So this is my first time posting on Naktiv. As a writer who has only recently discovered Naked Hiking Day, I was really curious about public attitudes towards nude hiking. So I decided to run a poll about public attitudes and thought it would be interesting to share the results here…
In May 2019 I polled 1,505 adult Americans through Google surveys with the following question (and multiple-choice answers displayed in a random order):
June 21st is “Naked Hiking Day”. Which of the following statements best describes your attitude towards naked hiking:
- It’s fine, I have no problem with it
- It should only be allowed in specific places
- It shouldn’t be allowed anywhere
- It sounds fun!
Here’s the result:
The first thing I noticed was, although the least popular option, nearly 15% of Americans think naked hiking sounds fun. That equates to 35 million people! Great news!
On the flip side, nearly 25% of people think it shouldn’t be allowed anywhere. When I broke that down by demography, there wasn’t much difference based on Gender. The Midwest and the South were more inclined to ban the activity than the North East and the West. Age, however, was a huge factor… If you were over 65, you were twice as likely to feel this way (35%) compared to 18-24 year olds (18%).
Although 25% of the population seem outright against naked hiking, that means that 75% are at least relatively accepting of it, which seems really positive. This aligns fairly closely with the regular polling conducted on behalf of the Naturist Education Foundation which consistently finds strong support among Americans for those wishing to pursue “clothing optional” activities.
And while I’m certain we won’t see 35m bare bodies on the trail any time soon, it’s quite interesting to see relatively high levels of tolerance in a socio-political landscape that seems increasingly divided.
This is adapted from a longer article which you can read in full here.
Interesting find, I once was walking on a local trail in the concord NH area nude and walked by a female with some dogs, she just said “the dogs won’t bite” as we pass by each other. I was skeptic but nothing happened.
Thanks for posting your findings here, I’ve also red the longer version of the article, interesting!
Public surveys on naked activities, in this case Naked Hiking, are a great service to the social world. Firstly it challenges the puritan views that their morals are everybody’s morals, and secondly it gets the topic in front of many more people in a neutral way. In this case 1500+ people who responded. Much kudos for doing this, and I hope we see many more relevant surveys in the future. Great work!
Oh, and welcome to Naktiv…
Thanks for publishing your findings here. I think your summary of the results is spot on. American attitudes tend to influence UK attitudes because we consume so many of your films and TV programmes, so I am pleased to see your findings and somewhat encouraged for the future. A more detailed survey conducted in the UK back in 2011 produced results that showed us to be even more accepting of such naked activities, but this shows that the US may be catching up… 🙂
The trouble is that there will always be a very vocal minority, posing as ‘the silent majority’ to stir things up. It doesn’t seem to matter how small that minority is, they make the most noise. It is only by having surveys such as this one that we ever stand a chance of proving to them that they are a minority who are making an unnecessary fuss.