Daily Archives: April 17, 2015

Naked Selfies? Over 25? Why?

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I’m not remotely shy to having my photograph taken while nude in the right circumstances.

Spencer Tunick? Yes, I was there for his Amsterdam shoot, along with the cousin with whom I discovered naturism. That was my birthday present that year! 🙂 And what a wonderful birthday present it was.

AMS01-TUNICK-AMSTERDAM-0603-03

Yep! There I am, and I can pick out my cousin and our respective husbands immediately too. Where am I? In the photograph. Look!

So yes, I’ll have my naked photograph taken, in an Amsterdam car park, for Tunick, or on the beach when my husband snaps us on holiday. I’ll even allow my photograph to be taken by others…if the circumstances are right, i.e. a birthday party at someone’s apartment while we’re on holiday. They’re naturist, we’re naturist and I’m pretty confident these photos won’t end up on the net. If I have any doubts about the intentions of the photographer, someone I don’t knowe well, for example, I’ll throw on a sarong. After all, the photographer isn’t going to be able to say ‘but I wanted a photo of you naked‘. So snap away…it’s a nice sarong.

Maybe it’s because I’m naturist and used to being photographed nude on holiday that I don’t feel any need to take naked selfies, a phenomenon of the digital smartphone and social media age.

But many men and women do. It’s something we’ve regularly blogged on in the past, and in a sense I’m now rehashing old ground here.

I sort of get that the younger generation might want to do it at a time of developing self-awareness and sexuality. And innocence and foolishness too – who knows where the photos might turn up in the future? At a period where relationships can be fleeting, there’s no ensuring that these may be shared online by a current boyfriend/girlfriend or, worse, as an act of revenge porn when that relationship ends. Of course you got your ex-partners absolute guarantee that they’d deleted everything! Yes, their word is their bond!

What I don’t get so much is older people’s growing fascination with them and desire to take them. Why? They’re mature enough to work out the implications of doing such a self-portrait, surely?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with older people featuring in nude photography, of course. I quite like the idea of sitting in my chair, aged 80, wracked with arthritis and unable to get about much but being able to fondly reminisce on my younger, less wrinkled, more active naked self.

Of course, who knows, by that stage maybe every citizen of the world will be expected to turn up every couple of years to have a naked portrait taken of them in the interests of ‘state security’, with the globe’s entire population nude database online. Nudity normalised? We can look up our neighbours, friends, co-workers naked image online in ten seconds flat? Who knows?

Look at the following photos…

selfa selfb selfc selfd

 

All are of more mature ladies taken nude selfies. As I don’t know the history of how they’ve come to be on the net, the ladies themselves may not be aware they’re out there in cyberspace, I’ve opted to heavily blur the photographs to protect the ladies’ identities.

But it’s not just older ladies who are indulging in this…

selfiee selfief selfieg

 

Why? Yes, I can see a bit of a case for it being ‘hey, I’m 35-45-55 and still in good shape, I look after myself, I’m attractive to the opposite sex.’ Maybe if I needed to diet I might consider before & after photos, to see where I was and where I am, but other than that…..no, I don’t get it.

Are these men and women in the photos sending them to other men and women? Is it part of some modern dating ritual to which I’m not party? Yeah, divorce rates are rising, so there’s going to be a lot of unattached but looking people out there. But is a photo of your penis or your boobs really the way that the dating/mating ritual is conducted now?

It’s seriously something about which I have no framework of experience, and I’m baffled. I’d be delighted to know if any of you take naked selfies and, if you’re more mature, if you’re sending these to potential suitors. Most importantly, I would love to know your motivations for doing so.

Ella

 

 

Butts are out, boobs are in

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Instagram appears to have clarified what it regards as acceptable and unacceptable on the site.

Apparently photos of bare bottoms are out, but boobs (at least with a feeding child attached) are in.

lactavists

A small step forward…but Instagram, like Facebook, is still permitting graphically violent videos ‘for reasons that they sometimes raise awareness of an issue’.

So not that much of a step forward. My take on it is that I can live without photos of boobs if they sort out the graphically offensive videos first. While I support the idea of bare boobs on social media, on the basis that they aren’t offensive, it’s not something occupying any of the higher rungs of my ‘issues’ ladder.

Pookes

Second Life abbreviations

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The blog does get a lot of click-through readers via naturist blogs and websites. Many aren’t Second Life users.

