I adore sending nudes. I adore love languages too, but like Riese, I think they’re best when broken up into personalized nuggets. For those of us subscribed to it, I’m sure we all get that the concept is helpful but a little broad. There’s room for personalization.
A critical part of my personalized love language is sending nudes. It means more to me than most. Yes, there’s sharing an intimate part of myself for someone’s enjoyment — a modern take on WWII-era lovers mailing over a photograph. There’s knowing that I’m keeping it interesting and fiery with people who are into me. There’s the self-esteem boost. All of it, sure. I’m also an online sex worker. This extra dimension changes up a lot. When I send nudes to someone for free, you bet your ass they’re high quality. Downright marketable quality. More literally than most, my sending nudes is giving my labor and skills freely to cool people.
My dual-citizenship as a rampant slut who loves sending nudes and a sex worker deeply concerned with safety makes me oddly well-positioned to talk about it. Here are some crucial hows and ifs of sending nudes as one of your love languages.
Assert your reasons and boundaries
Before you start airdropping nudes beyond a trusted circle, have a sit and think about why you want to send more nudes. The prerequisite spirit of every love language is that you enjoy doing it and it’s intended to benefit someone else. Love languages should be selfless or reciprocal expressions.
Sending nudes can become a vehicle for love and affection, but we’re not running a pornographic NGO. Affirmation and flattery are sensible reasons, but there’s a line between a gentle ego boost and leaning on this as your new source of Self Esteem™. If you want to make it a love language, your hot amateur content should be sent with love, not expectation.
Boundary setting is critical. Clear sexual boundaries are clear to everyone in the engagement. Their value is doubled if the nature of an act (sending nudes) is sexual, but the intention is platonic or uncertain. I’ve written about making a protocol for exactly this. Having a very sober think-over about where the goods end up and how you’d like people to treat it establishes two important things. Firstly, it helps you determine if this is what you really want when urgent horniness isn’t tugging at your sensibilities. Secondly, it’s practice for setting boundaries. Not everyone is good at it, but you’ll need to improve to start doing this.
Mitigate the risks
Nothing on the internet gets deleted. However, a private connection between devices is much better isolated than posting yourself on Bluesky. The other ‘however’ is that once files reach someone else’s device, the only things protecting your data are a social contract and respect for the law. Data breaches happen. Devices get stolen. People violate trust. If you’re lucky, your jurisdiction has applicable revenge porn or privacy laws, but I doubt anyone reading this trusts the justice system to handle this with the grace it deserves. Just assume the law isn’t on your side.
Data security
Data security is the ‘easy’ part. The core rules of data security are:
- All security is a conflict between safety and convenience.
- All security requires compromises. Making an informed decision to compromise and seeing it fail later is not a personal failure.
- Data spread across more devices is easier to recover… and breach.
- Ensure that there are always two independent security measures between adversaries and sensitive data.
- Your passwords will be leaked during mass attacks. Two-factor authentication (2FA) will save you from worse damage.
- If you’re not ready to lose control of some sensitive data, you’re not ready to possess it.
With those pointers in mind, here are some ways you can implement better data security — or your nudes and other stuff.
- Have two-factor authentication on anything that can be used against you. That means anything containing nudes or a way to wreck your credit rating. Same vibe.
- One up-to-date cloud backup is adequate. It’s the best mix of protection and convenience.
- Always put two barriers between you and your nudes. A drawn unlock pattern + a pin-locked photo app. Fingerprint login + a 2FA-secured cloud storage app. Facial recognition + a password manager.
- Keep your password recovery measures up to date.
- NO leaving your naughties lying around on USBs or portable hard drives.
Like I said, data security is the easy part. The part that requires entrusting yourself to another person? That’s harder. That doesn’t fit into bulleted lists.
Social safety
In my experience, the social contract is all about making an informed decision to send and being gentle on yourself when it’s done. Before sending this precious, private content, make an informed decision about the recipient. Do they have responsibility and integrity? Can you entrust them with the little things before this bigger thing? Practice making this decision and learn to trust yourself.
Then hit Send.
Once it leaves the nest, feel free to grieve a little. Grieve for the inherent shortcomings of data security and people. Especially the latter. Accept that the more nudes you send, the greater the chance that some will get misplaced or misused. Realize that this is true for any act of love. Anytime we give a part of ourselves away in confidence, someone can fail or abuse our trust. It’s better to grieve ahead of time than panic in the middle of an incident.
Once you’ve sat with those feelings, forgive yourself preemptively for the off-chance it does go wrong. You created something precious and gave it to someone with loving intentions. You’ve done nothing wrong. It won’t be your fault if a mass data breach downloads and copies your files into an undisclosed server. It won’t be your fault if the recipient violates the boundaries you set. It won’t be your fault if a phone gets stolen or that saucy text goes to the wrong group chat. Personalized acts of love should always travel both ways, and you deserve to feel good about what you’re doing.
Your expressions of love demand no justification. The failures of others are not your responsibility.
Know when to stop
Again, something that applies to any show of affection for others. You are putting in the effort, and it’s your right to stop when things feel ‘off’. A sudden disconnect between your self-esteem and sexting? Did someone hurt you? It’s starting to feel like a chore? Give yourself the time and space to see the next step.
I stopped sex work the first time because my eating disorder was torpedoing my self-esteem. I needed over five years before I was ready to use the selfie camera. If this isn’t for you, stopping is always the right call. The day you chose to stop was the perfect day for it. The timespan you needed to feel ready again was exactly right. The last set of photos you took was exactly what you needed at that moment.
Send nudes (love)
I’ve specifically omitted information about taking nude photos because the wider internet is replete with that knowledge. The mindset behind this special act is more important to me. ‘Cause I’m a nerd.
I think I’ve explained what I think about when I show my body to people. It’s not just a photo. It never was. It’s a rich expression of trust. It’s allowing others to access me in a way that is personalized and titillating. I’m sharing the fruits of labor that I normally charge for. It’s not a conventional love language like baking or listening, but we’re all gays here. We of all people know that love shouldn’t be boxed into polite categories. There’s just no fun in that.
