Nordic Naked Girls Photos
Olegario Benford
What do you hope being in the Body Issue will do for women's cross-country skiing?
I think, as a society, we tend to celebrate when men show off their bodies, and then sometimes we're judging when women do it. And I think it's really important to say, "Hey, girls can be strong. Girls can have muscles." Cross-country skiing takes a lot of power and endurance, and it's also a graceful sport. And I hope to be able to show those elements in the photos and to inspire younger women to be OK with who they are and what they look like.
Scandinavia has a casual approach to nudity, and I'm not talking just mixed saunas (which are common throughout Europe). Many Americans are amazed at what runs on prime-time TV. My friend told me that Norway has mixed PE classes with boys and girls showering together from the first grade on. In Norwegian hospitals, she told me, women who need an X-ray are casually sent from the doctor's office down the hall, past the waiting public, to the X-ray room after they've stripped to the waist. "No one notices and no one cares," she said. Scandinavians are quick to point out the irony that while much of America goes into a tizzy over a teacher who shows students a photo of Michelangelo's naked David, it is America that statistically has the biggest problem with sex-related crimes.
So during these project, we spoke to activists, law enforcement officers, scholars, lawyers, and we were also able to interview about 20 survivors of abuse in 10 different countries, both in Asia and in Europe. We at SCMP ran a three-part series, which were like three in-depth features, and the first story that I worked on for this project was focus on the growing number of cases involving women who see their intimate images being released by partners, friends or acquaintances. As I mentioned before, these cases have increased in recent years and seem to have reached a peak during the pandemic. So this first story delves into the role of this type of nonconsensual images within the traditional porn industry. Our focus was on videos that were made and released without consent, not about videos produced by actors who chose to be there. And the reason why we focus on these was because many victims we talked to said they struggled to have their photos and videos removed from porn websites and other platforms. So the stories are both about the trauma that women need to deal with, but also about how difficult it is for them to seek justice. That was like the first long feature for this project. And then we published a second story which was focused on chatting groups, sharing nonconsensual content of women and also abusive images of children. For this piece in particular, I monitored a number of Telegram groups for several months and it was shocking to see how much content is out there. I'm talking about hundreds of photos and videos of women and girls, but also content of children, both young boys and young girls. Some of these groups share naked photos, explicit sex videos and also mobile phones or other personal details without the consent of women. In some instances, they openly referred to leaks of personal information. And I also saw users asking specifically for materials that involve children.
On the Frankfurt-Toronto leg, my mother and I sat behind a fairly large man with a shaved head who kept looking over at me from time to time, as if he wanted to start a conversation. My thirteen-year-old brain did not register much, but I did think he was weird. At some point, my mother went to the loo. The weirdo now turned around to talk to me. He discovered I spoke English, and showed me some photos of naked women and asked some questions. Apparently, he was returning to Canada from Bosnia. He stopped talking as my mother reappeared, and I said nothing to no-one.
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