American Nudists

American Nudists

This is what real “American Beauty” looks like.
Start your day with something GOOD.
In “American Beauty,” photographer Carey Fruth uses the iconic rose petal fantasy from the movie of the same name to remind us that real beauty comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and ages. Fruth’s photo series takes a scene where the woman is only an object of desire and turns it into a beautiful statement of female strength by empowering her subjects to stay true to themselves. She also wanted to make her models feel beautiful in a way they may not have felt was possible.
“When women come into my studio, I want to prove to them that they ARE as beautiful as they always feared they weren't, then maybe they can let go of that fear. By stepping into a fantasy dream girl world and by letting go of that fear, they free themselves up to direct that energy they once wasted on telling themselves that they weren't good enough to elsewhere in their life,” the photographer explained.

The Pubic Hair Preferences of the American Woman

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Cameron Diaz waxes lyrical about pubic hair in “ The Body Book .” Dedicating 367 words to the topic, she writes, “T he idea that vaginas are preferable in a hairless state is a pretty recent phenomenon, and all fads change.” It appears that last prediction had some effect; commentators promptly heralded “ the year of the bush ” and clothing stores added merkins to their mannequins . The New York Times profiled the demise of the Brazilian bikini wax.
But what does the data say is happening in female pubic hair preferences?
Last year, two doctors at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Texas published research based on the survey responses of 1,677 women 16 to 40 years old. They found that just 8.6 percent of women had never groomed their pubic hair, and that “women tended to continue grooming once starting the behavior.” Only 20 percent of women said they had groomed in the past but did not currently do so. So, as of 2011 (the year the data was collected), there wasn’t a trend toward the natural look.
The majority of women who had ever groomed their pubic hair said they used a razor and shaving cream (77 percent). That was followed by trimming with scissors (23 percent) and hair-removal cream (19 percent). (The figures add up to more than 100 percent because there is overlap.)
Waxing was relatively rare; only 16 percent of women said they used this technique. And given that most methods are relatively inexpensive, it’s not surprising that just 28 of the 1,677 women said they went to a salon for grooming. About 95 percent of women said they took care of their pubic hair themselves.
A couple of niche habits also emerge from the data. A little more than 2 percent of women listed “pubic hair dye” as their method of grooming; 1.4 percent have friends take care of their pubic hair; and 1.5 percent of women have their boyfriend or husband groom it for them. We couldn’t find any other categories, so it seems that the question wording assumes that all women in the survey were heterosexual.
But we do have more data. A paper published in 2010, based on a survey of 2,451 women, has a more detailed breakdown; it suggests that choices differ slightly according to sexual orientation. Lesbians were more likely than heterosexual women to have not removed any pubic hair in the past month — 26 percent compared to 20 percent. And 14 percent of bisexual woman had not removed any. The results were almost identical between single women and married women.
The doctors reached a slightly different conclusion about American female pubic hair:
Although women’s total pubic hair removal has been described as a “new norm,” ﬁndings from this study suggest that pubic hair styles are diverse and that it is more common than not for women to have at least some pubic hair on their genitals. In addition, it was found that total pubic hair removal was associated with younger age, being partnered (rather than single or married), having looked closely at one’s own genitals in the previous month, cunnilingus in the past month, more positive sexual functioning scores, and a more positive genital self-image.
Finally, whether or not Diaz is right that total hair removal is a “pretty recent phenomenon” depends on how you define “recent.” In 2008, a paper in the Journal of Communication Inquiry argued that “concern with excessive hair increased tremendously between 1915 and 1945, when magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and McCall’s extensively disseminated the ideal of hairless white feminine beauty.”
Here’s one last study that may be of interest. In 2012, doctors from the Department of Urology at the University of California, San Francisco, looked at admissions to U.S. emergency departments. The data , collected from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, showed 11,704 pubic hair grooming injuries between 2002 and 2010. Of those, 56.7 percent were women, the mean age was 30.8 years and shaving razors were implicated in 83 percent of the injuries.
Mona Chalabi is data editor at the Guardian US, and a columnist at New York Magazine. She was previously a lead news writer for FiveThirtyEight. @MonaChalabi

