The naked truth

A thing I enjoy as I wander the web is to look at the nude photos that women attach to their webpages. (Well, duh, don't all guys, I hear you saying. But I'm not talking about trawling the web for wankfodder – there are sites for that, and like most webwalkers I know where they are.)
It shouldn't surprise me that people want to share their photos – after all, some share what is so personal that you doubt they even tell it to their closest friends (and yet will give it away to the whole world) – but it does a little.
Often, the nudists (if I can call them that) have a better cut of blog than normal. This one has an astonishing amount of detail about a woman who is, after all, only in her early 20s, but she's interesting enough (her photos are a nude set she did for a lesbian porn mag - *whispers* yes mum, they do). This is a woman whose good heart and openness touched me and whose blog I read every week. Still, she's prepared to show you her tits, which I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or a bad thing in a person.
I am not leering at gorgeous women. People who post their pics to the web are rarely gorgeous, nor are they clever enough with the camera or imaging software to make themselves so ("gorgeous" in its narrowest sense). I'm interested in the body, of course, more so recently. But I'm far more interested in the vulnerability and forthrightness of these women (men would not interest me – because I have no means of understanding what I'm looking at when I look at men, no cognitive machinery, rather than for any reason of their not being beautiful). I'm not interested in nude photos of the famous, nor in women getting their kit off in a film (who can really get excited at that sterilised sexuality?)
Germaine Greer, no stranger to going nuddy herself, has written a book, with a TV documentary to go with it, about the nude boy in art. The programme was interesting enough (the book, though, I think I'll skip - Dr Greer does a lovely op-ed but over the length of a book she begins to resemble the aunt who doesn't get the hint on Boxing Day) but I wonder whether it's true that classical art sexualised the boy. Can people not be beautiful without instilling the urge to fuck them? Or am I just being all When Harry met Sally about it, and are we consumed with lust when confronted by the shapely?

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:06 am