When You Become Naked Inventory
Our feelings on being behind a paywall.
We have been asked many times to do interviews for vlogs and podcasts. Simple enough… someone wanted to talk to us about our life in naturism. We’ve had these kind of conversations dozens of times. Usually on social media, at resorts, and at our local naturist park.
We have said no almost every time. There are a few reasons for this hesitation.
At first, we didn’t have a clean argument behind it. It just felt like a no, or at least a not yet. It took a while to figure out why.
We write a lot about the line between nudity and sexuality. That being unclothed isn’t inherently sexual, and that naturism is a practice, not a performance. We truly believe that so we’ll keep writing about it. But our framework only holds true if the structure around the nudity matches the claim being made about it. And we don’t end up becoming someone’s naked inventory.
The First Hesitations
It would be dishonest to not say the first hesitation is built on fear. After many years since having a tumor removed from my head and the treatments since, I have learned I don’t respond well to rapid-fire questions on the spot. I’m not as quick in thought as I used to be. And the fear of dead air or saying something I didn’t mean because I didn’t have time to ponder the right response is very real to me. I could never be a politician.
There is also the fact that we are introverts, and our batteries run on a very specific charge. For us, an interview format that demands instant charisma and off-the-cuff verbal responses goes entirely against our natural tendencies. We prefer to process thoughts internally long before speaking, which means a live microphone can feel less like a conversation and more like an endurance test.
Drawing energy from quiet reflection means we lose it fast in prolonged, intense social interactions. For us, an interview requires a massive amount of “masking”… keeping up a hyper-vigilant level of energy, eye contact, and enthusiasm for an hour straight. By the time we are halfway through, the mental fatigue sets in, making it hard to stay sharp. It’s a big reason why we choose writing and photography and deliberately avoid video creation.
When all eyes (or ears) are locked on us, every pause feels ten times longer than it actually is. That brief silence while we gather our thoughts doesn’t feel like a thoughtful reflection to our own nervous systems; it feels like an awkward void we are failing to fill.
We aren’t necessarily afraid of the work. We just know our own limits, and we are exhausted by the theatrical audition and mental preparation required just to survive a format that doesn’t fit how we’re wired.
The Next Hesitations
Last year, we were asked to do an interview for a user on their Naturist Patreon account. When we looked them up, it seemed the account asking was performance-based… built around escalating tiers of access, the kind where the “free” content is a censored preview or non existent… and the real material lives behind a paywall that gets more expensive as it gets more revealing. When we were approached, that structure hadn’t been made explicit. It just existed, unstated, in the background of the request.
The Patreon page had Bronze, Silver, and Gold member pricing. Artistic, nonsexual, behind the scenes video, available in full to anyone paying the top rate. Monthly live calls with the creator. The language leaned hard on words like art, nonsexual, body freedom… the same vocabulary we use constantly, because it’s true and it matters. But the structure underneath the words felt like it was doing something different than the words were saying. Their entire presence on social media was censored. So the only way to actually see them nude was to open your wallet and “Pay To See More”.
After looking at that account, we went looking at others out of curiosity. We found the same shape on page after page of naturist accounts… different names, same tiers, same words like ‘exclusive’ and ‘uncensored’ and ‘before anyone else.’ This isn’t one person’s choice. It’s a template.
We aren’t arguing about definitions of art or what counts as naturism. We also respect that charging more for higher production value, longer runtimes, or direct one-on-one time is completely reasonable. The contradiction specifically occurs when the primary commodity scaling up across tiers is nude human visibility. More money buys more skin, and more personal access.
If access to a piece of content increases specifically as a function of how much skin or how much intimacy it contains, the content is functioning as a commodity… regardless of what label is attached to it. Calling something “nonsexual expression” doesn’t change what the tier ladder is doing if the tier ladder is priced by exposure. The words and the incentive structure were pointing in opposite directions, and the structure wins, because structure is what people actually pay for.
After looking at these accounts, Corin said she doesn’t want to be someone’s for profit performance inventory.
