Planet Nude

Eva Grant was a former glamour model turned glamour photographer who photographed for nudist/naturist magazines postwar. She died on January 22nd, 2024, at age 98. I was intrigued by her when I researched my 2021 book, Nudism in a Cold Climate, as she represented one of a very small band of British women who worked as professional nude photographers. The fact that she made the move into the profession from the other side of the camera also added to her story. I found women’s voices harder to locate than men’s in the history of nudism in Britain, and in the history of nude photography. They tended to get spoken on behalf of, but Grant was an exception: she seized the means of production to develop her own photography business and she built her own publishing platform through which to show it.

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Immediate. Today, I am sure that most of us hear this word and understand it to mean now, to mean without delay, or without the barrier of time separating me from the thing I want. Immediacy, in our fast-paced world driven by consumerism and access to information, is about speed and convenience more than anything else. That is, after all, the most common definition you’ll find in any dictionary: “occurring or accomplished without delay.” But the wordy guy in me, the one who took all those linguistics and language history courses in school, has been thinking a lot about those less common uses of the word and how that relates to our body and our experience of the world around us, whether we truly experience any of our world immediately, and whether immediacy should even be the goal or if it’s just one of many important ways to experience life. 🪐

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In early January, there was a great post here on Planet Nude about AI’s anti-nude bias in art. Concerns were raised about AI censorship, including my caution about the dangers of AI misusing nudity. On January 26, this concern became real with fake explicit AI images of Taylor Swift surfacing online, alarming the White House and prompting Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to advocate for AI guardrails. SAG-AFTRA called for a ban on such images. This incident underlines the need for a deeper conversation on body freedom and how nudity is perceived outside safe spaces. It raises questions about the safety of women in an era where technology outpaces law, especially for those without extensive support systems. 🪐

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In a board meeting held on January 24th, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) board voted unanimously in favor of a new set of rules, prominently featuring a ban on public nudity on state natural lands. The state agency, which is appointed by the Governor to oversee environmental and recreational policies, voted to pass the rule changes unamended, despite a strong public response opposing the ban. Beyond its adverse implications for naturists and advocates of nude recreation, this decision significantly diminishes any hopes of reinstating the once-nudist-friendly Mazomanie Beach. This decision gravely impacts the naturist community and dashes hopes of reviving Mazo Beach as a nude-friendly site. Coupled with two pending anti-nudity bills in the state legislature, this ruling by the DNR positions Wisconsin to establish one of the most restrictive stances on nudity of any state in the USA, setting a potentially alarming precedent nationwide. 🪐

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More than just a lack of dress, nudism is a proposition of sorts. It invites you to abandon the dogma of a society that has handed down the long-held conservative mores of its parent generation—and their parents before them—all the way back to the birth of bodily shame, the Original Sin. This point in time and place is, by the way, impossible to tack down. 🪐

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Maslin Beach, located near Adelaide, South Australia, is the first official nude beach in the country, designated as such in 1975. Being an American who has never left their country, I can’t tell you much about it, but there’s something about the beautiful, pristine beach that led filmmaker Wayne Groom, who grew up and lives in Adelaide, to write and direct a quirky little low budget romantic comedy there that stands apart from other nudist films. 🪐

Read the original article: https://www.planetnude.co/p/maslin-beach-film-review

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MADISON, WI – In a significant development on January 16th, the Wisconsin State Senate passed two controversial bills, SB 477 and SB 478, in two party-line votes of 23 for to 9 opposed. There was no debate over the bills, which were scheduled among a slate of others up for consideration on the Senate floor. This move marks a pivotal moment in the state's ongoing legislative tug-of-war over public nudity and civil liberties. The bills now move to the State Assembly for final passage. 🪐

Read the original article: https://www.planetnude.co/p/wisconsin-senate-passes-anti-nudity

Webpage for this episode: https://www.planetnude.co/p/wisconsin-senate-passes-anti-nudity-pod

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We hear it all the time from naturism advocates: “Desexualize nudity.” It even has its own hashtag. I noticed the phrase being thrown around soon after I joined the online nudist community, and I often found it rubbed me the wrong way. It’s not that I think nudity should be sexual. Just take a look at my Twitter feed, and you’ll see that I’m a strong advocate for non-sexual nudity. But the way it was being used and interpreted by many struck me as overly simplistic, harmful, and counterproductive to the nudist cause. 🪐

Read the original article: https://www.planetnude.co/p/desexualize-nudity-doesnt-mean-what

Webpage for this episode: https://www.planetnude.co/p/desexualize-nudity-doesnt-mean-what-pod

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In the 2018 French science fiction television series Nu, written and directed by Olivier Fox, naturist activist Jean Lanvin (Thomas Séraphine) successfully campaigns for an ordinance to make public nudity the norm in France, arguing, with little evidence, that a nation that supports such an ambitious commitment to openness will be freer, friendlier, and safer. Class distinctions will vanish, and crime and terrorism will be eliminated. His proposal attracts the support of an authoritarian-curious politician named Simoni (Bruno Paviot), who is intrigued by the Orwellian possibilities of a society that disavows privacy. When the ordinance passes, public nudity is mandated by what comes to be known as the Transparency Act, and those who wear clothing face suspicion, social ostracization, and, eventually, even arrest. 🪐

Read the original article: https://www.planetnude.co/p/what-have-you-got-to-hide

Webpage for this episode: https://www.planetnude.co/p/what-have-you-got-to-hide-pod

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I’ve written before about generative AI and its apparent discomfort with the nude form in art. To probe this a little further, I turned to three popular AI art-generation platforms with the goal of recreating five famous nude artworks, in hopes of comparing the counterfeit works against their original counterparts and examining this bias and its effects.

To be clear: this isn't an attempt to establish the existence of an anti-nudity bias in AI art platforms—that’s already a well-known fact, usually explicitly stated in their terms of use. Rather, I hope to shine a light on this bias, and to look a little more closely at it. We will also look at some of the history behind these great works and the significance of the nudity they display, some of which were once quite controversial themselves specifically due to their use of nudity.

To be even clearer: I did not set out to make clothed replicas of great nude art. I set out simply to make AI replicas of great nude art. It was the AI that added the clothes.

Hopefully, by the end of this article, we will have examined some of the questions surrounding these AI biases, and explored their implications with regards to nudity’s role in culture and art, in a future that is likely to be heavily influenced by Artificial Intelligence. 🪐

Read the original article: https://www.planetnude.co/p/ai-arts-anti-nudity-bias

Webpage for this episode: https://www.planetnude.co/p/ai-arts-anti-nudity-bias-pod

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.planetnude.co/subscribe