It’s not bad to post nudes of yourself on the internet. There I said it.

I am a firm believer that nudity is not something that we have to keep private, save only for people we are romantically or sexually involved with, or inherently regard as sexual. Furthermore, even with respect to photos that are inherently sensual or sexual in nature, I still don’t believe that the world seeing us as sensual, sexual beings is a threat to our respectability, our humanity, or our professionalism.

Liora K Photography takes all my best nudes.

There. Now you’ve seen me naked.

How are you feeling?

I’m feeling pretty much the same. Actually, I feel closer to you, reader! You now know what the cool textural landscape of my armpit hair and stretch marks and scars from my breast reduction looks like up close, you can study the shape of the lumpy underside of them from where the surgeon rearranged all that breast tissue, you can even trace the lil squiggly vein that became visible on the bottom of one of them after my surgery.

How special!

You know what I’m not feeling now that you’ve seen me naked? Diminished or violated in any way. It turns out the two aren’t intrinsically connected!

I have been posting revealing photos of myself on the internet for years, and when I first started, I’ll admit it was scary! It’s insanely vulnerable, you have no idea if you’re going to face backlash, and you feel quite literally so effing exposed. But I immediately found that it became easier and more comfortable the more I did it. The more I shared of myself, and the more I tangibly saw that the world didn’t end when I did it, and the more I could focus on the positive things I was getting out of it instead of the Big Scary Regrets I was always told I would feel, the more free and powerful I felt.

I think there are a lot of reasons why sharing your body with the world can be incredibly valuable, but for some reason all we ever hear about is what the dangers, downsides, and terrible consequences of sharing your nudes on the internet are.

So let’s talk about some of the reasons why I think you should, if you want to, share your nudes with the world.

Seeing Bodies That Look Like Ours is Healing

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had someone comment on a photo of a client that I have shared and say something like, “Oh my god this is what my body looks like, I never see people with [insert feature here], it’s so amazing to see someone else with a body like this.”

If we rely on commercial representations of what bodies look like to determine our sense of what is normal, well, I think we all know how that ends.

The bodies that we are shown in most media represent an extremely narrow slice of the population. In fact, they barely represent them, given how edited and distorted and airbrushed those photos are. If we are going to rewrite our sense of what kinds of bodies are normal, we are going to have to share our own with each other.

When I was younger, I went through a pretty substantial phase of what I would now retrospectively describe as an eating disorder. It’s one that is extremely familiar to people my age and younger — orthorexia. This particular form of disordered eating involves an obsession with health and nutrition as the root of the neurosis, and it is often paired with an exercise obsession for a neat little package of absolutely garbage beliefs and behaviors masked as a commitment to health, fitness, and wellness. It’s a sneaky one because it’s pitched to us as a virtuous way of loving our bodies by caring for them, when in reality it’s just a barely-veiled toolset for disparaging and punishing them.

One of my most obsessive behaviors was scrolling for hours and hours and hours and hours through “fitspo” (short for “fitspiration”) content on Tumblr and Pinterest. If you’re lucky enough to have made it through your life without knowing what fitspo is, it’s basically just pictures of people with Super Hot Bods, in the traditional sense, that are supposed to serve as inspiration for you to stare at and feel a sense of purpose and motivation. Spoiler alert: this is Very Bad.

In my eating disorder recovery, one of the most instrumental steps I took was to do a complete audit and makeover of my social media feeds. I went through and unfollowed every account that even halfway reminded me of this kind of content, and I purposely sought out and followed people with diverse bodies. Suddenly, my feeds were flooded with all sorts of bodies, some of which looked like mine and some of which didn’t, and every time I opened my social media accounts my sense of what was normal was recalibrated a little more. Over time, this kind of consistent exposure to bodies of all kinds re-wrote my implicit default sense of what bodies look like.

Today’s analog of fitspo Tumblr is just…the entirety of influencer internet. We are flooded with images of a very specific type of face and body, and given the flaming hellscape that is the arbitrary and unequal enforcement of community standards, certain kinds of bodies are censored far more than others. Especially when it comes to sexy and/or revealing imagery, if we let the algorithms decide what our sense of normalcy is, it’s no wonder most of us have such a warped understanding of what bodies and sexuality are and should be like.

