Do you take naked selfies?

It seems like celebrities have a penchant for taking naked selfies, but apparently they aren’t alone.

What is it about celebrities that they all seem to have naked pictures of themselves practically everywhere? And if it’s not pictures it’s videos or embarrassing messages on their answering machines or whatever.

Maybe there are lots of people out there who like taking pictures of their private parts and posting them all over the net. So, in the interest of thorough investigative reporting, I just did a search on the phrase ‘naked selfie’ and got 20,200,000 hits! So I guess there really are LOTS of people out there who do this. And if they show up on Google that means people are sharing them with someone.

Maybe it’s because of technology. When I was younger the only way to take a private picture was with a Polaroid camera and you only got one copy. Otherwise, unless you had your own darkroom you had to send your film off to some faceless lab where you didn’t know who was going to see them.

Maybe if digital cameras, smartphones and the Internet had been around back when I was young and handsome (Go ahead and get the jokes out of the way, I’ll wait until you finish laughing…done? Good. Now to continue.)

As I was saying. When I was young and handsome I might have taken some selfies without my shirt on, but that’s probably about as far as I would have been willing to go.

I wonder if there is something about the celebrity mentality that makes them want to take naked pictures of themselves. Perhaps if you want to succeed in show business you have to believe, deep down in your heart, that you are absolutely, remarkably, stunningly beautiful. So beautiful that people really want to see you naked.

Or maybe they are just doing the same thing that 20 million other people are doing but we don’t really care about most of them unless they are celebrities.

I can understand why some people might want to take naked pictures of themselves. Bodybuilders who spend months or years doing endless repetitions of unpleasant exercises to sculpt their physiques until they think they look like gods probably take lots of naked selfies. Porn stars who make a living being naked and…er…um…you know…also probably take naked selfies and much more explicit snaps I imagine (not that I would know anything about that).

And there are probably a lot of women out there who want to show off their brand new DDD implants.

Then again, maybe it’s an age thing. When you’re in your teens and twenties you do a lot of stupid things, and naked selfies could just be the latest high-tech version of making a fool of yourself in public.

I don’t really know what the motivation might be for taking naked selfies and putting them in places where other people can find them. But I think it’s pretty obvious by now, even to the most oblivious star or starlet, if you don’t want anyone to see you naked then don’t take naked pictures of yourself and store them on the internet.

(By the way, the photo at the top was a self portrait taken by sometimes controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in 1980.)