“With 18.6 K Instagram followers I’m what you could call a very minor instagram fitness star. I’ve enriched my life by putting it online. @traineredith is a showcase of my healthy lifestyle, workouts and my clients’ progress pics. It also heavily showcases my physique in both an inspirational and self-promotional manner. While I refer to @traineredith in the third person and as an entity, it’s very much me. Unlike many other IG accounts out there I’ve never tried to manufacture a pixel-perfect being and life. I try to be the real, genuine and multi-faceted person I am in life on there. I’ve been told many times by my followers that they appreciate that. But it is, still, a curated life portrayed there.
There’s a side of my me @traineredith just can’t completely own. And that’s my sexuality and lifestyle. I’m Queer, poly and kinky — all things of which I’m proud and don’t hide in my day-to-day life with friends and acquaintances. I’ve mentioned in passing that I’m these things on @traineredith but I try maintain for the most part a squeaky-clean image there. I’m still cashing in on endorsements for all-kinds of fitness related products, and attracting much of my personal training clientele from there.
But that account was starting to feel so constrained and a bit void of a large part of me. I started this other account, @edendeplume , partly to showcase my ever-expanding collection of nude and erotic photos. But more than just posting thirst-trap photos of my bare ass it’s meant to be an avenue for artistic expression, of which I was starved. It’s a place I can write about sexuality, relationships, snippets of fiction and auto-metafiction and other things that fascinate me in the sexual realm.
Eden is also meant to be political. It’s meant to be a friendly affront to the hetro-normative, close-minded, nuclear-family, general vanilla-ness we’re fed since birth. It’s meant to say we have a choice. It says I’m sexual person, and here I am owning and flaunting it, and it’s OK, and you can too. It’s meant to say as woman I can take off my clothes, be sexual, but still demand respect. It’s meant to say, yeah, I’m proudly slutty (that’s not a negative attribute in my circle) but doesn’t mean I’m fucking you. It’s about self-empowerment. These things are very important to me, I honestly want to tell and show everyone. But here I am, not.
It frustrates me that I do have to maintain and keep separate these two aspects of my being. Edith lives by day in the gym, eats healthy and showcases washboard abs you can have, too, if you lead a wholesome life. Eden, on the other hand, comes alive in the flicker of candlelight in the company of several lovers, enjoys her drink and drug and is down for all kinds of debauchery. That’s too much complexity to be packaged and marketed in one IG personality.
I see myself slowly self-sabotaging @traineredith, allowing her dark-side twin to move in. More and more nudes and glimpses into my life are making it into that account and more than a few people have noticed. I don’t really care. More and more I want to own every aspect of my being, openly. I want to take a stand for it. And I honestly believe it’s an intriguing account with stellar photography and Ok-ish writing that deserves a wider audience. And it quite drains me to have these two conflicting personalities and accounts.
In my bravest moments I fantasize about Eden completely engulfing everything Edith has built up thus far. I fancy un-privatizing that account and getting on @traineredith‘s stories and telling my hoards that this person exists. Go there. See me for what I really am. Like a great fire of cleansing it will weed out the bigots, homophobes and conservatives, and phoenix-like my new true self and my newly-tested-by-fire flock will rise from the ashes, triumphant.
But I’m not brave. There’s people I don’t trust to see me that way or truly understand what that account is about. I don’t want to lose work, money or influence, and I fear some unseen reprisal in the future. Possible regret. It’s still not safe to be sexual woman, if that’s not your whole shtick and trade.
For the moment, @edendeplume is still a private account and I have a most complicated process of whom I think is worthy to follow it and who gets rejected. I’m going to write about that process soon on there so if you are a follower you’ll know why. In the meantime, enjoy my naked, true self.”
Studio: Sweet Boy Studios, Toronto
(Music credit: Voices – Sabalih)
If you have any interest on your very own intimate lifestyle or nude art photography session, feel free to contact or message me through Instagram @bofiguratif .
As always, write me a comment too and let me know how you feel about this collection. I would really love to hear from you!