Update: This is a repost. So it looks like Flickr images show up correctly. That’s good. Now I can speak briefly to the “headless horseman” problem of naked male bloggers.
Ok, first of all, it’s not just a problem with naked male bloggers, but for whatever reason people complain more when men do it. (I assume you know what I’m talking about: men who post photos only of their, um, lower-mid torsos and thus don’t show their faces.)
First the general problem: anonymity. You’ve got to be in a pretty secure social/employment/political/family space to identify yourself as a sex blogger in the first place. Next you have to be pretty confident to post “compromising” photos that include your face. (Witness now arch-conservative moralist Laura Schlessinger’s “youthful indiscretions” photoset, available if you care to Google for it.) In other words, identifiable photos on the internet are more permanent than tattoos, in the sense that you can theoretically remove tattoos. So that’s problem one.
The second problem for men is a more technical problem of scale. If you want to include genitals and face you have to include everything in between and photos at that scale tend to diminish whatever mid-torso items men tend to want others to see in its best light.
So along those lines the choices are: big picture, small parts; big parts, small picture. (I’ll get to whether this is the correct construction, in the sense that that’s really what other people want to see, in a moment.)
Add the two factors together — a reasonable desire for anonymity and the impression viewers will be more impressed at more limited scales — and you wind up with mostly torsos. QED.
The feedback I’ve gotten is that, in general, men’s dangly bits out of context aren’t as exciting to women as women’s dimply bits are to men. Quick note before everyone hits the comment link: I’m not saying dangly bits aren’t exciting — not at all! — I’m just saying more people seem to prefer them with more context than less. Thus the appellation “headless horseman” for those who don’t provide enough.
My solution, therefore, has been to show more and preserve anonymity by posting tiny, evocative-rather-than-explicit thumbnails. In the unlikely event anyone ever really wanted a larger version there’s always email.
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Aw Bullwinkle, that trick never works
Originally uploaded by Figleaf.
To save bandwidth I’m trying Flikr’s Blog This Photo feature.
This is a thumbnail index of some photos I took late at night with a timer and slow shutter, lit only from a single light in the other room. It involved sitting very, very still for a very long time.
