Dating Confessions by You "I love how nice, sweet, pretty and caring you are. I hate how I'm bored to tears. Mom would be proud, but my libido is AWOL. . . "
There's something so adult about a community of people organized around a sexual interest. Kind of like Kiwanis, only with leather, or diapers, or glitter. Community whether the word follows "Southern Baptist" or "cigar fetish" connotes a suburban mental space, where adolescent angst and doubt are banished.
Sexual communities are one of the great gifts of the Internet. The Web allowed the sexual "ugly ducklings" to find each other and realize they were really scattered swans. Most of their online communities don't concern the rest of us any more than sites for stamp-collectors or Civil War re-enactors do. Either you want to get it on dressed up like a horse or you don't, and most of us don't. But occasionally, one of these new online villages plays with universal fire: even if you don't go their way, you can see they're invoking the same powers that squeak and gibber in your own sex life.
Which brings us to the little naked people. All the images around these words were taken from websites with names like "Flasher Contest" and "Voyeurweb" and "Flashing for Fun." They're a community as well the one for safe, sane and (at least, to their Web viewers) consensual flashers. They like to run around naked (or near-naked) in public places, and they want you to know about it by reading their stories and seeing their pics. They're people who are living a dream specifically, the one when you're in line for the bank and realize you're not wearing any clothes.
Assuming you looked at the pictures on this page before you read this (if you didn't, I mean, I'm flattered, but you certainly are a strange one), then you've just been reminded that nudity is magnetic, in a way that buggy whips and sweaty jock straps are not. Not everyone makes a fetish of it, but the rest of us at least understand those who do.
Questions of nudity like why, when, where and in what company are ones that everyone, the world over associates with sex. (In tribal groups where the men wear nothing but penis sheaths, people giggle about the plopping sound of a man taking it off.)
They're also questions of power. Those who have it can suspend the rules (the emperor in that fable could parade in the nude because his subjects were scared to mention it) or twist them (the city of New York, for example, will be paying millions of dollars in settlements over the next few years to people wrongly strip-searched).
Unexpected nudity has its own kind of power, one political types have been tapping for centuries, from Lady Godiva (taxes) to Dr. Helen Caldicott (nuclear weapons) to Dona Nieto, an anti-logging activist who silences the chainsaws in the great Northwest by performing her "striptease for the trees." Artists, too, have used the attention magnet, so that nudes have been an emblem of freedom and daring in art. Some would-be artists think speaking nudely is enough to establish their bona fides, like the rep for a loosely organized streaking group of arty types in one of New York's trendier neighborhoods, who emailed me: "What's going on here is totally revolutionary. We believe we are part of a vast and growing groundswell reaction to the lame, consumerist and conservative attitudes that have prevailed for over twenty years now. We believe a big change is on the way." Sure, kid.)
Oh, and, I'm told too that showing naked bodies has been known to make some people a bit of money.
Nudity serves a lot of purposes. Purposefulness, though, is not what this fetish, or any other, is about. A fetish is not a road from one point to the other. It's a cul-de-sac; it's about itself. And before the Internet gave them a place to look each other over, the people who prized public nudity for public nudity's sake were on their own, with only stereotypes of grubby old men flapping their raincoats for company.
Which is why when I came across a Web-posted photo of a perfectly ordinary person filling up his old Chevy with regular while wearing sneakers, period I was surprised. Wasn't this guy supposed to be scurrying around in a back alley, ashamed to show his not-displeasing face? Why did he feel safe going public? People naked in a public place fall in about the middle of my arousal continuum. It doesn't squick me the way, say, people trampling bugs for thrills does; nor does it compel me to drop what I'm doing to follow the call of the wild. I get it, but I don't get it, and that intrigued me enough to keep me clicking from link to link. That led me to a familiarity with the "regulars," and to realizing that the warm blanket-y concept of community has wrapped itself 'round nudity as a fetish, a buzz for its own sake.
Othello, a regular on several sites, a fit professional guy in his forties (like all the people in this article, his name here is the one he uses on the Web), was certainly a flasher before the Internet. As a teenager, he tried naked walks out into the street late at night, which turned him on. But it wasn't until he found the flasher sites that he made flashing friends (one of whom crossed the Atlantic to visit him for some two-person streaks), and a girlfriend, who flashes with him sometimes.
The flasher sites provide another service they let the regulars serve as an audience for one another. Flashers love encouragement. (In her email answers to my questions about the pastime, Roanne, thirty-three, happily recalls the time she walked nude down five flights of stairs in a Hilton hotel; when she passed two couples, one woman among them, she writes, "slapped my bare butt and with a smile said, 'You naughty girl!'")
There's something so adult about a community of people organized around a sexual interest. Kind of like Kiwanis, only with leather, or diapers, or glitter. Community whether the word follows "Southern Baptist" or "cigar fetish" connotes a suburban mental space, where adolescent angst and doubt are banished.
