“Nudity is natural but not until a person accepts and loves who they are.” – Jolene Blalock
Category: BODY PRIDE
Body Pride at Come As You Are!!!
We are expanding! Thanks to the awesome folks at Come As You Are, Body Pride will have its first workshop at the super amazing sexy time store on DECEMBER 30th at 6pm.
This particular workshop will be a ‘Girls Only’ evening. A note on ‘Girls Only’ (which I like because it reminds me of little boys in cartoons who hang the ‘Boys Only’ sign on the treehouse… except we get to hang it outside the room that we are all dancing around naked in): The Body Pride events are not exclusive. All of the people involved with Body Pride and I’d Tap That go above and beyond to ascertain we make you feel warm and fuzzy, even if it’s just a little bit. “Girls Only” includes everyone who identifies as a woman.
I am a strong believer in acknowledging someone as a fellow human being. Gender, sexuality, hair color, race, religion, age – all come as interesting points of conversation. Really, I just want to throw some love at you. Deal with it.
However, the next workshop will be ‘Co-Ed’. Or… Co-Ederybody… Lawl… Meaning: EVERYONE is welcome. Date TBA, but I will keep you posted.
Contact me (ck@tobeaslut.com) or your host for the evening, Julia Lewis (julia.anne.lewis@gmail.com) to query about signing up for a slot!
Much love my sexy chickens.
Tell An 11-Year-Old They’re Beautiful
In my oh-so dramatically turbulent teenaged years, I had a mild obsession with the word ‘beautiful’.
Or rather, I should clarify, I had a mild obsession with maybe one day, if I was lucky, someone would refer to me as being ‘beautiful’.
I’ve recently been delving into all corners of my mind trying to pull out all of the things that I have forgotten to remember. (As a creative writing exercise, of course.)
There is one girl, let’s call her Suzie, she must be about 10 or 11. She and her mother/aunt/older sister were regulars at Fran’s (a 50’s style 24 hour diner I used to work at). This girl was overweight. By the standards that doctors give for healthy and average weight frames for girls her height and age, she was in the red zone. Every time she came into the diner, she and her chaperone would have just finished swimming at the ‘Y’. I know this because she told me this, right before she ordered the usual burger and fries along side the king size chocolate milkshake’s that are one of the trademarks at Fran’s (they also acted as the bane of my existence for the year and a half I worked there).
Suzie, at least once every meal she ate at the diner, would stare up at me from the table and tell me how pretty she thought I was.
Not once did I ever tell Suzie how beautiful she was.
Perhaps I was struck by the honesty that tends to spill forth from children’s lips. Perhaps, amidst so many other people, bathing in the florescent lights and pop rock, I did not think that I would be able to be sincere enough that she would believe me. Perhaps I was thinking about how differently my life would have gone had some complete stranger that I thought was ‘pretty’ told me that she thought I was beautiful when I was 11.
To recap what being 11 is like: I had just begun to discover the correlation with how greasy my hair was or how tight-fitting my clothes were to my social worth in popularity. Even with secretly starting to shave my legs, wearing training bras, and wearing 5-inch hooker shoes and a skimpy little dress to my grade 6 graduation, I was by no means ‘cool’. I liked every single boy, but was convinced, due to my low level in the social food chain, that not a single boy was looking at me.
No one told me I was beautiful until I was 15.
To be fair, in my own mind, I hadn’t reached any sort of impeccable beauty standard. I was not lithe and athletic. I was not the sort of voluptuous that stopped cars or caught the eyes of men. Had I recognized that I had a waist and what the wonders of a proper bra could do, I would have had a very different high-school experience. But alas.
The first person to use the word ‘beautiful’ in reference to me (that wasn’t a doting relative) was a 17-year-old boy who was unknowingly hitting a homerun with this word that oh-so nonchalantly escaped his lips.
