NSFW: Not Safe For the World
An honest meditation on nudity, beauty, and belonging in the body.
The Epiphany
There are certain films you don’t just watch—you remember. They live in the walls of your body long before you realize it. For me, one of those films was Cashback (2006).
I saw it years ago during a period where I was exploring cinema, beauty, and eroticism without knowing why. I didn’t have the language for what I was looking for. I just knew my body was drawn to something more primal than porn and more sacred than performance. Something honest. Something that didn’t flinch.
I recently rediscovered the film, and the moment it began, something ancient inside me rang. This is me I thought, not metaphorically, almost biopic. I am Ben, the protagonist, the man who sees the world not through utility or conquest, but through devotion to beauty, especially in its most human form: nudity.
Ben doesn’t ogle. He doesn’t fantasize. He witnesses. He sketches women not to own them, but to commune with them. And that’s how it’s always been for me, since I was young, before I even had the words.
The First Time I Saw Her
There was a teacher’s assistant in middle school, not the stunning kind, not the center-of-attention girl, but to me, she was intoxicating. She moved with a quiet confidence, fully at home in her body. And somehow, the earth seemed to bend around her as she walked. She wasn’t flashy. She was embodied.
And I noticed, not with lust, but with reverence. That was the moment I knew: I saw differently than the boys around me. They giggled at cleavage. I stared in silent awe at the way her hand moved across the chalkboard.
I wasn’t aroused the way they were. I wasn’t confused. I was captivated. And confused only by the fact that no one else seemed to feel it the same way.
Nudity as a Homecoming
I love being naked. Not because I want to be watched. Not because I’m turned on by it. Because it brings me home to myself.
My body breathes differently when it’s uncovered. I sleep naked because I feel more at peace with the sheets against my skin. I walk around my space nude because it makes me feel unshackled, soft, aware, alive.
There’s something ancient about it. When the wind moves across my bare skin or I slide my hand along the contours of my ribs, I feel like I’m remembering something lost—something true. Sometimes my body knows what’s about to happen before my mind does. Touch becomes prophecy. Sensation becomes insight.
And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. But in the world we live in, nudity is either commodified or criminalized. It’s rarely allowed to simply be.
A Religion That Taught Me to Flinch
Growing up, I was taught to fear the body. I was raised in a religious system that made war on flesh. Nudity was shameful. Desire was evil. Pleasure was a trap. The goal wasn’t embodiment, it was escape.
We were told to “die to the flesh,” which meant suppress every signal your body gave you. Lust, hunger, curiosity, these were tricks of the devil. And if you failed? You needed repentance, ritual, confession. It was spiritual gaslighting disguised as holiness.
My body became something I was told to manage like a burden. I learned to keep quiet about the way I saw people, about the way beauty itself moved me. And what didn’t get repressed got twisted into shame.
Nude Doesn’t Mean Porn
I have nude art on my walls. The human form, raw and still, sometimes posed, sometimes candid, but always honored.
This doesn’t make me a pervert. It makes me a devotee of form, a lover of geometry and shadow, of posture and line, and of presence. The female body, to me, is a sermon. And sometimes the best way to listen is to not look away.
But try explaining that to someone in a world where any admiration of a naked woman is presumed to be predatory. Where witnessing is mistaken for consuming. Where silence is taken for guilt.
So I hid. I flinched. I put up curtains. I stopped showing people that part of myself. Because it’s exhausting to defend a gaze that isn’t even sexual. It’s exhausting to constantly explain that reverence isn’t arousal.
The Male Form
Here’s where it gets even trickier: I find male nudity powerful, too.
Not arousing, necessarily, but anchoring. The naked male form makes me feel rooted, firm, settled. There is something incredibly grounding about the raw, unhidden masculine. It reminds me of earth, stone, and oak.
But God forbid you say that out loud. Because now, you’re either gay (as if that’s bad) or making people uncomfortable. Male nudity must mean sexual intent, right?
Wrong.
We are so steeped in homophobic conditioning that most men don’t even know how to look at another man without performance or panic. And that’s a loss for all of us. Because witnessing the male form can be reclaiming, too.
I Just Want to Look
Sometimes I just want to look.
Not to own. Not to consume. Just to see. Just to witness beauty in motion. A shoulder in sunlight. A waist turning. A braid falling out of place across a spine.
But in this culture, you can’t look. You can’t stop and stare, even if it’s with awe, not hunger. Because to look is to be labeled—creepy, predatory, or unsafe. And yet, every part of me is screaming: “But I’m not trying to take. I’m trying to remember.”
I want to drink in the shape of a moment. To see someone inside their skin and not turn away. To love the fact that they’re real and right in front of me.
But I can’t. Because gaze has been criminalized and not all eyes deserve to look—but mine do. And so I stay quiet. I look away. I swallow the moment instead of living in it.
Communion, Not Consumption
Nudity isn’t the problem. Our disconnection is.
The body isn’t a threat. Our projections are.
I want to live in a world where nudity is sacred again. Where a man can feel the sun on his chest and call it prayer. Where a woman can walk unclothed without it being a performance or a threat. Where we can all remember that to be naked is not to be exposed—it’s to be unhidden.
I don’t have a clean conclusion for this. Only this truth:
My gaze is not a weapon. My nudity is not a performance. My presence is not an apology. I am not here to hide anymore. And neither is the beauty I see.
—Jeff