When I first started posting revealing photos of myself on the internet, it was only because I had seen other people who look like me do it that I felt emboldened to do so. When my clients and followers say that seeing photos of other people’s bodies makes them feel empowered not only to share their own photos, but to shift how they think about their own bodies, it makes me feel like I am part of a magical, vibrant, varied, unshakeable community. Sharing your nudes is doing the lord’s work (no seriously).

Increasing Your (Naked) Freedom in Your Body Can Help You Embrace Body Neutrality

One of the most interesting things I have noticed since having more and more people see me naked (and being in a career where I see tons of other people naked all the time) is how it has contributed to an overall sense of neutrality about my body. Of course, seeing bodies and having people see mine makes me feel warm and fuzzy and full of love for all of our beautiful forms, but it has also just made so many things about bodies feel sort of…unremarkable? In a good way!

When we hide our bodies all the time, we build up an inherent sense of significance and value about what is underneath, and moments of exposure of that hidden territory (intentional or unintentional) can feel so much more laden with value judgment than they otherwise would be. If no one has ever seen my bare stomach and then suddenly it is exposed when I reach for something on a high shelf, my first thought is going to be “oh my god that is uncharted territory for these people to see….what must they think about it?” There is suddenly an acute sense of control over how people are perceiving my body, and I might suddenly worry about how to best present it so that it looks good when they do see it.

This is further exacerbated if I have an implicit belief that my particular body part is weird or abnormal in some way. Now, not only are they seeing some part of my body for the first time, they are seeing a weird version of that body part. “I never see people with [insert body part here] that looks like mine, so mine must be extra worthy of attention and scrutiny when it is revealed!!”

But being immersed in a world where bodies, my own and others, are exposed all the time actually sort of diminishes my sense of the significance of whatever my particular body parts look like. I have seen one zillion boobs of all shapes and sizes and textures and colors, so the particular details of mine don’t stand out in one way or another, good or bad, in my mind. I have seen so many people’s bodies that look so vastly different that when my body changes in some way and looks more like one kind of body or another, that change feels unremarkable — a mere wave in the ever-shifting ocean of all the bodies that exist.

The goal of feeling better about your body overall is extremely worthy; I hope everyone finds a way to love their body someday. But there’s also such a relief in just letting your body exist. The neutrality that comes from diverse body visibility is such a breath of fresh air, and choosing to share your body with the world can help lift that burden of constant heightened significance and value judgment that keeping it hidden all the time can foster.

The Dangers Are…Unclear At Best

There are a lot of fucking weirdos out there. And it is very important that we protect ourselves from them as best we can.

But I reject that we have to hide our bodies from the world just because some people are fucking weirdos.

In the current digital age where basically anyone can access almost anything about us that we post on the internet, keeping ourselves safe from weirdos is crucial. Not posting information that makes it easier for a weirdo to find you (location information, private data, travel plans, etc.) is a great baseline. Having good safety practices in place when you’re meeting new people (bring a friend to pick up that lamp you found on Facebook marketplace, meet new dates in a public place, pick a spot a few blocks away to hand off your drugs, whatever) is key.

Hiding your boobs? I’m not sure how that one helps.

I think a lot of warnings about the dangers of posting revealing photos of yourself on the internet can be reduced to the following threats: threat of professional or interpersonal repercussions, threat of embarrassment, threat to dignity, and threat of future regret. These are often conflated with true safety concerns, but they’re very different considerations. Of course each person will have to decide how they feel about each of these threats, but here are my own personal feelings about them:

1. Threat of professional or interpersonal repercussions: In my own personal line of work and personal circle of friends, family, and acquaintances, this is not a big problem. I am a boudoir photographer and my whole life is naked people, so nudity is an extremely unremarkable phenomenon in my world. I am fortunate that my career can really only be helped by the world seeing my boobs. And in my experience, any professional or personal opportunities that are closed to me because the world knows what my boobs look like are not ones that I am interested in.

