A little while ago I wrote a blog post about clothes and not wearing any. In that post I inserted a small nudist image of myself that I took on my vacation in England. I stored that image on Photobucket.com, a place that usually is quite good about storing images with undressed people. However, when I looked at the blog post a day later, the image was gone. It was replaced by a placeholder stating that the image was removed as it offended against Photobucket’s regulations and national laws.
The offending image in question is this one (original size too):
(obviously no longer hosted on Photobucket)
As you see, there’s nothing explicit or offending in it (at least, I think so). The interesting bit is that Photobucket doesn’t have any qualms about hosting a picture that shows a woman with full frontal nudity:
(Image linked directly from Photobucket, same image, original size as well.)
Is it really so horrible and offending to look at a nude man that ‘national law’ makes them take down that picture? Or is this more something that Photobucket themselves enforce without being honest about it? I can imagine that there are more men working there than women, and most of them probably aren’t nudist or naturist, nor understanding of that. Am I wrong in assuming that they’d rather see a naked woman than a naked man, just because the emphasis is on ‘naked’? Probably not.
My picture does not show child-porn, it’s not explicit in any sexual way. I’m simply leaning on a wall and look out over the area. And I’m wearing no clothes. In the other picture a woman is walking over a beach and carries a surf board. And she is wearing no clothes.
I dare state that accepted nudity would eliminate this discriminatory problem. After all, nude is nude, regardless if it concerns a man or a woman. As long as nudity is considered something to be secretive about, the general public will never be educated and nudism will never become a normal (accepted) thing.
It’s too bad that the definition of norms always rests with a majority. After all, a majority can mean that all the fools are on one side…