Forget the Cabin Retreat: Why Grown Men Are Now Discussing 'Moby-Dick' in the Buff

There's a book club meeting in a backyard in Portland this Saturday. Twelve guys, ages 34 to 61. This month's pick is a fat paperback about grief and fly fishing. Nobody's wearing a stitch.

Welcome to the strangest, sweetest corner of the male friendship renaissance: the clothing-optional social club.

Not a Sex Thing. Not a Kink Thing. A Loneliness Thing.

Let's get the obvious question out of the way, because every guy who joins one of these groups has asked it: is this a cover for something else?

"Ninety percent of the guys who show up are terrified I'm going to say yes," laughs Marcus, who runs a men's book-and-swim club out of his home in Oregon. "And the answer is no. We read books. We swim. We argue about the ending. That's it."

These groups have been popping up organically over the past few years — book clubs, hiking crews, even a pickleball league in Arizona that hosts an annual "birthday suit bracket." They're not nudist organizations in the traditional AANR-card-carrying sense. They're regular dudes who stumbled into the same realization at roughly the same time: men don't have spaces where they're allowed to be unguarded, and literal unguardedness is a surprisingly effective shortcut.

The membership skews 30s through 60s — guys who came of age in locker rooms that vanished, who work remote jobs where they haven't seen a coworker's bare ankles in three years, who can name their barber's whole life story but not their neighbor's first name.

How a Book Club Ends Up Naked

The origin stories follow a pattern. A group of guys meets for something ordinary — a reading group, a Tuesday night sauna session, a cold plunge meetup. Someone mentions they've always wanted to try a clothing-optional hot spring. Someone else says "actually, me too." And then the awkward negotiation begins.

"We did a vote," says Derek, whose Denver-based group started as a stoop-sitting whiskey club and now runs monthly clothing-optional hikes in the summer. "First rule was it's always optional. Second rule was nobody comments on anyone's body. Ever. Third rule was if you show up and chicken out, you sit in a chair with your clothes on and nobody says a word about it."

That last rule matters more than the others. Organizers I spoke with estimate that a third of first-timers keep their clothes on the entire first meetup, and most groups treat that as completely normal. The point isn't nudity as achievement. It's nudity as an option — which, ironically, is what makes guys actually take it.

Consent culture in these spaces runs stricter than most workplaces. No photos, obviously. No alcohol-fueled pressure. A few groups use a simple color-tag system at larger gatherings so nobody accidentally assumes everyone's opted in. And the vetting is real: most clubs require a couple of fully-clothed meetups before anyone gets invited to the optional events. It's less about safety theater and more about making sure you're here for the friendship, not the fantasy.

What Actually Happens at These Things

Here's the part that surprises people: not much. And that's the whole appeal.

A typical gathering looks like any backyard hangout — folding chairs, a cooler, somebody's dog begging for burgers. The book discussion is genuinely a book discussion, except it drifts into territory most book clubs never touch. Marcus says the naked version of his club has had better conversations about the father-son memoir they read in March than three years of clothed meetings produced.

"There's something about nobody having armor," he says. "You can't do the salary flex. You can't do the watch flex. You're just a guy on a lawn chair talking about a book. The status stuff dies fast."

The swimming ones are even simpler. A lake, a quarry hole, a pool after hours. Guys stand at the edge doing the same nervous comedy routine that's played at every skinny dip since middle school. Then someone goes in, and five minutes later nobody remembers who was nervous.

The Friendship Deficit, Diagnosed

If you've read anything about American male friendship in the last five years, you know the statistics: shrinking friend circles, men reporting no close confidants, the whole grim survey landscape. Sociologists call it the friendship recession. Podcasts like ours have been banging this drum for a while.

What these clubs represent is a workaround. Traditional male bonding runs on activity — sports, work, projects — which caps intimacy at a certain depth. These groups keep the activity (books, hikes, pickleball) but remove the performance layer. Nudity, it turns out, is a very efficient way to cancel the performance.

"The first time is a stunt," Derek says. "The second time it's just Tuesday. And somewhere around the third time you realize you've told guys you've known for two months things you never told your college roommate."

Not every guy stays. Some figure out it's not their thing, which organizers say is fine and expected. But the groups keep growing, mostly through the least internet way possible: a guy tells another guy at work, and that guy shows up the following month, sits in the chair with his clothes on, and comes back anyway.

Should You Start One?

The organizers' advice is consistent: start clothed. Build the group around something you'd do anyway. Let the clothing-optional part emerge from trust rather than being the premise. And write the rules down before anyone's naked, not after.

Because the insight underneath all of this isn't really about nudity at all. It's that men are starving for spaces where they can't compete, can't perform, and can't hide — and a backyard book club with no dress code turns out to be the cheapest therapy-adjacent infrastructure in America.

Bring a towel. You won't need it, but it's polite to offer.