   Now, to be clear, for some people and in some professional domains, there might be very real professional consequences to having revealing photos of themselves on the internet, and it is one hundred percent reasonable to take that into consideration in making this decision. But it isn’t always, obviously true for everyone that having nudes on the internet is a professional death sentence. And for some people (like me), the benefits outweigh the risks and losses. This won’t be true for everyone, but you are allowed to decide that it is for you. And for what it’s worth, almost all of my clients who choose to share their photos on the internet are in different professional fields than I am, so this is not just an idiosyncratic possibility in my own life.

2. Threat of embarrassment: I actually think the fact that I have shared my own nudes of my own volition makes it harder to embarrass me. Everyone already knows what my pubes look like, you can’t hurt me. Of course, some weirdo could do some shit like photoshop my boobs onto Mitch McConnell’s body or make some sort of deepfake porn of me and a hammerhead shark, but frankly I think they should be more embarrassed by that than I should.

3. Threat to dignity: My sense of dignity is mine to determine, not someone else’s. I don’t feel undignified because people know what my boobs look like, and if someone else thinks I am undignified I really don’t lose any sleep about it.

4. Threat of future regret: The internet is forever. Sharing things on the internet means releasing control over being able to undo that decision, and making peace with the possibility that if I change my mind someday about wanting my nudes on the internet I won’t be able to ensure that I can remove them. But I can only make this decision with as much care and thoughtfulness as I make any other permanent decision. I can’t ensure that I will never ever feel differently about it in the future, but we make all sorts of permanent decisions (tattoos, relationships, finances, children) that we can’t ensure we won’t regret in the future; we just have to make the most thoughtful decision we can. There are big and serious and life-changing benefits to sharing your body with the world, and I have decided that those outweigh whatever hypothetical (and, I think, unlikely) regret I could possibly feel in the future.

I won’t attempt a full analysis of the relationship between actual physical safety and posting revealing photos of yourself on the internet, both because I don’t know what the actual statistics are, if any exist, about the relationship between the two, and because each person will have a different personal calculus of the risk/benefit tradeoffs of having their nudes be visible to the public. I also don’t deny that there might be some physical safety considerations that are important to take into account in making the decision. But I will say this: I am not aware of any reputable data that indicates that posting nudes of yourself on the internet significantly increases your risk of personal physical harm, so in my own personal calculus, the benefits I have found of sharing my body on the internet outweigh those hypothetical considerations.

Agency Matters Most

There is a big, big, big, big difference between sharing your own body on the internet on your terms and of your own volition and someone else leaking your nudes without your consent. One is an empowered choice, the other is a sex crime.

I am talking about the first one here.

Making an informed, thoughtful choice to post or allow the posting of photos of your body can be incredibly freeing and empowering. You should be able to have the final say over where and in what manner images of your body are posted. Every client who works with me has full control over the privacy of their images (not even just for boudoir — your headshots are private if you want them to be too!) When you book a boudoir shoot with me, for example, you receive a model release form where you get to select your preferences for who will get to see the photos and in what manner (if any) I am permitted to share them on the internet. Here are the options that every client gets to choose from:

I always want agency to be at the forefront of the entire process because, when given the opportunity, people’s experiences of sharing their bodies with the world consensually and on their terms can be incredibly therapeutic. I never want anyone to feel pressured, of course, but more than that, I want to give them the space to actively choose to share themselves if they have the inclination to. And feel only good about it afterward!

I think that the way that we often talk about the perils of nudes being posted on the internet is quite disempowering. It is so often framed as a thing that happens to people without their consent, rarely as something that people have informed agency about. And even when we talk about it being done consensually, there is this implication of naïveté and vapidness that casts the decision to post nudes as something that is done by people who are acting impulsively, uncritically, and without due consideration of the consequences.

But the truth is that it is possible to make an informed, thoughtful, positive choice to share your body on the internet and then do so without regretting it.

Agency changes everything. As one of my clients put it, “If someone shared it without me knowing, then of course it’s a big fat NO. But if someone seeing my naked body makes them feel good or reassured that all bodies are beautiful, then hell to the yes show my tits and ass off baby!!!!”

Ultimately, the choice to share your body on the internet should be one hundred million percent yours. No one should ever feel pressured to do so if they don’t want, but I am also here to yell from the other side of the room: nor should anyone feel pressured not to if it’s something they actively and thoughtfully want to do.

Fuck it, it’s your body, it’s a gift to us all should you choose to share it.