I idolized him. Over the month that I had known him at camp I had continued to feed my brain whatever little detail I could about the delightfulness of his movie-star self: his unwashed, dark curls that bounced just below his eyebrows, the aviator sunglasses that didn’t quite sit right on his nose, but made him seem contradictingly law-enforcing and law-breaking all at once, the puss-filled pimples that were begging to be popped and loved – oh the character an uneven complexion aroused from my brain, the misunderstood loner who was just hit by a bad bunch of teen-genes.
We even had a few moments of utter ecstatical adoration for each other: catching each others eyes across the room. Slightly grazing shoulders. Being paired up in some form of tag game. Had known how to masturbate at this age, I would’ve been going at it everyday in the shower with the thoughts of him that were, by the minute, dissolving whatever else I had absorbed in my short time on Earth.
The real story came about when I officially returned to camp as a counselor instead of a ‘counselor in training’ (apparently, as long as you are paying to be there, you are still, technically, a camper, despite the title change – it was also at this point that I discovered how nun-tight they are about preventing camper-counselor relationships. I quickly realized how many of my male counselors avoided me in the years at my camp due to my exorbitantly obvious crushes on them…).
The day I returned, there was an instant click of a switch and some rather painfully obvious forms of universal signs presented themselves in front of us: on the ride to camp I was squished into the seat beside him. With our legs touching, he hands me the fortune he broke free of his recently consumed Chinese desert: You will find happiness beside you. If the truck had not been full of my other people I likely would’ve jumped him then and there – had I known how to kiss.
Because no one told me I was beautiful, I did as any normal teenager who hasn’t yet read a plethora of novels would do: I based my looks off magazine, TV and my peers. How this worked for my brain and self-confidence was that every time I looked up into a mirror I saw the hugeness of my forehead, the lankiness of my hair, the braces, the thin lips, the belly that cascaded in the lumps and bumps of a rolling hillside, the lack of booty and the uncompromising, thick, dark pubic hair. Not to mention two boulders attached to my chest that would roll out of any contraption you could buy at LaSenza.
To be quite frank, when this teenage camp-crush whispered “Morning, beautiful” into my ear right after we had done the Morning Freshie (a tortuous experiment enforced by the camp leader whose genius mind figured stampeding into a freezing cold Northern lake at 7 AM would be a great way to not only wake kids up, but keep their hygiene level at a decent level of stink), I didn’t believe him. In my normal state of being, I knew I was nothing shiny to gaze upon, but at the break of dawn, in a tight, unflattering bathing suit, after I had doused my body in sub-arctic lake water… Go fuck yourself.
But nonetheless, a shiver of endorphins and dopamine ran up and down my spine that sent myself the message that I was living out the dream in that moment. The rest of my life would likely go to shit at that point, because the boy I had a gynormous crush on was telling me I was beautiful – and this would be the climax of my lifes story.
But this was not the case. As you can tell by the picture above, I would grow to be an insanely beautiful lady, with the class and grace of a child raised in the company of royalty and strict nannies.
I’m not saying that no good evolved of my childhood ugly ducklingness. Instead of just assuming boys would be interested in me, I ordered books like ‘The Art of Seduction” off the internets and studied about non-monogamy. Which was a hoot in its own way. But, if someone had told me, if someone in their 20’s with a funky haircut, a neat tattoo, someone who wore Doc Martens and black eyeliner, or some babely chick had looked at me and told me without flinching, “You are so beautiful” … the heartbreaking, self-hatred I had formed for my body at the age 11, may have diminished some.
When you were 11, and a complete stranger of a young woman told you they thought you were beautiful, how would it have effected you?
The Future of The Naked Beings
OH HEY HI THERE.
It’s been a while, eh? I have not abandoned you my internet besties. I have been off galavanting in the real world meeting so many more awesome folks, planning for bigger and more extensive nudity and happy sexuality times.
I was perusing the event page for our next I’d Tap That shindig (August 31st, Capes, Comics & Cunts styles) and there is just an abundance of awesome coming from so many people that I have yet to meet. Our last mixer drew in nearly 400 people. We had the awesome DJ Ray Ruby playing kick-ass music all night long, photographer Becca Lemire snapping beauts like this:
It was a night of epic awesome half-naked people in their PJ’s.
