The Real Reason I'm A Boudoir Photographer
by Nashville Photographer Caley Newberry
Several years ago, I fell in love with a genre of photography that allowed me to help women get in touch with the truest version of themselves. To see themselves as whole, natural, calm, and free. However, I was deep in a faith tradition that taught me that women’s bodies were for their husbands’ pleasure and were otherwise meant to be completely covered, always.
I’ve always struggled with the term ‘modesty’ in the Christian faith. As a short, smaller chested woman, I could wear things that my taller, hourglass-shaped best friend could never get away with in our surroundings. Pretty much anything I wore looked more ‘modest’ than she did in a turtleneck. Her body quickly developed into something sexual. I saw the way men stared at her, the way women at church would tell her to cover up, not realizing they couldn’t see anything. The very existence of her body was something for people to notice, whether it was for desire or to provoke shame. Even at a young age, that distorted focus on women’s bodies began ruminating in my brain, a little simmer of what would become a pot boiling over.
Around this same time, I remember sitting in an all-girls class at an evangelical Christian camp I went to a few times, and the woman teaching the class said, and I quote: “When you get married, sex will be your duty to your husband.”
I was probably 15 and don’t know that I’d even kissed a boy at that point in my life. But I knew something about that was very, very wrong, and 20 years later, it still breaks my heart. I grew up hearing that it was my responsibility alone to keep a boy from going “too far”, but once we got married, we had a duty to do the exact thing we’d always been told to stay away from.
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Here’s my problem with the shame culture of all of this. If I tell you to stop looking at the color green because the color green is bad, you’ll constantly be looking for the color green for the whole reason of avoiding it. I think that’s how we’ve fallen on such a highly-sexualized culture — because we’ve spent decades telling people to look away from a woman’s body. We’ve turned women’s bodies into something that can’t be acknowledged, and in doing so, have subconsciously stripped her of her inherent value, telling her that her body is for other peoples’ sexual pleasures rather than her own. But just like you can’t avoid the color green, you can’t avoid seeing a woman’s body. Even when it’s covered up, her shape will always show through, and prioritizing covering and shaming rather than training ourselves to not objectify women will never lead to a cure.
Even within the dress codes I experienced, it began with shorts that couldn’t be more than three inches above your knee, so I heard thighs were bad. Then it was nothing that showed cleavage, so chests were bad. Then my tank tops had to be three inches wide because shoulders were bad. Shirts had to overlap pants because stomachs were dangerous. Then I had a friend who was from Florida and was scolded for how short her shorts were, and all she could see was how tight everyone’s jeans were. Nothing felt safe or consistent, and I eventually realized this was more about culture than purity.
What if we reset all of that? What if we saw women’s bodies like men’s? It’s — are you ready? — just a body. It’s just arms to carry and backs to lift and legs to walk and breasts to feed and butts to sit and eyes to see and lips to speak. If we can stop viewing women as sexual objects and just inherently know that they’re sexual beings because they’re human, the world becomes a safer place for women and men and non gender conforming people alike.
We’re a culture so content on fixing people and assigning roles that we miss the inherent humanity in all of us, and not a single person benefits from that. A people trying so hard to not see the color green that we’re missing trees and grass and the way it perfectly contrasts with the sky. We wouldn’t need to walk around staring at our shoes, shielding our eyes, trying desperately to avoid a thing that’s in its natural state.
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So here I am, five years after writing an original post about why I’m a boudoir photographer to say I’m here to desensitize all of us. That’s a term typically used in a negative context, but I think we all desperately need some desensitization.
We talk a lot in my sessions about being at peace with your body. My purpose in these sessions is not to help a person love her body. That not only takes a lot of work, but bodies are a thing constantly changing. And if I teach her to love her stomach, but then her stomach changes, she has to begin that process again. So I want people to learn to be at peace with their bodies, that their bodies are just the housing they’re in, so that when it inevitably changes, they’re at peace with that too. My hope to take the emphasis off a person’s body, not to display it.
When I first started doing these sessions, I was looking for a way to justify what, I believed, was an important step for so many women. I was afraid to say out loud that my goal in these sessions is to burn purity culture to the ground. As I’ve talked to more women and heard each of their stories, I’ve learned that the way several faith traditions portray women is as sexual gatekeepers before marriage and ever-willing servants after marriage, never taking into consideration that a woman is also a sexual being and has desires. I can now call that what it is — rape culture and abuse — and my passion to help women see past it renews with every few women who come in my door.
I always ask people why they’re doing a session like this, and I’ve never had anyone say “to feel sexy.” On the rare occasion that’s a part of someone’e answer, there’s always a deeper reason. Somewhere along the way, a trauma — sexual abuse as a child, emotional abuse of a longtime partner, body dysmorphia, for example — is linked to that need.
I’m here to provide a safe space for a woman to be comfortable in her own skin, to see herself as a human being with sexual desires that belong solely to her. She can, and I hope she does, willingly share them with someone safe, but the women I work with are learning that that safety only begins within herself.
So, I’m here to help you see in color, to know there’s depth and nuance and the ability to be at peace with your body and be able to love yourself apart from it. It’s a practice I’ve been working on, too. Sometimes processing all of this brings up some unresolved anger, and sometimes it makes me sad, but most of the time it renews my resolve to stand up and fight for all of us to have the freedom to be a little more human.