The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

Just 5 minutes to read – but the usual mature content warnings apply!

Now that we’ve had our first couple of winter snows in Santa Fe – and non-trivial drops they were: 7 inches to start – I’m reminded of what may have been my first sexual kink: going outside naked in the snow. Rather than write about this directly – I can’t think what to say, frankly – I thought that I might call on AI for some assistance. So I went to Bing Chat on Microsoft Edge and asked the bot this question:

“Is it weird to want to run naked in the snow?”

 Now if you are a therapist, or just lean that way, feel free to share with me your thoughts on why I asked that question when I never, in fact, ran naked in the snow. Certainly, I ran frantically back inside after having taken a few naked steps into a snow drift out back, or whatever, but never actually went running. I just, in my pre-pubertal search to understand the relationship between the naked body and pleasure, thought that it would be an interesting experiment to venture naked into the snowy night.

The result was not pleasure, but I did feel very naughty, and as a young Catholic I assumed that that was the same thing. Accordingly, I repeated the experiment on regular basis, well past the onset of puberty, with occasional variations (maybe I should ask Bing: “can a person throw themselves face first into a snow bank and maintain their erection?”).

At any rate, Bing’s response to the question I asked:

It’s Not Uncommon

It’s not uncommon for people to have the desire to run naked in the snow. However, it’s important to note that this activity can be dangerous and is not recommended. According to a 2008 article in the Orange County Register, running naked in the snow can burn more fat, but it’s also important to remember that we tend to be more active in cold weather and less active in warmer weather . If you’re considering going outside naked, it’s important to do it the right way. A wikiHow article suggests that you should get comfortable with your body, spend more time in the nude, and start sleeping naked before exploring your new habit . It’s also important to find suitable places to be naked and only expose yourself in places where you won’t be seen by others . Please keep in mind that public nudity is illegal in many places and can result in legal trouble or potentially embarrassing situations .¹

I wonder now, would I have had more endurance for staying outside, naked in the snow, if I’d been more comfortable with my body? The only information source I had at the time for such things was other neighborhood kids, and the only thing I remember them telling me about being naked outdoors was to not invite dogs to investigate my genitals. I was terrified of dogs, anyway, so I had no trouble following that advice.

I like the suggestion to “start sleeping naked before exploring your new habit.” I’m sure I wanted to sleep naked – under snowy white sheets, let’s imagine – because I basically wanted to be naked (or to “spend more time in the nude,” as the bot has it) at every possible opportunity back then. I suppose that’s because I wanted to retrieve my body for myself. Plenty of experience by then, of having it exposed to the pleasure of others; nakedness was not strange, but nakedness for my own pleasure…

Our family lived for 5, 6 years on a block where I could go outside my house naked with a reasonable – though not guaranteed – chance of not being seen. So to that extent, I was doing it “the right way.” It was the period of my childhood when the sexual abuse was at its worst, and though I have memories of multiple friendships on the block, of guys running around playing the games of the time (that is: pretending to kill each other), no one has a face or a name. This is not true of the neighborhoods before or after.

This was the strangest time: things involving naked bodies and penises were happening to me with regularity and I was dissociating from them and burying whatever memories stuck as thoroughly as I could, yet I was constantly fantasizing about naked bodies and penises in ways that obscurely mirrored those events.

I think I imagined

I think I imagined that the snow would be like dry ice, burning the residue of unwanted touch off my skin.

The light of a snow-coated night is twice-removed from the source – sun off moon off snow – and has always seemed to me as thin as a razor blade, and able to make every thing that thin. Not true, I know, but I believe it anyway. On a winter night, with snow on the ground but not in the air, all things can be sliced clean.

For the few moments that I could bear the cold and keep my back turned to the house, I would be looking the sled-ready hill that fronted the back yard. Nothing but open snow and sky.

And now that I think about it, maybe somewhere in my mind I was running.

1. Bing Chat with GPT4, December 2,2023. ↩︎