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Published: 16:29 BST, 5 September 2018 | Updated: 01:47 BST, 6 September 2018
They pose jauntily before the camera, some draped only in a shawl, some wearing only fancy hosiery, others looking pensive and clad in nothing at all. The women are surrounded by curtains and lace, pictured doing everything from bathing and reading to preening in preparation for male customers. Their barely-dressed ease in front of the lens is remarkable, their calm faces framed either by opulent 1890s hairstyles or left to tumble seductively over their bare shoulders.
This is life inside an 1890s American brothel, an intimate portrait of a segment of society so frequently kept behind closed doors, discussed only in hushed tones. And this extraordinary set of photographs – shot for the private collection of a commercial photographer named William Goldman in Reading, Pennsylvania at the end of the 19th century – was almost lost to history, as well.
Then an art curator happened upon them at a vintage fair in northern California , setting him on a journey to identify the city, the brothel and the photographer who captured them so intimately more than 100 years ago. Now the photos feature in a new book, published this week, titled Working Girls: An American Brothel, Circa 1892 – The Secret Photographs of William Goldman .
The photographs were taken two decades before the famous E. J. Bellocq pictures of 1913 sex workers in Storyville, New Orleans - meaning Goldman's pictures are the earliest known body of work on this subject in the United States.
They were discovered around a decade ago by Robert Flynn Johnson, and his book offers a fascinating insight into the lives of prostitutes in the 1890s. Through research and clues, Johnson figured out that the anonymous photographs depicted women who worked at an upmarket brothel run by single mother Sal Shearer in Reading around 1892 – at a time when the city was teeming with young, unmarried male railroad and factory workers and other laborers.
William Goldman, a commercial photographer in industrial Reading, Pennsylvania, took private photographs in the 1890s of women working at one of the city's more upmarket brothels - an establishment run by a single mother named Sal Shearer, who dressed her girls as upper-middle-class ladies to feed into male laborers' fantasies
The photographs were discovered by author and art curator Robert Flynn Johnson about ten years ago at a vintage paper sale in northern California; he had no information about their origin but noticed one image depicted a prostitute reading a newspaper, the Reading Eagle, from August of 1892 - giving him clues that eventually led him to that Pennsylvania city
Working with local Reading historian George M. Meiser IX - to whom he would eventually dedicate his book - Johnson tracked the photos to Sal Shearer's brothel and identified the man behind the lens as commercial photographer Goldman, who was also a patron of the establishment and kept the pictures in albums for his private collection
Goldman's photos were taken two decades before the famous E.J. Bellocq photographs of 1913 sex workers in Storyville, Louisiana - meaning the Reading photographer's collection marks the earliest known body of work on this subject in the United States
The girls at Sal Shearer’s brothel, Johnson explains, likely charged more for their time than other brothels in town - $3 or $4 as opposed to $1 or $2 – because the establishment catered to a particular fantasy or predilection amongst the male clientele. Many of the men had not yet made enough money to marry and start their own families, and the brothels answered a definite need in the testosterone-laden city.
Reading, located in southeastern Pennsylvania, about 120 miles from New York and 60 miles from Pennsylvania, was an industrial and railroad center throughout much of the 19th Century, especially important for moving coal. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad (P&R) was one of the first railroads in the US and highly successful, though problems surfaced in the years just before the time period during which Goldman shot his photos, when competition encroached and the railroad company went into receivership before gaining strength again.
Johnson, author and former curator of prints at the Achenbach Foundation at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, explains that ‘the city fathers considered prostitutes … the necessary evil. They considered it a safety valve for the community, so these men wouldn’t be accosting their own daughters and sisters on the street.’
He explains: ‘At Sal Shearer’s establishment, the men went in there and they didn’t want to sleep with a farm girl or an immigrant woman. That’s who the women were, of course,’ Johnson tells DailyMail.com. ‘”They wanted to fantasize that they were sleeping with the boss’ daughter, so to speak – so therefore the madam dressed her girls up as upper-middle-class with really nice clothes and stockings and all of that.
‘Not only were the men buying sex, they were buying the fantasy – and so the women were in a situation where they were being protected and not hurt in any way, they were being paid and they were wearing nice clothes and makeup and all that sort of thing … the clothes were a very important aspect of the whole fantasy, the whole illusion.’
It was a different era, Johnson points out, arguing that working at a place such as Sal Shearer’s brothel was not necessarily the worst option.
‘These women in the 1890s, these women didn’t have much prospects,’ Johnson tells DailyMail.com. ‘They were in an urban environment; they could work at a hotel, where they’d be sexually harassed; they could work at a restaurant and be sexually harassed; they could be a nanny in a household and be sexually harassed by the husband when the wife was away; they could work in a box factory for a dollar a day – or they might become a prostitute, where at least they’d be protected and wear nice clothes and stuff.’
Burlesque star Dita von Teese, who wrote the foreword for the book, echoes the view of brothels as a ‘necessary evil in town, where men with certain desires visited women who would oblige.
