Self Acceptance

There comes a point in time when you start to think it’s time to say something about something, and there is absolutely no reason why you should postpone it any longer. And the time is now.

Yes I know about Xia Xue, and of course I’ve certainly seen the gif animation she made with that fateful photograph that got me all the (then) unwanted article in the Straits Times. A friend sms-ed me while I was in Bali (OMG, XX made your tits move!). I’d been freezing my ass off on the side of some mountain then, in clothes more suited for the lower altitudes of Indonesia, so I didn’t give it much thought. Although I must say I did feel offended at what I thought it meant.

Coming back to Singapore, my sister showed me the… dissertation of the shape of my breasts (and what can be done to improve it), and I was quite pissed until I saw the .gif. I couldn’t help it, but I cracked up laughing. Even Tori laughed when she saw it again. She’s my sister, and sure as hell she loves me to bits and respects me in her own way and in ways she thinks I deserves- but she laughed.

There and then I though, what the hell.

Men are always making fun of their penises. They do the weirdest things to it. Look at the shit on the web, on top of sticking it in about a zillion places that it shouldn’t be in (and taking photographs of their cocks), they stick plastic eyes and direct puppet shows with them, they sing songs about how their dicks let them down after several pints, and every one that’s grown up or is growing up in the age of internet pornography kinda finds it sick, and maybe a little disgusting, but still… somewhere in them, they also admit, it’s actually pretty funny.

Women will always look at another girl and target the things about her that aren’t perfect. Sometimes even their best-buddies. We may not say anything, we may even praise the bits about them that are lovely that day, but secretly, we’d note all the not-so-nice things about them. (She’s gained a bit of weight, she’s got an acne outbreak, she looks exhausted, etc). I personally wouldn’t bother to critique another woman’s body (what bothers me mostly is attitude) and I’ve seen girls the size of Selina Tan pose naked for the camera, and you know what? I don’t think, god-damn she’s fat. I think, hey cool, she’s having fun and she’s pretty brave for daring to strip, despite her size.

Look, goddamn it. There’s something seriously wrong with this world and it’s a pity so many don’t see it. Me stripping doesn’t cause several million teenage girls to cultivate eating disorders, it never caused depression in anyone, it never resulted in any one killing themselves by living of three peas a day or something like that.

You want to know what I think about internet nudity? I think it’s mostly a good thing (Annoying XXX pop-ups aside). And here’s why:

Most people discover sex at about age 11. On an average, people start wanking of at the dawn of adolescence. You can attempt to hide how intercourse is performed by say, keeping the kid under lock and key with the only piece of literature he’s ever to read being the Bible. And trust me, he will find a way to get off on that. People have been wanking since the dawn of time, and there’s nothing any moral zealot can do to stop it, and there’s nothing wrong with it. The problem comes when the individual develops and addiction. But hey, the Marquis de Sade didn’t need the internet to become the deprave sexual maniac that he’d eventually turned into (or that’s what they like us to believe these days anyway).

Internet nudity is a mostly paranoid or progressive economy phenomenon. You have to be significantly technologically developed in order to have the internet, and someone you know definitely has to have to have a digital card-reader or a scanner to participate in the whole affair. If you look at the people producing internet porn (or nudity, or whatever) they are mostly from first-world countries. So in most cases, people who are on either end are not being exploited.

In fact, better they produce internet porn then prostitute themselves. No one ever got a fucking disease from jilling down.

Yes, there are some sites that cater to pedophiles. God knows where they got the little children to strip for them, and yes, those sites are dangerous. But pedophilia is so much more complex then just people wanting to fuck kids. I know a guy who gets off solely from reading literature concerning pre-adolescence. He’s married, and as far as I know, wouldn’t fuck a kid, ever. He simply finds it a turn on to be taken back in time to that point in his life where he was an adolescent too, and to relieve the passionate moments he had had, then. In my opinion, as long as he’s continuously aware of the fact that he isn’t 14 any longer and that it would be a terrible thing for him to even attempt anything with someone that young, then he can feel as good as he wants to with his fantasies. We all have our moments when we wish we were ignorant pre-teens again, where every sensation was new and pure and completely exciting. But we also have to acknowledge reality.

I digress. At any rate, pedophilia will happen, internet or no internet. It is bad when a kid gets screwed, really, really bad. Period. But that’s a sick part of humanity that exist, that I do not condone, but that also only constitutes a small fraction of internet nudity and pornography.

‘Everyone knows that the internet is changing our lives … However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were all these people 15 years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, “You know I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there’s simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we’ll just have to sit here and watch Falcon crest again.’ –, Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa-puffs.

So there you have it. Most internet nudity and porn is created by people who want to do it anyway, because 1) it’s an ego trip (I agree with this) 2) It turns them on thinking about other people masturbating to their pictures (this does nothing for me) 3) Stripping is fun, Suicidegirls definitely beats watching re-runs of Alley McB. (for quite a lot of people it would seem, considering the amount of naked people on the web) The list could go on, but there you have it, some reasons as to why the people that do it, do it. And they aren’t reasons that are bad. Like I said, my stripping didn’t cause anyone any problems, except for those that make it theirs.

Stripping never condemned anyone. And in my opinion, condemnation and the fear of it is the biggest killer in first-world societies. It’s been proven. Stress is the biggest murderer in developed nations, isn’t it. If we weren’t afraid of being condemned by society as failures, we wouldn’t be so stressed about everything, from money to getting married to our funerary arrangements (you better burn me a Mercedes when I’m gone ah, Ah Boy). Freakishly, that’s actually mentioned in Revelations (12:15 - Condemnation as tool of death, not the necessity of burning paper cars).

But I’m no priestess; but hey, Singapore is about religious tolerance, isn’t it? So you better tolerate mine, because I’m sure as hell tolerating yours. Enough with the brochures on telling people at Bugis Junction that we are all going to hell, Unless.

Anyway, just leave the people who are proud of their faces and of their bodies alone. You’re not expected to make love to them, you’re not even expected to look at them, so why look and get sick and slap them like it’s their fault.

I know a number of girls that strip for the camera, and they are some of the most nicest, coolest girls you’d ever meet. Nurses, Primary school teachers, Military air-craft pilots, SIA cabin crew. Your Grandmother. I’m just kidding. For heaven’s sake, the digital camera is so popular for many reasons, and nude photography is one of those things. And it’s not a reason, it is one of THE reasons.

‘…people who aren’t obsessing about internet porn are missing the point, because that sleaze was the catalyst for everything else. I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society, but I suspect it’s done wonders for the advancement of computer technology.’ –Klosterman.

I say, if it gives someone else pleasure, and doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s well-being, then who are you to deny her that? In my opinion, Suicidegirls (I use the site so often because I don’t know any other company that has got the philosophy of the joy of nudity and the appreciation of the spunky modern uninhibited female down to pat so well as they have) has probably done much, much, much more good for hundreds of girls out there in terms of self-confidence and self- appreciation then any stupid school program about…What The Hell, I don’t recall anything in school that cultivated self-confidence. In fact, when I was in School, they mostly like to tell us how we had the fashion sense of slobs (and we’d say how they had the fashion sense of wedgied nerds) and how some of us would never amount to anything –some of my teachers did, anyway.

You know what, forced morality never made me happy. There are a whole lot of people that live according to some impossible bunch of laws on how to behave, and they aren’t happy. There are a whole lot of people thinking they are doing the moral thing by blowing up clubs and sky-scrapers and people’s homes, and they’re dead.

xoxox