Fifty Nude Women: A Musical Montage

Way back in the Spring of 2001, first-time filmmaker Margot Roth took out an ad in The Village Voice to recruit participants for a documentary about naked women, seeking "50 Real Women of All Ages, Sizes, and Colors . . . Stretch Marks, Bow-Legs, Body Hair, Cellulite, Tattoos, Wrinkles, Knobby Knees, Varicose Veins, Round Bellies, Defined Muscles, Scars—Thin, Heavy, Pear-Shaped . . . All Shapes and Sizes Welcome & Needed". Women responded with enthusiasm.

Roth’s career as the Bob Guccione of bulgy everywomen arose, unlike Bob Guccione’s, out of a sense of civic duty. Several months earlier, a friend of hers had begun to date “this really nice woman” whose breasts, he confessed to Roth, looked less alluring au naturel than they did encased in their customary pushup bra.

“What’s wrong, are they hairy or covered in stretch marks?” Roth asked.

“No, they just hang down.”

“Dude, if large breasts stand up straight they’re not real!” Roth declared. “You just need to be barraged with, like, real boobs.”

This is precisely why nudism, or at least some sort of societal shift towards a wider acceptance of non-sexual nudity, is important to the mental health of individuals who obtain their only images of the human body from pornography.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, forced Margot to shelve the project because, at the time, it seemed "frivolous", but last November the film was completed, and several of the participants gathered in the filmmakers apartment to view and comment on the final product.

“I’m thinner now,” Heather Allison, a thirty-year-old university administrator and singer, said, as a shot of her as an odalisque revealed upper-abdomen fat rolls. “I was still coming off my women’s-college weight gain.” She went on, “When I think back on it, doing this was the beginning of my adult life.”

That's a pretty profound statement to make, that shedding clothing and coming to terms with her own body was a watershed of maturity. Time for America to grow up a little, too.

The Fifty Nude Women Project

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