And the last Body Pride?! Holy moly flying fuck. I could not love you women more (and men). It was our 12th and largest Body Pride yet. 9 of us women sat around for my last scheduled Body Pride in Toronto and interacted on a level that surpasses all bar conversations, all childhood friendships, and all drunken texts.
So. What’s next, you ask?
What happens to ‘To Be A Slut” when she moves across the country to a tiny city with lots of whales and super cheap rent? What happens to “To Be A Slut” when she gets hitched and and then leaves this booming, incredible city behind?
Don’t think I haven’t thought about this, you gorgeous internet-dwellers. I have plans. So much plans.
First and foremost, Newfoundland is not scratched off the list of me attempting to hold naked parties there… If Body Pride could go national… Oh man.
Secondly, Body Pride is not disappearing in Toronto. After much thought and deliberation, I have chosen a wonderfully amazing woman who attended a workshop a few months ago and I have just been getting more and more excited about her. Julia Lewis will be running her first Body Pride on August 24th (7pm – 11pm).
credit: Jennifer Moher Photography
Julia is pretty friggin’ stellar. For the past few weeks, she has been taking rigorous notes about the ‘how-to’s’ of running the workshops. All future workshops will be run from a convenient location (MUCH more accessible than my tiny Beaches apartment) that is owned by a dear friend of mine (and of I’d Tap That). Khadeja will continue on as our magnificent naked photographer, and I will continue to be organizing the attendees (mostly because I want to know all of you still). But our lovely Julia shall be filling in as the ‘conversation facilitator ‘ (self-given title) in my absence. She seems very excited. Which makes me excited. She also wrote chu guys a lil summ’n summ’n:
I think people need to be naked more often. No, really. Growing up, I had very low self-esteem, and was very private about (and ashamed of) my body. Throughout high school and in the time since then, I’ve worked at building my relationship with myself; at loving myself – both inside and out. I’ve come to a place where nudity feels natural to me, and I have a healthy level of respect and love for my body. Part and parcel with that is my interest in human sexuality and the ways we look at and talk about our own bodies and the bodies of others. When a good friend linked me to a post on Caitlin’s blog, I could see immediately that I agreed with her line of thinking, and found her writing engaging and thoughtful. This led me to explore her website further, and when I happened upon the Body Pride section, I knew I had to attend the workshop. I mean, come on: a group of women sitting nude in a room, talking through their relationships with their bodies and the obstacles encountered therein? Sign me up!
The night of my first Body Pride, I went in expecting to feel like an old hand; after all, I had already been through my journey to accepting my body – but I figured I would be able to pass along some wisdom to any attendees who were less enlightened than I. How arrogant of me. What I found instead was a warm, safe, accepting atmosphere where I shared parts of myself I didn’t know I was keeping secret. We all told stories about how we’d grown up and our experiences with our own sexuality. It was clear that everyone in the room felt safe to share these most intimate parts of ourselves. Then, we all got up and danced to rockin’ music, taking some of the silliest and most fun pictures I have ever seen.
We all have insecurities, but I have discovered that nudity can be very freeing. That night felt like freedom. So when Caitlin approached me about facilitating a couple of workshops after her move East, I jumped at the chance – almost literally. I’m super excited to embark on this journey with Caitlin, Khadeja, and everyone else involved, and I can’t wait to meet you at the next Body Pride!
And so, with Julia on board, I bid you farewell Toronto. I leave for the East Coast in one week. Do not fear, my chickens, I will be back.
Co-Ed Body Pride
So. It happened.
It actually happened a week ago. But you know what’s funny? How much shtuff you have to do when you decide to have a wedding in two months… ALAS. Here I am, internet! Here I am. With stories, to boot!
Last week I got naked – as I do every week with a handful of wonderful and empowering women – but this time, dudes were involved. Caitlin! I hear you holler. YOU HAD AN ORGY?!
