Monday, April 23, 2007
I Hate Hipster Naked.
filed under: Sex Pop by Lux Nightmare
I was at a party the other week — the kind of party I rarely go to anymore, in a downtown bar full of hip kids. The kind of party with a camera set up in back, the kind of party where hip kids pose and preen for the camera, where photographers smile pretty and use every ounce of charm to talk said hipsters out of their clothes.
That’s when I realized: I hate hipster naked.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the phenomenon: suave young photographer (say, Merlin Bronques or Nikola Tamindzic) hits up parties populated by the young, beautiful, and painfully hip. Suave young photographer takes “nightlife” photos, making sure that “nightlife” includes plenty of photos of nubile young hipsters in various states of undress.
I hate hipster naked because it tends to be coercive: a sort of “Girls Gone Wild” for the hip set.
“You should totally kiss her,” the photographers tell you, camera in hand. “That would be hot.”
I hate hipster naked because it preys on insecurities. You want to be famous, right? You want to be popular and pretty, right? You want the hipsters to adore you, right? All you have to do is make sexy for the camera.
All you have to do is get drunk and flash your tits.
I hate hipster naked because it’s exploitative: Merlin Bronques gets a book deal and all those hot naked chicks get… cred. Get notoriety. Get naked on the Internet with no payment.
Oh, and I hate it because it’s illegal.
A while ago (more recently than I’d like to admit), I found myself at Rated X (more naked than I’d like to admit). Caught in front of the camera, caught in the lens of Last Night’s Party, a single thought echoed through my head:
“I’m making porn. And I’m doing it for free. Fuck.”
Yeah: I hate hipster naked.
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[…] I Hate Hipster Naked. : Sexerati: Smart Sex. “I hate hipster naked because it’s exploitative: Merlin Bronques gets a book deal and all those hot naked chicks get… cred. Get notoriety. Get naked on the Internet with no payment.” (tags: porn sex exploitation) […]
Wow. Great post. I totally agree.
Right on the mark. I’ve taken to just calling the unpaid porn stars of the world scabs…
So true! Never take it off if you aren’t getting paid… no matter how healthy that trust fund is.
I have this internal debate about people who do this kind of stuff for cred, for a tshirt, for free. I can appreciate the exhibitionism. But it is as if these models are making a statement with their actions - that getting naked, making porn has no value and no cost.
Seska:
I feel the same way. On the one hand, I feel that people should be able to do whatever they want, and if it gets your rocks off to flash your tits or your dick or whatever for a camera, then awesome.
What gets me, though, is that I don’t think people really understand the full extent of their actions, don’t understand that what they’re doing goes beyond that moment, that people are making money off of them, of their bodies — something that really strikes a chord for me, personally.
Sabrina’s scab remark strikes me as more than a little accurate.
Don’t get me started. Bronques is a major contributing factor in my decision to never touch a flash. Ever.
The problem is that their pictures are about themselves, not the subject. We’re not going to be able to look back 50 years from now and get a sense of what was going on in the nightlife scene from these pictures. Which is a real loss. Nightlife is interesting. People are interesting. Showing your tits to the camera. Not so much.
Mostly I get the sense its two people who are too cheap to hire models.
[…] Lux Nightmare hates hipster naked. […]
This is a great post, a perspective I’m SO glad to see out there. It’s totally right on about all of it, about being stricked with the sudden realization that you’re making porn for free, about worrying you’re making a statement that getting naked has no value and no cost, about the sometime appearance of exploitative coercion that just replicates the most boring, patriarchal images in the whole culture… And yet. My friend and I had words the morning after Nikola photographed me doing a strip-tease at a party one year ago. She is firmly of the ‘never take it off if you aren’t getting paid’ school, and was horrified. I am (as she is) an on-and-off stripper and sex worker; I embrace getting paid, setting your value high, realizing the economic consequences of what you as an individual do for everyone, becoming aware of the commodification of young, conventionally attractive women’s sexuality and all the damage it does — all of the things that this post and comments point out. And yet, I think maybe I really disagree with Joshua, or maybe there are a fuck-ton of awful party-pic photo sites out there that I haven’t even seen (there are those weird people who snap your picture and hand you a card when you’re out, who aren’t anyone you’d recognize and have cheap-looking dot-coms; I bet those are a travesty…).
I would have paid a good bit for professional portrait shots of me and my (clothed) friend as beautiful as the ones Nikola took that night. It’s one of the coolest digital images of myself ever taken. He makes everyone he shoots look like a gorgeous rich celebrity; there’s art to that and I don’t begrudge him his paycheck for it. And I think a few of the better-known nightlife photographers ARE documenting the interesting — the people and scenes of nightlife — and if there are naked people in the pictures, well, people were naked, even if it was maybe only because they saw a camera. And more of the subjects in this genre are NOT conventional-looking women than in many other genres of naked pictures on the internet, not to say that patriarchal forces aren’t present, but I do think there’s a difference between candid nightlife photos and the vast majority of what’s cast, styled, and marketed as porn in terms of the range of looks and configurations represented.
I’m just saying that in the realms of the aesthetic and the documentary, all my business sense aside, I think it is not on the whole a bad thing if there are spaces for the random, anonymous recording of beautiful young bodies out too late taking their clothes off, and artists doing that work. To me the fact that the Nikola photo set of me cements one of those nights in memory gives it a nostalgic patina, and the fact that it was on gawker the next day is a matter of hilarity still today. This was, admittedly, a pretty different scene from the drunk party kissing and flashing I’ve seen and which is referenced here — when anything becomes a ‘thing’ it’s just annoying.
Does it not distress anybody else reading this that the whole premise of this post strips everyone involved of any sort of sexual agency? Sex workers and pornstars are in control of their actions but as soon as it’s the allure of fashion or glamour, instead of money, they don’t know what they’re doing?
It sounds like sort of a watered down, capitalism-ified version of the sex-negative account of universal exploitation.
Nick,
One could argue that the presence of alcohol alone strips people of sexual agency: in fact, many a sexual assault policy makes that claim.
I don’t have issue with the women and men who choose to take off their clothes. If people want to do that, if it gets their rocks off, so be it. So much the better.
But I don’t think that the people who strip for Last Night’s Party or whathaveyou actually have a full understanding of what they’re getting into, of the repercussions of their actions. And that is what bothers me — that’s what I find exploitative.
I’ve made porn, I’ve photographed naked people, whatever: I also made sure that everyone I worked with was, uh, sober and fully aware of the consequences of their actions (because, you know, having naked pictures of yourself posted on the Internet can be a pretty fucking big deal). I’ve also gotten naked in public (for free, even), and been okay with it… largely because it was in a situation where I felt in control, where I knew what was going on, where I knew what I was getting myself into.
msmsgirl: Thanks for the input, I appreciate the perspective. The photos are great, and I can understand the thrill of being a part of them. If you’re cognizant of what you’re getting into, and okay with the repercussions, then I think the whole thing is peachy keen: I just don’t think everyone who gets caught in front of the camera lens is in quite that situation.
I absolutely agree. Good point and one that really needed to be made.
That said, I do like some of the Nikola Tamindzic stuff - I just don´t like how he goes about getting his material. Bronques is just Joe Francis in a fluorescent hoodie.