> The image attached to this blog post is a stock photo of a nude pregnant woman. Absolutely nothing sexual.
How is this not sexual? The fact that it's a stock photo, or that the woman is pregnant, is irrelevant. It's very clearly a sexual picture.
How is this not sexual? The fact that it's a stock photo, or that the woman is pregnant, is irrelevant. It's very clearly a sexual picture.
If you say “everyone’s idea of what is sexual can be different,” I would agree, which I think is part of the point of posts like this: why does the most restrictive definition of sexual content always seem to be the point of view our lawmakers are protecting?
Edit: she’s not showering, I think. I went back and looked at it, when I read the post from my phone I thought she was showering.
Another, more charitable, explanation, would be that a lot of people around here are asexual. It's possible - but to this extent? I am skeptical.
It must have been non sexual at some point in our historical development, before clothes. So I can't really agree that it's inherently so - just that we've culturally made it a sexual thing for basically all of history. That might be close though to functionally be inherent to human society depending on your viewpoint though.
Do you think those people found nudity sexual?
How about doctors and nurses that see naked people all the time? Is simple nudity sexual for them?
How about athletes that shower in open showers together. Are they experiencing a sexual experience when they’re showering after practice?
There’s so many counter examples to this that saying nudity is sexual is just silly.
I think de-sensitization [*] may play a big role here; I'm convinced that the more porn you look at, the higher your threshold goes. I've not consumed any porn for years now (as I write in my other comment), and I find the lady in the picture extremely sexual. Yes, she's not suggesting / soliciting / provoking; she is just standing there. I agree. Yet she's no less sexual for that fact.
[*] edited comment for fixing my wrong use of the term
I think this is why there's a lot of pedantry and "know it when I see it" to the discussion
I propose you watch 5 minutes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Jungle with nude Keith Chegwin, and you will be disabused of that notion.
Your argument will be reduced to "everyone feels some kinds of nudity, preferably not featuring Keith Chegwin, are inherently sexual"
Whether nudity is considered sexual is cultural, not "inherently", and you claiming that "everyone" feels like it is is highlighting your own blinkered world view. You don't speak for "everyone".
Then again, there are societies that will shame (and do worse things to) women for showing their hair or skin to strangers.
If you're (un)lucky, your innocent holiday pictures may make the front page of Wikifeet, but that doesn't mean you're a creep for posting your holiday pictures online. There's a spectrum here and claiming to know the absolute truth and branding everyone else as perverts is silly.
Personally, I find the puritan idea that any nudity is sexual to be quite childish and immature.
Taking just one example, in Finland it is extremely common for people to visit saunas, and from what I've heard, you'd be laughed at if you tried to wear clothes (or even a towel) in the sauna.
One Finn posting online I saw a while back remarked that a lot of the problems Americans have would be resolved if we all saw our grandmas naked regularly.
I imagine you've been to a locker room before - was that sexual? Of course not. But you're not gay, you might say.
So then it's not nudity - it's your own inclination to sex. If you see the world sexually, you'll sexualize nudity.
I don't think it shows that at all. Any content not suitable for a work computer in the typical office gets a NSFW label, it's literally in the name. An image of some war-time event can be as NSFW as an image of a woman removing her clothes, and at the same time neither images can be sexual.
Most workplaces would find there to be many categories of inappropriate things other than sexual content: violence, profanity, non-sexual imagery of people in unprofessional contexts, etc.
https://www.cpreview.org/articles/2021/8/firearms-and-the-ph...
Is
1) far more sexual
2) far more dangerous than the picture on the linked site
And that's nowhere near the level of say this:
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-girl-licking-her-gun-...
I came here for your comment. That stock photo is strikingly sexual; it immediately makes me horny. (I'm a cis-het guy nearing 50 years of age, I have an active and satisfying sex life with my wife, and I've not looked at porn, or engaged in self-pleasing, for several years now. The reason I find the photo sexual is not that "I'm not getting any". I've been getting plenty, thank you very much.) I had had regular sex with my wife during all of her pregnancies; if anything, pregnancy makes women more arousing to me (without it being a "kink" for me).
Some people suffer/enjoy getting aroused by cars, does that mean every car picture is sexual? Probably not.
While fun to hear about others perspective, "suggestively sexual" usually requires at least some attempt at being suggestive, a pregnant woman just existing probably isn't suggestive, even though you find it so because of your sexual preferences.
I don't know how old you are, but this paragraph from the article felt strikingly accurate (and familiar):
> Every person’s idea of “adult” imagery is different. A young child or an adult won’t automatically think any image including breasts or nudity is sexual, but a horny teenager (generally) will.
I agree that the photo is not suggestive; in other words, I fully agree that in the picture, she's not "soliciting" or even "provoking" (even without having any actual intent to participate). That's fine. She doesn't have to be suggestive, or to do anything other than exist and be visible (like this), for me to find her sexually (very) attractive, and to make me horny.
Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
Yes, with one tweak: it's because I find the person sexually attractive. It's not the kind of attractive that urges me to start "socializing" with the person, for example; "trust", "friendship" etc are not my first impressions. My first impression is that I'm horny as heck.
> That would quickly lead us to classifying 90% of everything on the internet as sexual, as there is a wide range of stuff that makes people aroused, like people having sexual attraction to cars.
I'm confused by your repeated allusion to "sexually aroused by cars"; I've never heard of that. Other than that however, 90% of everything everywhere (not just on the internet) is sexual. Absolutely everything is advertized with attractive women (clad to various levels of decency, dependent on the medium), precisely because sex is the #1 drive for men, and so "sex sells" (to men). It may be subliminal, or it may be "in your face", but a huge proportion of all ads is sexual.
> Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
Oh definitely. I have absolutely no personal interest in the "content labeling" debate, as I've not been a consumer for several years now. It's just the fine article's qualification of the picture -- which the author tried to use as a representative, for driving the point home, IIUC -- that I disagreed with.
Also, my English could be failing me here (I'm not a native speaker): you seem to use "sexual" and "arousing" as two (at least somewhat) orthogonal concepts. To me, they mean the same thing: "stuff that makes me horny". If I cared about cars, I guess I might call some cars "exciting", but that's not "arousing". Arousal implies excitement, but not the other way around, in my vocabulary.
It does, in the one particular context where I would be looking at it.
(I understand that this response of mine is unusable for labelling images, without the context that they are displayed and viewed in. That's fine. I'm indifferent wrt. labeling pictures on the internet, for the purposes of lawmaking.)
Consider this. Assume you have a nice big poster "featuring women who are from a culture where partial nudity is normal and not considered sexual". Assume you take it to your workplace, to an office where several ladies work, and you put it on display on the wall of your cubicle. I think the picture will be defined sexual in that context, and most women at the office will be uncomfortable with it. I, as a man, would get an arousal response, and therefore, in that context, I would also immediately feel uncomfortable with the poster (and I would also request that it be removed). Indeed I very frequently disagree with being exposed to arousing impulses, and I may try to protect my senses from that. Either way, such a picture is sexual, most of the time. It does depend on the context, so I guess I agree that without context, classification is futile (lacking sufficient nuance). Assuming some "default Western context" though, I still claim that the picture you are proposing is sexual. The context where that image is not sexual, is that culture where the picture originates from. But we are not that culture.
Again, I'm neither supporting nor opposing politicians in labeling and/or restricting images. I'm only talking about what the pregnant woman's picture in the fine article makes me feel, and what urges it generates in me.