No, my loves. No orgies are to be had in any realm of Body Pride. Surprisingly, it was freakishly similar to our Girls Only Body Prides. When you get down to the nitty gritty of it all, boys have a lot of the same hang-ups that chicks do… they are just framed in a different manner.
What I took away from my experience hanging out with 3 amazing males and 4 incredible females was that it is a darned ass shame that we can’t just be naked together (without bumping uglies… unless its from dancing… interpretively…)
These are our last three groups of amazing girlies. And manlies.
Pretty amazing. I’d say.
I have a bucketload of really really incredibly hilarious jokey shots that I’m hoping to combine and do something with. Stay tuned for those bad boys. Okay. I have another BP starting in an hour and ten minutes. YES.
Some Favorite Moments of Body Pride
CO-ED B.P: Naked Girls (And Boys) Make My Heart Sing
Look how absolutely amazing these girls are.
Body Pride is actually becoming what we ever so dearly need in this society. I pinky promise you. Ask any girl who has attended and they will only bellow in ecstatic joy of how much fun they had and will try their darndest to convince you, that you, too, should attend.
And with this, I bring to you: Co-Ed Body Pride.
Our first Co-Ed Body Pride will be taking place Friday June 8th, 2012. At this moment, there are 4 spots for men, and 2 spots for girls. If you would like to come and I do not know you, a friendly interview situation will be going down. Don’t get nervous – seriously, I just want to make sure that the environment we will be creating is a positive one and I just wanna make sure our head’s are in the same place… I’m fairly consistently goofy – the interview is nothing to get antsy about.
Rules in place for Co-Ed Body Pride:
1. Most importantly, this is not a sexual environment and never will be. I totally love boners and I think a well-lubricated vagina is a beautiful thing, but we shant be acting upon these urges at Body Pride. If you get an erection: awesome, I will most likely sleazily thumbs-up you and raise an eyebrow, but that will be the extent of how far we go. If you find someone damn sexy and they are keen on looking for new friends/sexy partners, I happily urge you to hit on them as soon as you exit the workshop.
2. Everyone must be naked. Sometimes we have girls in panties, that’s cool, I ain’t gunna force you to undress, and if that is your state of comfort, I’d rather you not have a panic attack and remain pantyed-up. BUT, due to the level of awesome that Co-Ed Body Pride will be, I would like everyone attending to be ready and prepared to shimmy down to the bare bottomed.
3. If I have more people interested than we have room for, all interested pre-approved names will go into a lottery and will be randomly selected. If all goes well, we will have another one and the names that weren’t selected will get priority over any new interests (And let’s be honest, they are going to be kind of epic, so we will have many more).
4. No couples. People who are in relationships are good to go, and the both of you can totally come to separate workshops – but, you just can’t come together. Sorryz.
Co-Ed Body Pride will be $45 (cash only) and will include food/(non/)alcoholic bevvies/and a professional photoshoot from my brilliant co-worker Khadeja.
BAM.
Yeah. I did it. Your very own nudist experience in the city without it seeming weirdly cult-like.
You’re welcome.
Oh Joyous Day, More Nudity
Nude Photo Revolutionaries
I always love finding more women who not only love to be naked, but are also proud to be naked. This is an amazing project put together by Maryam Namazie.
Excerpt from freethoughtblogs.com:
On 8 March 2012 International Women’s Day, the Nude Photo Revolutionaries Calendar was launched in homage to Egyptian atheist, student and blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy who posted a nude photo of herself, announcing the post on Twitter under the hashtag, #NudePhotoRevolutionary.
The calendar is the idea of campaigner Maryam Namazie to support Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and join her ‘screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy’.
Namazie says: ‘What with Islamism and the religious right being obsessed with women’s bodies and demanding that we be veiled, bound, and gagged, nudity breaks taboos and is an important form of resistance.’
Get your calendar here.
My Lovelies
From our last workshop. Just gorgeous!
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