Here are some of the keyword searches that brought people to my site in August.
- Naked people photos, people naked in public, naked beach people, beautiful naked people, happy naked people, real naked people….
If I had a dollar for every person who came here looking for pictures of naked people, I could buy that Mac we’ve been wanting.
And here’s a thing…I just googled “real naked people” out of curiosity to see how many hits there were. There were 1,170,000 (yep, 1.7 million hits) — and my blog post about naked people is number 6. Why? I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
It’s interesting that so many of us want to see naked strangers. Perhaps these searchers are all life studies art students (hah, probably not). Are we in search of sexual fantasy material? Are we curious how our bodies compare to others? Do we admire these naked people, lust after them, want to be them, or maybe just want to get a look at what it’s like to lie in the sun in nothing but our own skin…
Best naked people searches: naked people high (sounds great!), forced to go nude at beach (not so great… embarrassment and sunburn!) and — I swear — as naked as when one was born in a state of nature in one’s skin in the nude nude. That one pretty much covers all the bases. - become invisible nobody can see you, sorry we thought you were invisible, what would i do if invisible…
A dollar for each of the invisibility crowd would certainly get me an iPod. I would have suspected at least one homework assignment in there except that it’s August…
The winner in this category: how to know if someone is invisible. I keep trying to imagine where this question comes from or where it’s going… - cats
Just for grins, I also googled “cats” and got 220,000,000 hits. Now seriously, how far down the list did this person have to go to get to my site? All night, at least. - nice way to say be quiet
Please, be quiet… Okay, I couldn’t resist that, but I mean no disrespect. It’s hard in this culture to turn around in the movie theatre and tell someone to stop chattering — there’s that burst of are we gonna have a fight now adrenaline that really yanks me out of the immersive movie experience, you know? - why do people strip naked for sex
Um…If you are under the age of 11, go ask your parents to give you more information about sex. If you are 11 – 18 or so, well, trust me, it will become clear very soon. If you’re over 18 then I think you should find someone who makes your knees weak and ask them… - i want to get a lot of emails
For whatever reason, this actually makes me a bit sad. I guess if that’s what you want, I hope you get it. - low sparks of a high heeled gal
Did we go to high school together? And were you way cooler than me? I bet you were — I’ve loved the song for more than 30 years and it would never have occurred to me to think of it that way. - make her dance like a snake
The thing that gets me about this search are the words “make her”… - short nice words
Love, hope, sex, joy, friend, sun, wine, talk, play, fun, tea, bed, dream, smile… - werewolf transformation while having sex artwork
Someone else has been reading the Anita Blake books! - am i crazy to want to write a book
(smiling) No, no. Well, maybe just a little. Okay, yes, but it’s a good kind of crazy to be. - free formulas or common models for writing novels and short stories
(shrieking) No, no, no, no, no! - what are dangerous spaces
The ones inside where our deepest dreams live. The ones between us and other people. Go read the stories, find out for yourself. - And this month’s WTF award goes to: never yawn like spiders
The management is constantly amazed at the infinite possibilities of people.
As long as one keeps searching, the answers come. — Joan Baez
Kelley, what a wonderful post! I’m going to be smiling throughout the screenwriting lecture today. Thank you.
Okay, I’ll give you a little something. A guess. My educated guess is that your blog post about naked people is number 6 because of a combination of the following: a) it’s been written recently (this July 15), b) many links lead to and away from it (blame it on people who commented on the post and have a blog or reading suggestion), c) you update your blog on a daily basis, which gives you a higher page rank on search engines and also gives you d) a big amount of content that keeps the spiders crawling and happy, that is why they don’t have to yawn while they index your pages.
My guessing powers also tell me that by writing this post and including all those hot keywords in it, you’ll keep showing up in the top WTF searches. Eyeballs are eyeballs, right? I hope your web is as sticky as it is interesting and manages to persuade them to do the smart thing and read your stories.
I liked this post a lot too. Great quote too. I had to test the real naked search words, and now you’re coming up 5th. Funny. Here’s another link for all of those people. Ran across this the other day and thought of your post. These six photographers get together to photograph themselves nude. They say it’s about getting to what they all “essentially have in common.”
