Ogling nude celebs isn’t pervy! Now get me Orlando’s pics...
EVERY time I see a picture of someone naked – either by accident or design – I am reminded that ten years ago I was persuaded to strip and lie on a bed, my modesty preserved by a sheet, for a women’s magazine’s ‘body image’ issue. I mainly did this because both my publisher and my husband told me not to, and I hate being told not to do something – and I only mention it as the photo isn’t online.
Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether this tame shoot, so far from breaking the internet, hastened the demise of respected middle-market title Easy Living (tagline For All the Women You Are or, as we called it, ‘fatwa’ for short.)
I started keeping a rough tally of images that appeared last week of people in various states of undress.
There was Orlando Bloom in his birthday suit and baseball cap on his paddleboard. There was the Team GB women’s rugby sevens side for the ‘naked’ issue of Women’s Health. There was C4’s Naked Attraction nude dating show and we (well, I did anyway) also saw all of Melania Trump in a saucy sapphic spread for nowdefunct French magazine Max.
In the end I gave up counting the number of bums, front bottoms, bellies (more of David Cameron later) and boobs I saw last week, though I might note that the first episode of Channel 4’s Naked Attraction attracted 64 complaints for showing 282 shots of penises compared to ‘only’ 96 of vaginas.
And I can’t even pretend all this peering at privates was in the interests of research.
In fact, I was in the kitchen, looking at the censored photos of Bloom, when my daughter said: ‘The same thing happened to Justin Bieber, it was really unfair,’ and explained that the singer just wandered out on to the deck of his condo in his birthday suit and the paps got their money shots.
At her words I grabbed my iPhone and tapped ‘Justin Bieber’, ‘naked’ and ‘balcony’ into Twitter and in a matter of seconds I could see with my own eyes what all the fuss was about.
Does this make me – and you – a perving voyeur? You, wishing to preserve the ‘dignity’ of such important personages, might not have looked. But I did.
I find it harder than ever to empathise with the crocodile tears of stars who are only too happy to take their kit off in a controlled shoot to promote a film or some other project, but then cry foul when the public consumes ‘stolen’ images of them rather than those fed out by their PR machines. Plus I was curious.
Once we know they’re out there – and the internet went into meltdown over paddleboarding Bloom – there is something in us that wants, nay needs, to see pictures of others in the buff, which is why media outlets pay through the nose for them, whether it’s Kate Middleton topless in Provence or David Cameron in his designer togs in Corsica.
But as we see from the noise around Naked Attraction, or our burly women rugby players, people don’t even need to be famous or even that hot for us to be interested. They just have to be nude.
RICH, poor, celebrity, nonentity – these candid pictures remind us that without our coverings we are all the poor, forked animals of Shakespearean tragedy. We look at David Cameron’s paunch or Sam Cam’s toned withers or some tattooed, shaved twentysomething on Naked Attraction and think, first, they’re a bit like me and you.
Then we think how much more attractive, whether buff or rough, people tend to look with some clothes on rather than all clothes off.
I maintain: curiosity about what other people look like, clothed or uncovered, is not a race to the bottom – it’s a basic human instinct. So can someone send me the right link to the full Orlando Bloom collection now, please?