“Everything online is for-profit for someone”
It’s tempting to wave off Corin’s words with a shrug. Everything online is monetized somehow. An Instagram creator sharing an interview clip profits too… through engagement, audience growth, whatever comes next. Even our own website and Substack offer subscriptions and Ko-Fi donations if people choose to support us. So what’s actually different here?
The difference is between diffuse profit and direct profit. When someone shares your interview because it’s interesting, you’re one piece of content among many, and any benefit to them is general and downstream. When your interview sits inside a paid tier structure, you stop being shared content and start being inventory… a line item positioned next to “The Secret Collection” and “behind the photos” clips, priced the same way, sold the same way. The transaction isn’t abstract anymore. It’s “pay this much, get more of this.”
When your voice and likeness are locked behind someone else’s paywall, you lose control over who accesses your voice and images and what context it sits beside. That loss of agency is entirely foreign to how we chose to operate. Everything we publish, every article, every photograph, every thought we share on our website and Substack, is completely free, open, and accessible to anyone who wanders onto the page.
When you put your work out into the open internet for free, you accept that people will read it, disagree with it, or share it in ways you can’t always control. But you still own the context. Your words live in a space you built, surrounded by the principles you laid out. We wrote a long time ago about our goals in Why We Are Naturism “Advocates!”
Handing that same interview over to a tiered subscription model means surrendering that context entirely. Your voice becomes a marketing tool sitting directly beside content you didn’t create, for an audience you didn’t vet, packaged on a ladder where the ultimate incentive could turn into “pay more, see more.” You go from being a participant in a conversation to being part of someone else’s product catalog, and once that door is closed, you no longer have a say in who holds the key.
That’s the part that was hard to name at first. Not profit itself… profit is everywhere, and we don’t begrudge anyone building a business. It was the specific mechanism of becoming a consumable: something whose value to the platform increases in proportion to how much of a person it reveals.
Why this matters beyond one interview
This isn’t really about turning down one conversation. It’s about a pattern we think the naturist community should be able to name clearly, because the language of naturism… body acceptance, authenticity, nonsexual embodiment… is genuinely useful, and it’s also borrowable. It can describe an honest practice, or it can dress up a paywall so that a support tier reads as artistic mission instead of what it functionally is: pay more, see more skin.
Both things can be true about the same account. Someone can believe, sincerely, that their movement pieces are nonsexual and still have built a pricing structure that behaves exactly like the thing naturism spends most of its energy trying to distinguish itself from. Intent doesn’t fully control how structure reads. We’ve made that argument in this publication before, about our own mistakes. This was a chance to notice it in a request aimed at us.
We aren’t saying no to conversations entirely. We are saying “maybe” to things that stay open… public articles, free podcasts, open discussions where anyone can walk up and listen without needing a subscription. The moment a conversation with us is boxed up and used to populate a tiered pricing ladder, it changes character. And it’s not the character we are choosing for our style of naturism.
In fact, we recently said yes.
After some conversation with Evan from Planetnude about his New Nude Podcast, we agreed to an interview in the fall. Because his approach completely flips the script to the other requests. He offered questions in advance so our slow-thinking brains can actually process. He edits his own shows rather than demanding a high-wire live performance. Most importantly, he gave us final editorial review with the absolute right to kill the episode if it doesn’t feel right. And it isn’t behind a paywall.
That isn’t inventory. That’s just a conversation between people who care about the same philosophy, built on mutual respect and open access. It turns out we aren’t closed off to interviews at all. We just require the people inviting us into the room to remember that we are human beings sharing a story, not a product tier waiting to be unlocked.
After over six years in naturism, we are still newbs. We are still learning and growing ourselves so we don’t know where this all will go. In the end, we said no to that first request and to many others so far, or at least not like that.
It isn’t because interviews are dangerous, or because Patreon is bad, or because anyone involved is acting in bad faith. We just feel there’s a real difference between being asked to share a story and being asked to become part of a product line… and once you feel that difference, it’s hard to unfeel it.
Kevin & Corin
If you’d like to support what we do, you can choose a monthly supporter subscription or a one time donation through Ko-fi. Everything we write and post is always free, but this helps fuel our late-night naked potato-salad-fuelled rants!
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