Whenever I’m visiting here, I am feeling better or I’m going away thinking. So, here’s another question about naked or nearly naked people. ‘Why is there such feeling of freedom, liberation, joy at the seashore? I think it is because when we are all stripped down to our swimming suits, the class system goes right out the window. Nobody can pull rank while wearing in a bikini or a Speedo. I look at your nudity and realize I am you. Suddenly we all have more in common than we are separate.
The closer we live to the equator, the less we worry about clothes. Is nakedness a northern obsession?
The farther we live from the equator, the less clothing is an obsession and the more it’s a necessity. (As I understand it, woman also learned to use and control fire for cooking in Europe before she did so in equatorial Africa.) Yet even at the equator people ornament themselves, and I don’t think bodily shame is necessarily related to an obsession with clothing — more likely the reverse.
Kelley wrote, “Are we in search of sexual fantasy material? Are we curious how our bodies compare to others? Do we admire these naked people, lust after them, want to be them, or maybe just want to get a look at what itâs like to lie in the sun in nothing but our own skin⦔ Well, yes, to all the above. And probably other reasons too.
@ Jennifer — I enjoyed the photos, although the idea of climbing a wood or brick wall with an uncovered penis just made me want to do that draw-the-the-thighs-in clinch thing…
There are so many fewer images of naked men than women in the realm of “culturally acceptable.” It’s easy to attribute that to “the patriarchy” but I also wonder if it has something to do with self-protection… I was struck by how vulnerable these men looked, at the same time that they looked strong and confident.
I would enjoying feedback on this from someone who actually has a penis. I’ve always been curious what it’s like to live with one…
@ Anonymous — what a lovely thing to say. I’m glad that what you find here pleases you.
The beach is one of those interesting boundary-blurring places. We cover up our private bits so that no one will see them in public, but we cover them in ways designed to draw attention to them — and then we all wander around pretending not to look. At least I believe that women mostly pretend. I think girls and women are pretty commonly raised to not look at men’s crotches, even in those Speedos…. and so we are more alike on the beach in terms of body visibility, but some of us still have more “access” to the view.
Well, having had a penis for 57 years and going strong… I agree, the idea of climbing a wall of brick or wood (eek! splinters!) while nekkid is not too appealing. But then, would it would be so different for a possessor of breasts? I haven’t been nude outdoors that much, so I can’t say how vulnerable I’d feel about that. I suppose it would depend on the situation.
Penises, like breasts, vary greatly in the amount of protuberance and dangle; so do scrotal sacs. I’d imagine some men would find it rather uncomfortable to run with their parts flopping around, just as many women use sports bras for exercise. I have one of those that retracts rather nicely when not in use, so I don’t feel as vulnerable when nude as some men must.
About the relative scarcity of images of naked males, that seems to vary somewhat with culture. The nude male used to be the artistic ideal in the West until about the Renaissance, I think I read somewhere, and then the ideal became the female. But in numerous cultures the nude of either sex isn’t an important artistic subject. Think of Chinese or Japanese art; even in the classical Japanese erotica I’ve seen, full nudity doesn’t appear much if at all.
Your suggestion of self-protectiveness as a motive for covering up males makes sense, which is going to make me think some more about the different meanings of nudity and eroticism.
Duncan, thanks for the insights. I was raised by politically liberal parents, but they weren’t exactly Free Love Nudie Hippie types, and we were living in the South in the 60’s… so I never had anyone to talk to comfortably about what it was like being a guy.
When I was in 5th grade, I checked a book out of the library called What A Boy Wants To Know About Sex (at least that’s what I remember it being called, but I just googled it and can’t find it anywhere on the InterWeb, which is a very spooky feeling). I read this book so intently that it ended up being overdue, and it was the practice of the school library to send up a list of overdue notices to every homeroom class each week, which the teacher would read aloud…
Yep, it was pretty embarrassing. And you can add to that the fact that my mother was the school librarian.
But I managed to retain my curiosity in spite of the public humiliation (grin), and I’m still curious. The really interesting thing is that I never felt able to ask any of my male lovers about their experience of owning and operating boy bodies. Maybe that’s because it felt too intrusive, although I suspect that underneath that rationale was the fear that they’d ask me what being a woman was like and I wouldn’t know what to tell them. I was pretty disconnected from my own body in my youth.