Love Thy Nude: Nudes May be the Currency of Love, but be Wary of What You're Buying Into
*Article from Lexington Line’s Spring/Summer 2022 Issue, pages 8-11
Check out the full issue here
Bella says her soul left her body the day her nudes were leaked. The night before, numerous parts of New Jersey had lost power. One of Bella’s friends still had the lights on, so she and a group of friends playfully decided to shower together. One friend snapped a few pics, thinking it was a funny moment. The next day, one of their male friends was browsing her friend’s phone and sent the pictures to himself—then shared them with the whole football team, which included Bella’s brother.
“One girl called me a homewrecker because her boyfriend had the photo saved in his phone and that caused issues for them,” Bella remembers. The release of the photos caused extreme anxiety.
“I was so insecure about everybody seeing my body, and I think it created a negative mindset because I was tearing apart the photo in my head like ‘omg I look terrible, I wish people didn’t see that,’” she says.
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Even years later, Bella still has a lot of anxiety over the couple of nudes she has sent her boyfriend. She has a fear deep down that if they break up one day, he’ll leak them, even though she completely trusts him right now.
Nudes are no new concept to Gen Z. We’ve grown up with Snapchat and iPhones, and taking intimate photos has been a rite of passage in dating. In Euphoria, Rue (Zendaya) calls nudes “the currency of love.” And she's not wrong. Nudes can be a way of connecting with a partner, or even connecting with yourself. But there is a darkness around nude culture, and it’s something one should be aware of before sending anyone their personal photos.
Leah’s ex-boyfriend Dylan leaked her nudes not long after they broke up. When they were together, he had expressed interest in taking videos and photos.
“Even though he knew that I wasn’t that confident in my body, I did things to mainly make him happy,” she says.
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She wasn’t quite comfortable with it, but they made a pact to never share photos if they broke up. They did break up, and a week later, Leah was on her way to her cousin’s house. While she was in the car, she got a snapchat from a familiar name from her ex’s town.
“It was one of my nudes,” she says. “It was sent without any context, but I knew my ex was the only one who had them.”
She tried to confront Dylan, she says, but this only made things worse. He continued to share her photos until he eventually grew tired of it. But Leah is still traumatized knowing her photos could still be out there.
Salty ex-boyfriends aren’t the only ones leaking nudes. In Ryan’s case, her best friend’s boyfriend was the traitor.
“A year ago, my best friend told me that her boyfriend got on her phone, sent them to himself, and claimed he was going to sell them to ‘buy her a birthday gift.’”
The photos Ryan’s BFF had weren’t explicitly sexual; they were just pictures of friends making each other laugh. When Ryan found out her best friend’s boyfriend did this to her, she tried to go to the police. But since there wasn’t enough “evidence,” she was forced to live with his disgusting actions. It’s been years now, and the best friend never dumped the boyfriend, so it’s safe to understand that these two had a horrible falling out.
All Clara remembers are the whispers and the threatening messages she received after her photos were leaked. It felt as if the worst thing that could ever happen to her became true, and she wasn’t quite sure how to live with it.
“When a private part of myself became very public in my adolescence, it felt like everyone around me knew my darkest secret,” she says.
She told her mother she didn’t want to live anymore, was sent to an inpatient unit for over a week, and continued intensive therapy for a while after.
“I don’t believe that I genuinely wanted to end my life, but I saw that as a better option compared to the terror that had become my high school,” she says. “But, alas, I had to return.”
After a while, when she was able to graduate from the school that hosted all of her trauma, it helped her to move on.
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The world can feel dark when your private photos are made public. It’s especially hard for women because of a double standard that exists when it comes to taking nude photos.
Kaleb is just one example of a man whose experience greatly differed from a woman’s. He had been talking to Maya for a couple weeks before Maya decided to release his photos. She claimed that she thought Kaleb was flirting with other girls, and her anger caused her to betray him.
Kaleb found out because he was in a group chat where the photo was being sent around. As opposed to the shaming that Clara or Leah faced, Kaleb was praised for it. They all were “surprised” by him and had very positive reactions. Of course, there were a couple of hurtful replies, but they didn’t overpower the praise. He stopped sending pictures for a year or so, and then cut it out completely, but not because he was traumatized. “Honestly, I was obviously pretty hurt, and struggled with trust for a while,” Kaleb tells me. “I stopped sending pictures for a year or so. Since then, I’ve stopped ever sending pictures but that was because of my faith. I’m now a minister.”
This may sound surprising, but the leaking of one’s nudes can actually be a good thing, but that’s just the society we live in today. Even though these women have faced a lot of trouble around their nudes, it’s not like this for everyone.
Violet loves their body. And when I say love, I mean love. They love being nude. But part of the reason for this love is because of their love for art. They told me about “viewing the body as an art form itself” and how “it can be seen as the hand or a nipple, and it should both be seen the same, they can be used to convey different things.”
For Violet, who doesn’t like to focus on their gender, the hard part is when they feel they are being gendered. Violet is comfortable with their body, except when they feel they’re being labeled based on what they were born with.
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Some women are able to empower themselves through the experience of having their nudes leaked. Some feel it’s easy to brush it off their shoulder and move on. Lydia was talking to a boy who thought it would be “cool” to leak her nudes. She found out when the boy’s friend told her she has a “nice ass” while she was walking to class. She immediately confronted the boy. She said that she “told the kid he was a loser and shouldn’t do that.” Now, a few years later, she has found that nudes can be a key to intimacy in relationships.
“[They have helped me learn and grow to love my body and to see how beautiful it is,” she says. “So when I send [my boyfriend] nudes, it’s because I was feeling myself and in love with the way I looked.”
In 2020, novelist Diana Spechler published a New York Times article about the role nudes played in the pandemic.
“At the time, trading photos was all there was,” she told me in a phone interview. Sending photos actually helped people stay connected during the lockdown, not only with partners, but with themselves.
“It’s a way for some people to feel sexy, to feel connected to their sexuality,” she says.
Reagan loved taking nudes as a way to connect with herself. She started sending them to please an older man she was talking to. But over time, she realized, “it made me come to terms with a lot of insecurities about my body and accept it for what it is.”
“There were times I’d dress up in lingerie to take pictures, and it would lead to me making myself dinner and enjoying time with myself,” she says.
While taking nudes is typically seen as a way to connect with a partner, Reagan suggests nudity can really help us with body positivity.
“Now that I’m older, I’ve accepted my body for all the curves, scars, stretch marks, and hairs,” she says.
Most men and women struggle with body image to some degree, so if we can take nudes to appreciate ourselves, what’s the harm?
The best advice, Spechler says, is to exercise caution—“but still live your life.”