You know that feeling where you catch sight of yourself half dressed in the mirror and you realise that, despite all the forces in the world telling you to hate yourself, you look really fit? In that moment the obvious thing to do is to reach for your phone and snap a picture immortalising the depressingly unusual feeling of ‘I like myself’.
Sometimes it’s a flattering a hotel room mirror, other times you’ve picked up some tan lines. Whatever the cause, these moments where you fall in love with your own body and are able to step outside of insecurity and see yourself for something great, are worth celebrating.
According to research, nine out of 10 millennial women have taken naked photos of themselves on their phones. The assumption is often that sending nudes is foreplay, but in my experience those nudes aren’t always sexual, and they’re certainly not always taken to titillate a romantic partner.
I’ve got a gallery of nude and semi nude pictures of myself on my phone. Most of which I’ve never felt the need to send to my husband. But that’s not to suggest that they’re unseen by human eyes. Very often I will send said pictures to my friends, and they’ll send me similar ones in a totally non-sexual exchange. Why? For the same reason that I post pictures of my newly painted kitchen on Instagram. Because I want to show it off.
The assumption is that sending nudes (and most sexual activity in general) is about women doing something performative to please a man But that’s just not the case. Women are just as sexual as men – and anyway in the case of taking nude photos it can be just as much about the artistry of the photography as anything sexual. The vast majority of the nudes I’ve taken have been for myself, and if I’ve sent them to anyone it has been to a female friend I have a platonic relationship with.
We live in a culture of photo sharing – once upon a time it was 450 photos from a single night out, painstakingly uploaded to an album on Facebook. Now it’s more likely to be a few carefully chosen slides on Instagram, edited so that they could almost be professional. The technology and skill level might have changed but the principle remains the same. We like sharing pictures of things that we’re proud of.
It’s odd that the idea of a man painting or photographing a nude woman is artistic and creative, but a woman photographing herself naked has to be for the gratification of another person. There's nothing wrong with your nudes being designed to arouse, but they don't have to be.
‘I just want someone to see how nice I look and how pretty the picture is’ says one 28-year-old I speak to. ‘I know that I can’t put nudes on Instagram because they hate nipples and I don’t think my work would be wild about it, but it seems unfair that I can’t use really nice pictures of me because I haven’t got any clothes on. So I send them to my friends.’
You might assume that the perk of being in a relationship is that you always have someone to send nudes to. But honestly when you’ve been with your partner for a long time and they see you naked literally every day, it’s a bit unreasonable to expect them to be mind blown at quite a small picture of what they see every day in real life.
There’s nothing wrong with sending a picture to someone who is going to masturbate over it, or sending it to your boyfriend of 10 years and wanting him to make a fuss. But honestly if you’ve got beautiful lighting, pretty lingerie and your hair looks just right, it’s often more fun to share it with a platonic friend who is going to appreciate the entire composition.
READ MORE:
Famous Or Not, Women Should Feel Free To Take Nudes Without Fearing Hackers