Freehike Japan

This blog is currently limited to friends of friends. Depending on future events I may make it available to a wider audience. If you choose to make a comment, please be aware that the audience may widen in the future.

An issue has arisen with a photo, http://www.naktiv.net/photo/40761/dsc_8584/ The photo itself is not the best "poster boy" for the issue, it just happened to be the one where the issue arose. There are in fact two separate issues, and I have separated them out into two blogs. This is the blog about comments about "lovely ladies" and what effect that may have on female membership. The other blog is about photos taken of non-members.

This blog is to be read after reading the comments on that photo.

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This particular issue is a "soft" issue and I am under no illusions that this blog will change anyone's behaviour. You either "get" this issue or you don't. All I can hope to achieve is for a few people to start to see how their behaviour can be interpreted in a different way by a different audience, and how that might have an effect counter to what they may be hoping.

For all the talk about nudism being about body acceptance, there is still a strong contingent of practitioners who feel happy to comment "lovely ladies" — and often that is the full extent of their comments — on a photo. Such flattery is viewed by the flatterer as a part of chivalrous behaviour, and any comment about that behaviour is seen as rampant feminism. My personal view is that this concentration on the physical is an objectification of the flatteree. They lose part of their status as a human being and start to be just a pretty thing to look at. I am also fully aware that such arguments by me will have no traction with the flatterer.

I can't help feeling that there is an element of creepiness to the comments, although the practitioners of course deny this. However, I do wonder if, for example, these people would go to a new town where they are a stranger, and spot a random woman on the street, and go up to her and say "Well hello there! Aren't you lovely!" And if they did so, would they be received as a gentleman? Yet to make the same comment about a photo of a stranger is "natural" and flattery. Further on that last point: such flattery is cultural, not at all natural, and culture changes over time. I myself recognise this, and I feel that this comment-making is part of the culture of the practitioners, which is why I feel it might not change. I do ask that they be aware of other cultures as I am trying to be, however.

One effect such comments will have, however, is on other women, especially those who are not fully confident about their bodies. It will reinforce notions that other people in nudism, and especially men in nudism, only approve of pretty bodies, and that their (in their own eyes) flawed body should not be allowed to be displayed in such an environment. Such comments make it hard for the insecure to open up to nudism.

Where this issue is particularly poignant in this case is that, as we have discovered, the subjects of the photo can not see the comments, so they can never in fact be flattery. It ends up very much being self-satisfaction on the part of the commenter that they have been able to see a pretty thing, and an objectification of that pretty thing.

My remaining comment is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but will be made nevertheless. I am acutely aware of unnecessary adjectives, and the subtext behind them. Just as my comments in the photo thread were described as "brave" (which is unnecessary and not correct in my view), so are these ladies "lovely." If you go to the effort to point out which comments are brave, you should also go to the effort to point out which comments are cowardly. And you should point out which ladies are ugly. Otherwise, your words are devalued.

This blog is currently limited to friends. Depending on future events I may make it available to a wider audience. If you choose to make a comment, please be aware that the audience may widen in the future.

An issue has arisen with a photo, http://www.naktiv.net/photo/40761/dsc_8584/ The photo itself is not the best "poster boy" for the issue, it just happened to be the one where the issue arose. There are in fact two separate issues, and I have separated them out into two blogs. This is the blog about photos taken of non-members. The other blog is about comments about "lovely ladies" and what effect that may have on female membership.

This blog is to be read after reading the comments on that photo.

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There are, at the time of writing, 9,842 photos on this site. I am raising an issue about photos which appear to be of non-members, and whether they are appropriate here. It is not as though there is a shortage of photos of naked people here, and they are growing in number all the time. Maybe a few of those photos would not be available any more if there was more respect for the rights of the subject of the photo, but by no means would all photos disappear.

People seem to be saying that their rights to look at photos of naked people is so valuable, that that right is greater than the right of the subjects of the photos to be fully aware of where and how their photos are being used, and the control of the subjects of the photos over the audience that photo gets. There is really no other way to explain the anger with which people are demanding that discussion gets closed down on this issue.

What makes me angry, and what explains why I have taken the step of escalating this further, is that people are convincing themselves of mistaken facts — I am not saying lying … yet … — to enable themselves to ignore the rights of the subject. They say that the subjects have taken part in the Naktiv site community and if they had a problem with the photo the subjects themselves would object. When this claim is put to a test, it ends up that none of that is true. But it seems that even if that is false, it does not appear to change the conclusions.

I am told that this issue has been raised before, but I am expected to take the report on the conclusions of that discussion on faith, when already I have seen that people are mistaken about crucial facts in this topic to convince themselves of their right to continued access to photos of nude people. Frankly, I want to review those previous discussions, in view of the way this issue is being dealt with now.

Apparently, raising issues such as this is an indication that I do not have a life, and I am not being real. That is supposed to convince me of the correctness of their arguments in what way?

I don't want to single out Ján Kleskeň http://www.naktiv.net/profile-9134/ because I don't think he is the only person posting photos of non-members, but I will point out that he has a practice of posting photos which are not even his http://www.naktiv.net/photo/album/5204/wnbr-prague-2016-not-my-photos/

I will of course defer to the judgement of the site owner on this issue. I do understand the desire to have a critical mass of content to keep a community vibrant, but I do also think that we can survive on just our own photos.

Frankly, it is not as though the membership here is unable to get a fix of looking at naked photos of strangers other places, and if we allow it here, this ends up being a site for gawkers. That is not the sort of site that I want to be a member of, and I have already, by making a similar statement in the photo comment, in effect made an ultimatum. The attitudes that have been displayed so far suggest that this might not be the community for me.