We remain, first and foremost, a Second Life naturist blog, with the real life articles reflecting how things might work within the virtual world of Second Life.

I’ve become aware that some readers are confused by some of the shorthand that appears in some of the posts, so I thought it would be a good idea to list some of these, so that anyone who has chanced upon us in a search, or clicked-through from one of the many real life naturists sites we’re connected to, understands the acronyms.

SL = Second Life

RL = real life

LL = Linden Labs, the company that runs Second Life.

L$ or simply ‘lindens’ = Linden dollars, the unit of currency that exists within Second Life.

Avatar or avi = the virtual representation of yourself within the game.

‘In World’ or ‘on the grid’= being in Second Life

MP or Marketplace : an online repository where designers and builders sell their wares. You can click directly to it via this link.

TP or tp = teleport, the capacity to move from one sim to another instantaneously. Think of Kirk and Spock going to the surface of a planet in Star Trek. Second Life teleporting is somewhat similar.

cyber = cybersex. While not within this blog’s remit, it is something referred to from time to time.

(Edited to add 20th April: SLex/slex = cybersex, too. Thanks to reader JTW for pointing this out. Ella)

SLN = Second Life Naturist, i.e. the blog you’re reading now.

Sim = an area of region designed in a certain manner, from a shopping mall to a naturist beach and anywhere in between.

pookes 12_001b

Pookes’ avi, or avatar, as represented on a sim within SL

All clear? Remember, if you do chance on some abbreviation you don’t understand, ask! We’ll explain what we mean.

If I remember I’ll try to re-post this blog entry on a semi-regular basis for the benefit of new readers.

So if you now read about Ella or myself spending some L$ on our avi on the MP before going to check out a new sim but tp’ing out because it was just a cyber place, after which we logged out and went back to RL….you know what we’re talking about, right? 🙂

 

Pookes

How porn affects people’s attitudes to a normal sexual relationship: SL leading the way in respect of pubic hair?

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Only marginally connected to naturism, and I’ll come to that in a moment.

Anne Robinson is a veteran UK journalist, and her name will be known to any UK readers. Recently, a young feminist, Grace Campbell, asked Ms. Robinson, who had never encountered porn before, to look at it and give a reaction to how people are portrayed as well as how else it may be affecting sexual relationships. What they watched together is quite disturbing in some aspects, although it’s good to see that Ms. Robinson’s acerbic tongue is still well to the fore.

Ms. Campbell is absolutely correct about online porn now appearing to drive the expectations in real life sexual relationships with ‘choking’ and anal sex now expected to be part of ‘the deal’. From a personal perspective, yuck! to both, but these are elements that wouldn’t really fall within the remit of SLN. Make your own judgements on those.

The naturist element of the video is where pubic hair is concerned, because pubic hair is very much a ‘thing’ within naturism. It’s discussed from the 2’28” mark, with Ms. Robinson acidly saying that ‘obviously no one in porn has any pubic hair’. Ms. Campbell reports that 66% of females in the 20-24 age group had totally or partially removed their pubic hair in the past month!

She goes on to say that if it’s a woman’s choice, that’s fine, but if partners say things like ‘it’s dirty’ or ‘I won’t sleep with you unless you wax’, or -most amazingly of all- ‘women aren’t supposed to have hair down there’ then ‘porn is having a very negative impact on the way men react to women’s bodies‘.

hair-down-there

 

Quite clearly I have my own personal perspective on this, as anyone who reads the blog will be aware. It’s natural, it’s there for a reason, it’s more than fine. I’m not advocating that everyone is required to have it, but I would be advocating that everyone has a right to make their own choices about it, not because porn infers we must all be bare down there.

Within RL naturism I remain in a minority by ‘keeping it natural’ and I’m baffled that naturists, who are fairly stern in their disapproval of equating nudity with sex should therefore be at the forefront of following what is a porn trope by almost totally, as a community, following that porn trend. We pride ourselves on our alt-lifestyle choices by being naturists. Why should we then feel that we must look like something from a porn movie?

