the term “Titian red” Of course I recall reading something about how his artwork changed once his wife died.), he was indeed Italian!

About the time Titian died, which if I recall was the later part of the 1500’s, those wacky Puritans were setting sail for the new world. Now, it’s a little known fact that while they were indeed Puritans, they had pretty healthy sex lives and a very robust attitude towards sex in general, well within the confines of marriage anyhow. Oh sure, the Devil was indeed behind every evil deed back in those days, but sex wasn’t vilified back then amongst the Puritans like certain modern day dogma would have you believe. The Puritans had it right….sex is good. As my idol Martha would say, “It’s a very good thing.” Well, I don’t know that she’d say that about sex, I was just…oh never mind. Trying to imagine my idol having sex is almost as bad as the realization that one’s parents still have sex at an advanced age. Talk about traumatizing!

But as much as the Puritans believed that sex was an essential part of the day to day married life, I can’t imagine them sleeping in the nude. Not when the practice of “bundling” was quite common back then. Parents would bundle their young daughters – literally sewing them in their bed clothes, when any member of the opposite sex, not a family member was present and sleeping in the house. I find this quite amusing.

So, we’ve got a couple more hundred years of sleeping in heavy bed clothes and sleeping caps, thanks to those Victorians and all their silly bedtime finery – which begs the question, how did they make it through a night without their nightshirts/nightgowns up around their necks? I can never sleep in a nightgown because around 2AM it’s around my neck and I feel as if I’m being choked to death. Victorian sleepwear was every bit as complicated and frilly as what they wore during the day, as the below image, taken from a catalogue of 1893 boudoir wear, illustrates. Yes those are in fact, bed clothes!

Anyhow, fast forward another couple of hundred years and we’re back to folks baring it all at bedtime.

One of those people happens to be my darling husband who I adore with every breath I take, but who has no compunction about sleeping totally butt naked!

This fact quite surprised me the first time we….we…well the first time he hopped into bed with me. I mean, look at this cutie in his Winnie the Pooh tie.

And I’m not trying to make a connection between men who sleep in the nude being men who wear Winnie the Pooh ties. It’s just that he’s so cute, one might not imagine that when the lights go out, the clothes come off….all of them! Anyhow, I remember thinking to myself back then; “Oh, do all Brits sleep naked? This is interesting, just naked, just like that, right off the bat! So there goes the whole ‘rip his clothes off’ fantasy I had going.” I had another much more um, well, well, just another thought at the time as well, but I don’t want to embarrass my dear husband too much.

The other thing about Gareth is that the man is a walking furnace. And after a few years of sharing a bed with him, I’ve come to the conclusion that if he did wear anything to bed he would probably combust. And yet, this is the same man who must have a duvet (comforter for all you Yanks out there that have no idea what a “duvet” is) that weighs 50 million pounds. That must also be a British thing. I have another friend of mine who married a British import and she says the same thing about her hubby. Even in the stifling heat of the summer, this man needs a duvet which weighs as much as a safe.

However, being that Gareth and I have in the past, often been separated by an ocean, it’s far more convenient for me that he hops into bed in the buff. I simply can’t be bothered with all those clothes anyhow. I’m far too impatient. It’s a miracle we even make it out of the airport sometimes.

Ok now that I’ve embarrassed not only my husband but probably my parents as well, and possibly my in laws……

Back to what I was saying.

Yesterday, my curiosity got the better of me, which also led me to discover just exactly how the phrase; “curiosity killed the cat” came into being!

While I was out running errands, I decided to take this very “unscientific poll”. Big, huge, GINORMOUS mistake! Unless one can run as fast as a scorched cat, I don’t recommend starting up conversations about sleeping in the nude with just “anyone”. Plus I didn’t really feel up to putting to test just exactly how fast a fat, pregnant woman can run. That would not have been a Kodak moment.

Thus ended the unscientific poll. Ok well technically it ended after two people. Again, I don’t recommend this method to anyone. Next time I decide to get a wild hair up my butt about something like this, I’ll call random people out of the phone book and *67 my telephone number before I do.

So my next logical course of investigation was to poll the other January Mom’s in my birth club. Their answers were pretty typical…”we would if we didn’t have kids, but we do, so we don’t.” This is logical to me, lest we traumatize the young. Well, my young would most certainly be traumatized. There were also some Mom's that do, or sleep in as little as me, and a few that felt similar to how I felt, that it's kind of an "odd" feeling and can't get to sleep without something on. Again, there is nothing wrong with sleeping naked, or even walking around naked. To each his own.

So, I fear, my curiosity will have to go unsatisfied. But the cat’s still alive. And that’s a good thing.