the next few pieces in the Victorian series are nudes.

I think there must be three or four journal entries in my archives that detail my intense fear of submitting nudes here. That would be because I have submitted three or four nudes before. And yet, every time, I felt the need to be afraid and to inform you that I was afraid.

I seem to feel the need to add these qualifiers to reassure some imaginary audience who would take offence. I insist on bringing up "Oh I am so very nervous and ashamed" to reassure you that I do conform to socially enforced standards of modesty, and that it is only through repression of my instincts that I would dare defy any social code.

which is fucked.

I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of about my body. What size or shape I am is irrelevant, it's just an animal that carries around my brain. It is largely unrelated to who I actually am, never more than when naked.

The people who would judge me on the state of it, morally or aesthetically, are ones I would prefer not to be judged well by.

So why do I do this? Why do I freak out about submitting nudes, every time? Why do I feel the need to mention my fear so loudly and repeatedly?

To be naked in a public forum is to express your lack of shame, and your flaunting of those moral conventions and strictures on modesty, and perhaps that is what I am afraid of.

Well, this is the last time I'm going to whine about it.

I don't want to reinforce those social restrictions. They are only a part of me against my will and I'm not going to give in to them, or validate them to reassure anybody else.