Why I started posting nudes on social media
A month or so ago, a friend asked me how I could be so bold and brave with the pictures I post and share online. He said he was awed yet too afraid to try it himself, of showing too much. I told him that this was precisely why I was posting — so that I could learn to silence those voices that told me to bottle it all in.
To be clear, I work in the arts where nudity often seems to go hand-in-hand with the job. For his part, as a private school teacher, my friend clearly has different considerations as to the kind of content he puts out there of himself. Safe to say: self-censorship has its place. But for me, in my world, I was beginning to find that self-censorship was impeeding a lot of my work, both personally and professionally. So, I began to do something that would, still to this day, sink my tummy every time I put it out there: I began to post nudes of myself online. To be clear, they weren’t full frontals, but rather back-side shots taken in whimsical situations. Nonetheless, there I was, naked for all to see.
The first time I posted a picture of my bare ass on Instagram was almost two years ago now.
It took me a few weeks of deliberation before I could actually muster the courage to do it. That uncertain period though was part of the reason I ever did it at all; The very fact that I was afraid or concerned about what others would say if I posted it. That was enough to propel me to post my cheeky nude in order to make a point.
“Fuck them,” I thought as I shrugged and pressed publish.
And then I put my phone down. I even enforced a period of time where I wouldn’t be allowed to check back in to see what others had said because I wasn’t doing this to see what they would say (at least, not entirely). Rather, I was doing it to make sure I was still bold enough to carve my own path in spite of how it would upset or offend others. And yes, showing my bare arse felt like (one of) the rawest, most honest way to do this.
Since that fateful picture — composed epically with sweeping views across a moody bay in New Zealand — I’ve posted a total of seven more bum shots. On average, that means I’ve been posting back-side nudes just about once every three months or so since. I don’t hold this calculation as a precise science; I take it more like a feeling because you see, I try to toe the line between just enough, and way too much. To be fair, I think this conscious calculating on my part is exhausting, but, so it goes: even though I’m keen to break the chains and molds around me, I’m still concerned about appearing too desperate, or too vain as we say of those in our sickened selfie generation.
Are my nudes vain, though?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself, and while I do think it would be hard to answer it completely in the negative, it is worth noting (if only in self-defense) that not a single one of these nudes is itself by definition a selfie, described most rudimentarily as “a digital picture of oneself taken by oneself”. My nudes, by contrast, are always taken by others. They are also — at least I like to think — more art than self-indulgence. But what’s the difference, you ask? Welcome to the slippery slope of nudism. I’m like that Reddit user who, in asking the same question concludes, “I usually try to quality control my work by asking if I think it is self-indulgent, but I’m losing my grasp of what that actually means. Is it the same as being flowery?”
Am I being flowery, i.e. showy in posting my nudist pics? Am I being self-indulgent or aggrandizing by calling them art? As I said, I think it would be hard to argue otherwise. But then, does that necessarily make it a priori bad? Because the truth is also that, while there is a definite degree of narcissism or self-indulgence in posting my bum for the world to see (I have a public profile, after all), the truth is also that I try to limit the constraints of my ego. For one, I never take more than a few snaps at once, maybe a couple at most in one go. This isn’t a photoshoot, I tell myself, it’s meant to be as on-the-cusp and uncalculated as a nudist pose can be. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, so be it; next time!
And yet, you musn’t be fooled because there is, of course, more strategy to it than my breezy composure leads on. For instance, I only ever post pictures of my behind. Like that little girl innocently caught with her panties down on Coppertone sunscreen bottles, it seems to be that the ass crack is the limit of where nudity is deemed still acceptable. (Less acceptable: breasts of women feeding; The hair on our groins; Our groins). This decorum is enforced too by the algorithms of the twin feeds of Facebook and Instagram. Community standards, they say, were created to foster a “diverse audience”, but that audience is definitely not ready for nudity. In fact, even “close-ups of fully-nude buttocks” aren’t allowed; so as you can imagine, I must be strategic with how far I position my buttocks from the eye of the camera. Like my posting schedule, the ideal is somewhere between just far enough so I won’t get flagged, but close enough so you can see me flagrantly, vainly, exposing my crack. Again, there is no exact science to it, but there are without a doubt certain calculations.
It’s been hard for me in trying to make sense of my nudist whims. By and large, my social feed isn’t dominated by them, only sprinkled. Even selfie pictures themselves aren’t really a thing I (publicly) indulge in. Perhaps maybe a couple have made it on my feed in the nearly four years I’ve had an account. This isn’t to say that I am humble. Not in the least. Like most of us, I lean more towards a humble-brag; I lure people to my posts with beautiful pictures and witty captions in the hopes that they will see something, some truth about my soul; that it is deep and wisened. On average, only about thirty people ever indulge me of this. To them I say, thank you (and if I were posting this, that thank you would, of course, come with emoji prayer hands).
What I do know though, is this: that as humans we are irresistibly driven to connect and to be seen. In a way, nudes fall right into this category: Self-promotion for validation and connection. But, I also know that it goes beyond a sense of needing to be seen, to one of needing to be freed.
Writer Lara Sterling encapsulates this feeling quite aptly in her article on why she’s a nudist. As she writes, “It’s about reveling in the destruction of one of our most basic social rules: that one must always be clothed.”
And so it seems that I too am straggling the line between permission and wildness. Indulging myself — nay, daring myself to push my comfort zone in order to feel more alive, more in charge. That seems to be, at least, how I felt when I posted another characteristic back-side nude last February, quoting the feminist writer and Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“When women hear those words [wild and woman], an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghosty from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her; we know she belongs to us and we to her.”
So it is, that in all of this there is some truth in wanting to be wild and free. But also in being seen and indulgent. And in trying to ask myself, is it right? before posting yet another back-side nude, I often have to brush the question aside, reminding myself that dwelling too long on whether or not to post yet another nude turns the matter into something much more calculated that it ought to be.
It ought to just be free. And so it goes, with that I post my buttocks for the world to see.
This article was written by Sarah Howell.
For more articles on love and lust, check out The Pleasurey.
