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25th June 2025 at 8:49 pm #21335
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19th June 2025 at 10:25 pm #21271
I’d been gradually losing interest in Twitter for a while and, when it became X, I decided to move on. I’d have left at some point in any case. I make less and less use of social media. Facebook is still ok for hearing about local events but pretty useless for keeping in touch with past real-life friends. The only reliable way to find their posts is to search for them, which would take ages if I wanted to see them all, so I just focus on people I have no longer have any other contact with. If Facebook is our only point of contact, I stick with it. Instagram is better for that, but fewer of my real-life friends use it. I used to really like Pinterest but it started bombarding me with messages about random images breaking their terms and conditions, all of which I’d collected from other Pinterest pages, and none of which were in the slightest bit risqué. I saw some discussion forum threads about what was happening (not just to me) and the conclusion was that they’d started using AI moderation. I deleted my account and I’m still a bit sad about it. Not sure what I think about Reddit. It’s useful and seemingly uncensored, but users can be quite grumpy if they disagree with you or don’t see the point of a question you’ve asked.
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19th June 2025 at 10:01 pm #21270
A few thoughts come to mind(!)
- Is she “doing the right thing” and integrating herself with the locals, or has she always been harbouring a secret desire to be topless in front of her colleagues?
- Some male colleagues would join her if the local men were topless, but others might be very embarrassed, especially any men who had always wondered what she would look like topless.
- How would female colleagues judge her? Look down on her because she was being shameless? Pity her because they thought they had better bodies than hers? (My wife is convinced that far more women than men look at her boobs instead of making eye contact.)
- Would the locals appreciate her effort to integrate, or would they see it as cultural appropriation?
- I wonder if the missionary organisation has rules about not “going native” when on an assignment. Could she be protesting about the rules? (And if so, into fantasy land, when she gets home, would The Committee make her show them exactly what she’d done to embarrass and annoy her colleagues?)
This is barely relevant, but I listened once to a radio play about when Sister Clare, who the Poor Clare nuns are named after, joined the Franciscans, who were all male monks up to that point. Their ritual for joining involved stripping naked and having their heads shaved. She did the ritual.The story went on to her friends finding her abandoned hair and clothes and dreading what had happened to her, but strangely I only remember the earlier part of the story!!
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17th June 2025 at 5:23 pm #21242
This newspaper article is interesting. The writer says “Nudity has a solid tradition in the performance arts context, and is anything but radical. But informed by social media, our contemporary visual habits confine the naked body to porn. If the body doesn’t belong to a cisgender man, it is an object to be censored and regulated. Seeing Holzinger on stage, however, we look at it as a weapon, a tool and sometimes a joke.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/17/berlin-florentina-holzinger-director-stageEd likes this
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17th June 2025 at 11:39 am #21238
It wouldn’t interest me. I might even find myself mentally tuning it out. (I know I’m oversensitive on this point, but – to me – big bold letters would feel like being shouted at. That’s not what I’m here for.) I saw a youtube video recently about a life drawing collective. The guy who ran it was also a poet, and he compared being physically naked for the drawing classes with being mentally naked when publicly reading his poetry. He liked the total exposure of doing both things. If you’re looking for total exposure by revealing your contact details as well as your body, I wonder if there are creative ways of doing that on other platforms. It’s not my thing, so I don’t know of any, but it might be worth investigating.
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25th June 2025 at 11:51 am #21328
He shouldn’t be surprised or concerned. The “Wild Man of the Woods” is an ancient folktale character. At least you weren’t a wolf. (I don’t mean that in a wolfist way. Some of my best friends are wolves.)
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16th June 2025 at 7:58 pm #21231
Of course, it depends on the context as well. I remember when my kids were younger we went to Bournemouth beach where toplessness is tolerated, or it was at the time. My oldest daughter was old enough to have her own opinions and didn’t bat an eyelid, but I imagine in the town centre she’d have pointed and loudly asked why someone hadn’t got dressed.
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16th June 2025 at 7:51 pm #21230
I think some people, maybe a lot of people, experience “embarrassment” as “outrage”, added to which, people deflect their own embarrassment by transferring it onto others. If I stood naked in the daytime on the bandstand in the town centre (I hope I’m not giving away one of my fantasies!) people would say “He can’t do that. My grandma/daughter/dog would be really embarrassed and that’s outrageous.
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13th June 2025 at 11:44 pm #21221
I blame mass production. I can’t buy cheap clothes from supermarkets because I’m overheight. My doctor thinks I’m condemned to an old-age full of illnesses because I’m overweight according to her definition, but I’m not overweight according to the supermarket clothes definition. I could be a lot fatter and still wear their clothes, but I’d need to be shorter. My liquid diet is overcaffienated and underhydrated. My garden is underflowered and overweeded. A friend once tried to explain that she was the wrong shape to wear a particular kind of dress. (I tried very hard to pay attention, honest!) Surely the dress was the wrong shape for her, not the other way round. When I’m naked, am I underdressed or overskinned? (I’m what a serious real pagan would call a “wannabe pagan”, and I like the word “skyclad”.)
Going back to a previous discussion, maybe some people are shocked by nakedness just because the skyclad person isn’t wearing the average amount of clothing, a tiny bit like the gutter press being “shocked” that a princess is too skinny or a TV presenter is too fat.
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12th June 2025 at 12:19 am #21170
Yes, I’m concerned that if someone sees me naked, they’ll think I’m a flasher, or at least they’ll react as if I’m a flasher. Despite naturism not being illegal, people do call the police if they see a naked man, and the police do investigate. I was surprised fairly recently to see a local newspaper report about police asking people to check their doorbell and dashboard camera footage because they’d had a report of a naked man wandering around late at night. It gave the impression they wanted to arrest him even though the report was so vague he clearly hadn’t caused any trouble. Even if he was then released without charge, it could lead to him being unable to get an Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service certificate signed off to work with vulnerable adults etc etc. That’s a different emphasis from another newspaper story where someone had reported seeing a naked woman seemingly tied to a lamp-post. On that occasion the police were trying to identify her, supposedly so that they could check on her welfare, but I wonder what being “identified” could mean for her future employment, especially as the police can be remarkably lax about giving too many details to the media.
Sorry about my uncharacteristic grumpiness. I’ll go for a naked wander around the garden to cheer myself up (and hope next door’s security camera is less invasive than it appears to be!)
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