Happily, with SL, the situation is somewhat different. Six years ago, in a drive to make my avatar as realistic as possible when I started my SL, I bought pubic hair for my avatar to wear. I was, I felt at the time, almost alone in that. Indeed, there were sims I would visit when I definitely was alone in that.  In recent times, and certainly over the past year, I’ve found that more and more female avatars are now wearing pubic hair. Why? As it’s not yet at the forefront of RL fashion, it seems as though it’s a sub-conscious trend that is probably reflecting the RL female’s personal grooming habits. What’s more, it seems to add to what I -and probably many other female avatars- would see as part of an adult woman’s femininity, rather than the Barbie/little girl look that probably remains the majority fashion. SL may be leading the way in this respect. Certainly I don’t expect to see wall to wall carpeting, to coin a phrase, in SL anytime soon. Nor indeed do I expect to see it in RL naturism in huge numbers when I go on holiday. But things are changing. I’m afraid that the 20-24 male age group, if Ms. Campbell’s thought provoking video is anything to go by, are in for a shock.

Ella

 

 

 

The ‘Nude’ Beach

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What does the phrase nude beach suggest to you? Here in Europe, it means just that, nude people, not semi nude people. In north America it seems that the term ‘nude beach’ is much more readily applied to what we in Europe would call a ‘topless beach’, i.e. boobs out, ladies, but bottom half covered. And in Europe that sort of means damned near every beach going, and no real funny looks or the threat of a law enforcement officer pressing charges. At worst you’d get a quiet word about ‘behaviour’ from a policeman who, mark my words, will know much less about the law and nudity than you do, if you’re a card carrying naturist.

Trust me, I’ve had that conversation. Not, I should add, on a beach, but at a dinner party, where our naturism came up in conversation and another guest, a quite senior policeman, tried to bore me with his ‘legal’ take on it, much of it false. Either he didn’t know the legal position in the UK, or was working on the assumption that I wouldn’t know my rights. In this, he was quite wrong. I dismantled his arguments one by one and that bit of conversation ended with the arrival of the cheese board and the hostess declaring we should all head off to the beach and ‘get out t*ts out!’.

Well, exactly. It’s not illegal. Aspects of law relating to public nudity can be found on the Crown Prosecution Services’s website.

What is key is that ‘A naturist whose intention is limited to going about his or her lawful business naked will not be guilty of this offence.‘ Note that this isn’t just about boobs, it pertains to bottom-half nudity too!

Self-evidentially, waggling your willy at the church/school gates won’t be regarded as ‘lawful’, whether you claim to be a naturist or not, as Steve Gough, the Naked Rambler, continues to find out to his cost, and to my mind to the detriment of UK naturists, whose reputation is tarnished by his actions of being naked everywhere.

That’s my personal view. I know some UK naturists support Mr. Gough’s approach.

former-royal-marine-stephengough-won't-stop-taking-his-clothes-off-in-public-theflyingtortoise-005

Stephen Gough, the Naked Rambler

There’s a cultural difference between Europe and north America, then, and this can be seen in articles that pose the question if speedoes are acceptable nude(!) beach wear or articles which highlight toplessness in America as progressive, while Europe’s several decades past that analysis of the situation. Quite clearly, many Americans do understand what naturism is: it has been reported that in 2010 there were 260 naturist clubs in the USA, double that of a decade previously.

The Naturist Society reports that 1 in 4 Americans, while they may not necessarily classify themselves as naturist, have at least skinny-dipped in mixed company. That’s 70m people.

Within Second Life, the same conventions regarding what constitutes a nude beach carry over from real life.

On my travels around the grid I’ve often encountered places where no one is nude. Some females may be topless, but bikini briefs and, yes indeed, speedoes are the order of the day for everyone.

I can well understand the conventions within real life, where nude=topless in many RL locations. Within SL, however, I don’t understand the theory behind it. The word nude is defined here. ‘Wearing no clothes’. That’s right, no clothes.

If SL is a world where people have the opportunity to do things, virtually, that they can’t do in RL, be it a parachute jump, flying a plane, captaining a yacht, all manner of sexual activity and, yes indeed, visiting a nude beach, then should your avatar be pushing that boundary or your own, learned responses to social convention and lack of opportunity in the real world?

If you are going to visit a nude beach in SL, I’d encourage you to slip off those bikini briefs and speedoes and actually embrace full, virtual nudity.

If you teleport into a sim described as a ‘nude’ beach, accompanied by a sign at the tp point that says ‘swimwear may be worn’, do yourself a favour and tp out again.

Ella