Nudes comment

Similar to the name of this site, years ago I went by Michele in California online in various places. One of them was Metafilter and I recently went through old comments of mine there looking for something in specific and in the process tripped across this comment, which starts off:

I'm a woman. I was sexually abused as a child. Art and literature that deal with nudity and sexuality were important to my recovery process and continue to be important to my personal growth.

My knee jerk reaction was: Damn I sometimes said some brilliant stuff. And it reminded me of things I had completely forgotten about.

There was exactly ONE blowjob photo I actually liked. It wasn't really porn, more like erotica, and I recall someone, somewhere on the Internet had linked to it and described it something like "This extremely artistic photo of a blowjob."

There were no visible genitals and I imagine if a child were young enough, they might not know enough to interpret the piece as sexual, though I'm not suggesting it was safe for work. 

I liked it because unlike most sexual art, it was evocative of intimacy rather than merely being sexually explicit and it was beautiful.

I'm not readily able to find it again, but revisiting that comment reminded me that I also for a time posted suggestive imagery to a Twitter account and figured out why the expression the bitten peach exists.

I've been celibate for medical reasons for roughly two decades but that doesn't mean I don't have a relationship to my sexuality. Being celibate has actually been a wonderful opportunity to learn how to stop feeling like a sex object whose only value in life is to look pretty enough for some man to want to use me and to figure out how I actually feel about my own sexuality and what my own sexuality is as a woman when not being merely mistreated by a male dominated world.

This is a space about sexuality and female empowerment through the eyes of a woman. To me, the two things are inseparable.

If that doesn't immediately make sense to you, stick around. See if you eventually have an epiphany.