So I just spent the better part of two days removing a line. We’re talking about a tiny, black, curving line a few centimeters tall. This row of pixels is so offensive, apparently, Jeff Bezos has taken it upon himself to protect us from it, whether we want it or not.
Ah, but Nick, you may be saying—doesn’t everything start with a line? Add a few curves, and you’ve got a peach. Or, God forbid, a buttocks. But complete the picture with a sexy girl in a sexy pose and cover THE LINE with a strip of cloth, and now the sexy girl is “safe” for kids. It isn’t what THE LINE is but what it represents that has Amazon wasting untold millions on buttocks detection software—it’s the need to protect the public from the unpardonable, shameless idea that we can exist AS WE ARE.
Confused? Let me explain: next month, I am attending an adult book fair in Dade City, Florida. This isn’t a p@rnographic event, mind you, but some of the books on display may include material not suitable for children. Nobody under eighteen, I am told, will be permitted onto the floor. So I figured this would be the perfect place for me to showcase my naturist heroine from Ages of Aenya and The Feral Girl. But try as I might, I was unable to design the custom tablecloth I wanted for the event. At first, I just assumed this was a technical issue, that perhaps I’d uploaded the wrong file type, or that the image took up too many megabytes. Only after an hour did it dawn on me that Amazon’s built-in AI system was rejecting the piece due to a few centimeters of crack. There is more nudity on daytime TV, more nudity in art galleries across the country, FAR more nudity on the Sistine Chapel. And here’s the thing: I AM NOT SELLING this piece on Amazon. NOBODY but my patrons at the Dade City Book Fair will see it, yet Jeff still deems it necessary to protect us from ourselves.
As someone who believes in the decency of the human body, I don’t have any problem with children reading my fiction, and in fact, I encourage it. The Aenya Series promotes empathy, equality, and environmentalism — everything, I believe, children ought to be taught. Thelana is a role model for girls of all ages. Likewise, Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 children’s classic, The Jungle Book, stars a fully naked hero, Mowgli, and early illustrated editions weren’t afraid to show kids THE LINE. Somehow, those kids turned out all right, even without Bezos’ Orwellian parenting.
If you’re a naturist, like me, and you believe the human body is natural and healthy and good, the censors at Amazon will have you know you’re not allowed to think this way. Sure, you can practice your beliefs in secret, and you may try to express them on the few platforms, like WordPress, that still allow freedom of expression, but as censorship grows, we are increasingly pushed to the sidelines. When our voices are shut down, when we are prohibited from defining ourselves, it becomes all too easy for bad actors to demonize us. This is how nudism becomes illegal. This is how people living in nudist families lose their children. This isn’t mere hyperbole. Naturist YouTubers Jesse O’Brien and Hector Martinez were quietly banned from the platform despite the fact that YouTube’s policy allows nudity for “educational purposes.” Naturist podcaster Stephane Deschenes lost his Twitter account for discussing children in naturism and more recently had his Patreon account shut down for similar reasons. And I fear it is only a matter of time before WordPress decides I need to go, too.
This level of censorship has nothing to do with community standards. Hate speech and nudity have nothing in common and, if anything, naturism teaches us to value every body. Across the state of Florida, Thelana’s naked rump appears in comic shops, bookstores, and libraries, and NOT once in five years has anyone ever complained to me about it. I have had families browse my wares and even buy my books for their children, and no parent admonished me for the LINE Amazon deems it necessary to protect us from. Most Americans I’ve met take no issue with innocent, natural nudity; it’s the rare, modern-day Puritans we have to appease, the 18th-century moral minority who blame women for sexual violence while secretly supporting a billion-dollar p@rn industry that treats women’s bodies as commodities. If you can’t fetishize skin, how can you profit from it?
Social media platforms are using new AI tools to censor us out of existence because innocence is a danger to their bottom line. The message is clear, no matter who you are or what your age: bodies exist for sex and sex only.
So I did the only thing I could: I pulled up another image, the one with Thelana overlooking Hedonia, and used Photoshop to hide her offensive LINE. It’s a shame to ruin such a beautiful work of art, like spray painting graffiti over Michelangelo’s David, but the LINE is worse than the swastika, apparently (countless books are permitted to show those lines), and we must be protected from it at all costs.
Being and Nakedness 
Leave a comment