I Want My Nudes Back

One of the first men I dated after my divorce was a director who told me about a new app called RAYA. I joined RAYA when we split. Sitting on my back porch, I was scared and thrilled to open it for the first time. I was publicly about to announce that I was horny and single. That feeling was new and at forty that was weird. The very first person to pop up on my RAYA feed was the director I’d dated, and his profile photo was a photo I had taken of him. I just sat there and stared at it, wondering if this was the future I had to look forward to. A future of men using photos I’d taken of them to lure other women. It was a fair start to this journey of my love life, continuously becoming the IP of others.

I started dating and fucking men and women a long time ago. I was working in an independent video store while we used VHS-long-ago. We called landlines, picked one coffee shop to loiter in for years, and wrote letters, we saw and heard from each other 80% less while-we-were-dating.

What I’m trying to say is that there was once a culture where we saw people naked for the first time in person.

This is no longer the case.

I’ve been dating men, and they’ve asked to see photos of me naked before seeing me naked in person. Men have asked to FaceTime me and jerk off or asked for voice notes of me cumming—before we have fucked.

I do none of this. After my marriage, I went into five years of monogamy between Harley and Adrian. During that time, I sent them nudes, etc., while they traveled. I don’t think about them. I don’t care what they did with them; I still trust them. I did save some of those photos.

I’m not in a monogamous relationship right now, and I am dating. I do not take sexual requests, and I don’t send nudes to men I’m not monogamous with.

I have discussed this with the women in my coven, and they all concur: THE MATH OF NUDES IS ROUGH. It is trigonometry. What do you show? Do we want our videos and photos back after a breakup? How do you decide what to send?

I recently sent this photo (below) to a man and instantly regretted it.