Have a Happy Nude Year!

Nude Yoga

Commenter:

The images inspired me to embrace me! Their authenticity - stark beauty/ straight up nakedness - allowed me to connect with ME in a way that a lot of images create the experience of comparison for me. I saw these images and thought they were beautiful! The female body is BEAUTIFUL! Thank-you for sharing these intimate images and allowing me to get a step closer to embracing myself for ME!! xo

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More Naked Yoga

Thought-Provoking Nude Photos That Challenge Conventional Ideas About Attractiveness

The media would have us believe that “attractive” and “unattractive” are fixed categories, and that all of humanity can be neatly sorted into one or the other. In practice, of course, beauty isn’t even a continuum; it is, as the cliché goes, in the eye of the beholder. And the images we see in mass culture of supposedly attractive people are made-up and coiffed and Photoshopped to the extent that they often barely resemble their subjects.

Gracie Hagen dramatizes the effects of these narrow, manipulated depictions of humanity in a brilliant, deceptively simple series of side-by-side nude portraits titled Illusions of the Body. “Most of us realize that the media displays only the prettiest photos of people, yet we compare ourselves to those images. We never get to see those photos juxtaposed against a picture of that same person looking unflattering,” Hagen writes. “That contrast would help a lot of body image issues we as a culture have.” See a selection of pictures from the series (spotted via Beautiful/Decay) below, and visit Hagen’s Tumblr to see the rest.

Full piece is here

Lessons from a Swedish co-ed sauna

I took two things away from my experience in Sweden: 1) women in America don’t see nearly enough normal, naked female bodies with which to compare themselves; 2) somewhere in their education, American men are taught that being naked equates the potential for sex.

I think a lot about behavior and how it’s formed. When we say it’s society’s fault that women feel ashamed of their bodies and men are pigs, who are we blaming? Society is us. It’s our own actions and behavior that perpetuate these ideals—and we are the ones who can change it.

What if women actually liked their bodies? What if men were taught in sex-ed that nudity doesn’t equal foreplay? What if neither sex was taught at an early age that a naked body was taboo? Would women’s near-constant quest to be more “physically attractive” cease? Would men’s ideas of acceptable sexual advances be curtailed? Would “asking for it” involve women actually asking men for sex instead of men assuming a low-cut top is a secret signal? I don’t know.

What I do know is that after four weeks of being naked in a Swedish co-ed sauna (excluding the American ogle-fest that was week three) I learned that it is possible to like my body, and for men to appreciate it without sexualizing it—two statements I never thought I’d hear myself say—which is really the saddest part of the story.

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