I’m Getting Naked for My Art

Why I’m pushing past my comfort zone

I want to sell nude photographs of myself. There. I said it.

That will probably come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with my work. I want to walk around without a bra on, DDs swaying. I want to take off my shirt when I’m doing yard work in the hot weather, just like any guy would do. I want to undress in a locker room or even at the doctor’s office without hesitation or reluctance.

As I’ve written before, it’s not exhibitionism. In fact, it has very, very little to do with sex, at all.

It’s more about how much I want to be seen. How much I want to define how I look and what I’m allowed to reveal without it being censored or labeled as obscene. How much I want to just be me, a sexual being, yes, but also just a woman, also just a human being.

No more stigmas about breasts. No more insecurities about my stretch marks. No more worrying about how people will perceive or judge me.

Just me, in this body that was given to me by the Creative Source.

So of course, it’s only natural that I want to use my body as a canvas for my creativity. I have been taking self-portraits for the past six years, first as a way to try to see myself more clearly, beyond my body dysmorphic disorder, and later as an expression of my creativity. I want to show what it feels like to be in this body. I want to celebrate the human body, and yes, specifically, the female form.

I want to take control of the narrative around who I am, reclaiming it from a society that prefers to define women and their stories in its own terms.

I don’t question my desire around this any longer. There are countless artists and photographers that I know who sell photos and paintings of their naked bodies as fine art and I find that to be a genuinely authentic, beautiful expression of their creative energy.

But it’s interesting to me that the few times I’ve gone to post a nude photo on Twitter, I have a momentary fear that it will be misinterpreted as “attention seeking” or “pandering,” or just being inauthentically provocative.

Further, every time I ponder whether or not to sell a nude photograph on my website (which I did for the first time, recently!), I wonder if people will assume it’s pornography because I write a sex column. And also, who cares if I did want to sell pornographic images? Is that shameful? (That’s a hypothetical question. The answer is a strong and emphatic NO.)

The politics of selling nude self-portraits brings me back to the very reason why I create them: because I’m tired of other people defining who I am, how I should present myself, and how I should behave as a woman.

I feel so triumphant and powerful in the creation of these portraits, but presenting them and selling them feels like having to walk through a second minefield after I’ve just been lucky enough to get through the first one, unscathed.

Do I really have to do this again?

So much of this is the fault of a society that asks me to center my sexuality around others — other people’s pleasure, other people’s definition of shame, other people’s judgment.

Last summer, when I first began posting scantily-clad photographs of myself on Instagram, it was exhilarating. That was maybe the first time that I ever expressed myself sexually just for myself.

I’m sorry to say that I found myself in a damaging situation soon after that and during that time, the person with whom I was “involved” once asked me if I posted one of my sexy photos for him.

I felt my conditioning kicking in, reorienting myself around him. I knew my honest answer would hurt his feelings and I’d always been taught to put someone else’s feelings — especially a man’s — before my own. “Yes,” I told him. “A little.”

That was a lie. I had thought vaguely that he would find the photo sexy, but it wasn’t for him. Not even “a little.” It was for me.

I still post photos like that and I still do it just for me. (And if Instagram would allow it, I would take it so much further. Nipples everywhere, dammit!)

But why sell them? some ask.

This question really doesn’t mean anything to me. For me, this is part of my work in the world, part of my artistic expression. I’d create whether I received compensation for my creations or not, but like everyone else, I need to pay the bills, too, and like everyone else I do that by exchanging my work for money. It’s really that simple to me.

I left behind that damaging story that it’s somehow impure, selfish, or manipulative to exchange art for money. No one balks at buying a movie ticket or paying for a paperback — and that’s art. Further, no one would ask a business coach or lawyer or teacher to produce value but not charge for it.

I will always be on the front lines, championing the cause for writers, artists, photographers, dancers, and other creatives to insist on compensation for their work.

But nude photos aren’t art, some say. They’re porn. Some would even argue that taking payment for nude photographs makes me a sex worker.

My answer to that is that I honestly couldn’t care less. I don’t care if you think my naked body is pornographic and I definitely don’t care if you think I’m a sex worker. Though I have some very specific issues with certain types of pornography, in general, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with porn. I also refuse to buy into the stigma around sex work. I’ve thought about working in that industry many times, as I’d guess many women do, and if I had found the right outlet at those times, I probably would have done it.

Part of me, I confess, wants to add all of this as a disclaimer on my website, on every receipt, on every social media post. Something of an attempt to explain how I feel so I don’t have to answer all the questions.

But in reality, what I’d really like is to not live in a world that asks all those questions. A world that doesn’t spend that much time fussing over the moral implications surrounding my decisions around my own body.

Who owns my body?

I once had an argument with a Medium reader about this several months ago. He said once a woman shares an image of her naked body, she’s made herself a public commodity.

Interesting, I thought. Does that work for men, too? If a man posted a photo of himself on social media without a shirt on, does that mean we can judge him, shame him, critique his body, use the photo for our own purposes, sell it, and/or distribute it on the internet (or anywhere else) without permission?

No, you say? Again…interesting.

It’s because a woman’s body is sexual, he went on, and a man’s is not.

Really? Is that so? There’s nothing sexual about a man’s body but a woman’s body is only sexual? And I guess that’s where we take that leap in “logic” to judge a photo of a naked woman as obscene, and (another “logical” leap here) therefore it must be regulated?

I have seen these arguments about nude photos of women all the time in the past year. In fact, I’m so passionate about this subject that I’ve been working on an article about it for some time now…but I’m waiting for my emotions to settle down so I can ensure I fully express the points I want to make.

It only convinces me more that nude self-portraiture is one of the next steps I want to take with my art. It’s not just about creativity, not just about my need to express myself. It’s my act of defiance. It’s my determination to define myself, my choices, my life, my body. It’s my bid for sovereignty.

Every time I worry about selling a nude self-portrait, this is what I tell myself.

I get to decide what I do with my body, my image, my sexuality. Without having to explain myself.

That’s the beginning and end of the story — not just for me, but for all women.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

Author’s note: If you’d like to see this article featuring my own self-portraits, you can find that here.

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