AllAmericanBoyNextDoor

College Kids at a Naked Party

One dilemma a lot of models face is whether to do nudes or not. It’s certainly easier to find a photographer who will do TFP/CD with you if you’re willing to show some skin. On the other side, there are concerns about it hurting careers if there are nudes of you floating around.

In general, these days, while being nude around others is still mostly considered a taboo, the myspace/facebook generation seem to be much more open to sharing nude ‘self pics’. And the Internet in general makes access to nudity just a google image search away. On college campuses, there’s a growing number of ‘naked parties’, where students gather and hang out, either naked or very, very close to it, such as a guy wearing a sock on his cock.

On beaches, you also see a lot of guys showing butt cleavage, letting their board shorts sag way down. So, there seems to be a lot less concern about nudity than there used to be — especially if you’ve got a good body.

But can this affect your career? There are examples of people having the course of their careers changed because of it. Frenchie Davis got booted from American Idol due to topless photos on a porn site. Did that really hurt her career? Well, she’s a success on broadway.

What about models though? In the early 90′s a teenage Simon Rex did solo porn videos. He was a model for Ralph Lauren I believe. Then he became an MTV Veejay (remember when MTV used to play music videos?) He later did some gigs on TV shows. Any lack of career advancement was probably not related to the porn. And that was a worst case. Artistic nudes are not considered to be in the same vein as porn.

On the TV series, Make Me a Super Model, which I’m sure many of you watched, they did nude photo shoots. I’d love to see the results. (If anyone has a link, please put it in a comment or email it me.)

I’m not aware of any examples of people hurting their careers by doing artistic nudes. Not saying it hasn’t happened. I’d like to know about it if anyone reading this is aware of some (so add a comment please.)

Kerik Frontal Nude by Victor Cody ©2005

For me, the decision to do nudes was not difficult. I’m a nudist anyway. And if people can’t appreciate the human form, then I don’t really care. I’m also aware that I’m well past the age of becoming a supermodel or a celebrity. But for those of you who are younger and still have that hope, I would still consider doing nudes — tasteful, artistic nudes.

Frontal nudes can be another issue to address. I think a lot of guys who don’t want to do them are worried about being small. That’s a legit reason for not doing frontal. There’s also the issue of what your family might think if they find out. Again, if it’s artistic, it’s nowhere near the same issue as it is if it’s just porn.

So, it’s one thing to be willing to do nudes, but there are people like me, who are not just willing, but actually prefer nudes. What motivates us? For me, I like doing things that are edgy, that push the envelope, especially if it flies in the face of the puritanical society we have here in the U.S. There’s a lot of repression in this country and that can lead to bad things.

From an artistic perspective, I think male eroticism is underrepresented in art. So, I’m willing to do my part to rectify that… willing to show my ‘part’ to rectify that.