‘In this case, it was the desire of a man to capture the beauty and sensuality of the women he befriended,’ she writes.
Johnson says the photographs ‘reminded me of Degas, reminded me of Rodin. They were beautiful and honest, and that’s why I had enthusiasm for them.' He adds: ‘The thing that struck me, for sure, is that there are photos from around this period or a bit later that you don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Either they’re pornographic pictures or … they’re the kind of French winky postcard – the naughty photographs that were made, especially in France, to monetize to sell. And these photographs were never monetized, as far as we can tell … he never published these photographs. These were his private albums'
Goldman photographed the girls posed and also going about their day-to-day activities at the brothel such as reading, bathing and preparing for male customers; in the late 19th Century, Reading was awash with young, unmarried male workers employed by factories and railroads. Johnson says that 'the city fathers considered prostitutes … the necessary evil. They considered it a safety valve for the community, so these men wouldn’t be accosting their own daughters and sisters on the street’
The brothel was located six or eight blocks from Goldman's studio; Johnson says that the photographer 'became friends with Sal Shearer and he became friends with the girls – and they seemingly were extremely comfortable with him'
Unmarried women faced few prospects at the time, Johnson explains; sexual harassment of women working as domestic help or in restaurants, or they could make $1 a day in a factory - but if they worked as prostitutes, they enjoyed some level of protection and fine clothes
‘There is much to learn and (most of all!) take pleasure in with this discovery. As these lost photographs illustrate more than a century later, one period’s “social problem” is another’s cultural revelation.’
Johnson had no idea about the photos’ backstory when he first caught sight of the images at a vintage fair in Concord, California about ten years ago.
‘They reminded me of Degas, reminded me of Rodin,’ Johnson tells DailyMail.com. ‘They were beautiful and honest, and that’s why I had enthusiasm for them.’
The woman displaying the photographs, priced individually, was selling items from the estate of her late collector husband. Johnson – who has published books featuring other artistic photographs of unknown subjects and origin – asked her for a better price if he bought the pictures in bulk, but the pair clashed, and he left with only two. It was a decision he soon regretted.
‘Over the next couple of days, I realized that maybe I’d made a mistake – that her personality had turned me off to the quality of the art,’ he says. ‘So I had [her] card, so I called her up and said, “Well, you know, I bought a couple of these photographs at that fair over the weekend … do you still have any of them?” And she said, “Have them? You’re the only person who’s interested in those.”’
Goldman, pictured, included a naked self-portrait in his collection, which helped Johnson and historial Meiser identify him as the man who photographed the women
So Johnson drove three hours to view more of the collection and purchased about 50 additional photographs, eventually amassing several hundred as he sought to turn the distinctive images into a book – an endeavor which turned into a bit of a detective story as Johnson tried identifying the brothel, the photographer and the women captured by his lens.
‘One of the photographs was the key to everything else,’ Johnson tells DailyMail.com. ‘Without that photograph, these would have been beautiful, mysterious, anonymous photographs, period. I would not have been able to connect it to a photographer, a brothel or a city – but one of the photographs … had one of the prostitutes reading the Reading Eagle of August of 1892.
‘I called up the historical society in Reading, Pennsylvania from California, and I said, “What was the name of your newspaper in 1892?” And they said, “The same as it is today: The Reading Eagle.”
‘And I said to myself: Bingo,’ Johnson says. ‘That’s where I started my search, and it was like a detective story.’
He made several trips to Reading and enlisted the aid of local historian George M. Meiser IX – to whom the eventual book would be dedicated. Their efforts identified the establishment as that run by Sal Shearer, who had been abandoned by her husband and tried working as a seamstress – unsuccessfully – before opening up the brothel.
Meiser also helped identify the photographer, a local man who worked in commercial photography named William Goldman – whose naked self-portrait within the collection of photographs led to his own identification. Goldman, it turned out, had been a friend of the women, a fan of private and artistic photo shoots and – it seems – a brothel client.
‘Obviously, if these albums had seen the light of day in his community during his lifetime, it would’ve been a scandal,’ Johnson tells DailyMail.com. ‘He would’ve gone out of business; he would’ve lost all his clientele, because his profession was to take photographs of businessmen and weddings and school events and things like that – so he was just a professional photographer, and his studio was six or eight blocks away from the brothel.
'And he was obviously a patron and he became friends with Sal Shearer and he became friends with the girls – and they seemingly were extremely comfortable with him.’
He adds: ‘The thing that struck me, for sure, is that there are photos from around this period or a bit later that you don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Either they’re pornographic pictures or … they’re the kind of French winky postcard – the naughty photographs that were made, especially in France, to monetize to sell.
‘And these photographs were never monetized, as far as we can tell … he never published these photographs. These were his private albums.’
Johnson divided the book into 14 chapters exploring themes such as ‘Customers,’ ‘Erotic Poses,’ ‘Artistic Photos,’ ‘Off Duty’ and ‘Side Jobs.’
‘He had
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