The Empress's New Clothes
My nudity is the cloak of my freedom.
I know there will always be those who sexualize my nudity, as well as all the nudity they see, but that is not my business. It is not my pathology, and that pathology has nothing to do with my nudity or anyone else's.
In so many ways, I am freer and more accurately reflected by this place I live now than I have ever been.
It's a California theme that I meet the people I'm going to be the best friends with while we are naked. Lounging by the river, in a sauna, at a day spa, at the hot springs, at festivals.
There is something natural and freeing about being a body in a body with nothing to hide or apologize for. An environment that is friendly to nudity is friendly to the most vulnerable state of humanity. It's a whole other layer of safety, and most of us have been alienated from accessing it.
In person I almost never experience the sexualization of my nudity, but online it's a different story. People think I do different kinds of intimacy work than I do, men who never otherwise reach out or comment, comment on the nudes (especially mono-married guys), and those whose practice it is to drag other people's character use this as an opportunity to drag mine.
It's ok with me. I really do want to know who you are and what you're capable of—it helps me sort my priorities. When you drag my character, you are truly only revealing your own.
Sexualizing nudity is one metric of dysfunction, the dysfunction of thinking all nudity is about sex. But I also want to mention the nuance of charge around sex, which is the dysfunction of thinking sex is taboo, wrong, or naughty, when it's literally how we all get here and something almost all of us engage with. This is what can make the sexualization of nudity violent, violating, and plain old icky rather than a simple and potentially even sweet misunderstanding.
When I find that my nudity is being sexualized in person, it's usually, these days, in a charge-free way. Someone who feels neutral about sexuality innocently representing the sexual energy that is running through their own body at the sight of mine. The responsibility for desire is what makes this clean.
When I find that my nudity is being sexualized online, it's usually in this charged way, where I'm doing something naughty and making them "be bad," or I'm asking for some type of contact, interaction, or relationship. Where I'm advertising some sort of immorality. They're abdicating responsibility for how they feel to me and my expression. They're projecting their own desires onto me, and that's murky.
Sex is not a moral issue. It's a neutral activity we're equipped to really enjoy, as humans. Our culture is what creates ideas of violence, morality, and taboo around using our bodies for pleasure and play. Our culture is what says our sex is everyone's business but our own—the church's, the government's, our parents’, our partner’s—how could we make a choice for our own pleasure without consulting some authority? Shouldn't we know what everyone else thinks??
Every time I watch a movie someone else picked, I lament once more about how easy it is to see gore, violence, explosion, dismemberment, gunshots to the head, and how I wish these things were treated the way we treat orgasm—represented by metaphor, never depicted on the screen, because of how it can corrupt the mind and character to witness such things.
I can't help but think about what it would be like if pleasure were so freely represented on the screen—do we earnestly, as a culture, fear pleasure more than war? Do we truly fear depictions of the naturalness of a nude human body more than the destruction of a human body ripped apart by weapons and cruelty? What is it that THEY are afraid would happen if our attention was consumed by pleasure and play?
That which we leave in the realm of imagination is able to acquire and maintain charge and mystique. We don't really talk about sex, so we don't really know what anyone is thinking about sex or how they're doing it, and we're able to imagine just about anything.
We're shown violence because bringing it into the realm of the seen diffuses the charge, gives us the show rather than leaving us to our own imaginations. When we hear about war on the news, we don't have to imagine it, it's just like the movies, and so we don't have to imagine it, and to us it is just as real as the movies.
Then there is (most mainstream) porn, born of this corrupted relationship to nudity and sexuality and secrecy and taboo, the sex we do represent on a screen stripped of real pleasure, of real interaction, of emotional depth and developed characters, emptied of all but depravity. That's the "sexuality" we "normalize."
For myself, I choose freedom in my body and my mind, and when I share nudes, I'm sharing the freedom and the safety I experience in my body, in my community, in my relationships in person and online. For every one weirdo sexualizing me and bringing icky sexual charge to this, I imagine there is at least one person who opens their eyes to the lies they've learned about nudity and sexuality.
I ALSO know there is a huge community whose eyes are already open, and who look upon my body with respect, appreciation, and the same neutrality they have when I'm clothed. I've received feedback that what's sexy about the nudes I post is how free I am.
This is the freedom I want to show, and I want to show it not just to brag that I've found it, but to advertise that it's available to you, too.
Not only the freedom to be nude, but to break ANY rule you learned that does not make sense to you now.
Imagine getting to the end of your life and realizing you followed all the rules, and you're out of time to break them.
Imagine realizing how few of the rules you allowed to corral your human experience make any sense, as you stand on that liminal edge overlooking the abyss of all you cannot know.
There will always be someone telling you how to live your life, or telling you what it means that you've chosen to live your life the way you have. There will never be anyone who is correct about the right thing to do, or the right way for you to be, other than you.
Your human experience is sacred. I hope you will be free.
