Social-construct-interpretation popobawisms aside, I find interest in your repeated assertions that the bubble overlay presents the exact same information, with no change in effect whatsoever.
Could it be your mind is processing images differently from others?
Human vision includes a whole lot of unconscious guessing, interpreting and filling in the blanks based on previous experience, as part of a general inclination for pattern recognition which probably helped with survival in a lot of evolution-relevant contexts. I’m thinking something like the skill to recognize a dangerous animal from glancing at some small part of it shape peeking behind grass.
Of course, that means a lot of false positives that can be intentionally exploited (optical illusions, etc) or just seeing meaning in random data that can’t be unseen even if you know what’s going on. Particularly with faces, as in the infamous toast Jesus phenomenon, or this clever example from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
The point of the bubble thing is this simple quirk of human visual processing: when we see even small hints of someone’s clothing over a mostly unclothed body the brain goes “say no more, the answer is CLOTHED”. When you add some weird overlay that strategically shows a big naked area but no clothes as all on the same image, we unconsciously fill in the blanks by imaginining more of the same, changing the answer to NAKED.
Do you not see that at all? Does that effect not happen in your particular brain? Not getting into gender or sex or anything else, just curious about the purely physiological visual interpretation.
I can understand the idea, but I don’t “see” it. They just go from being covered with one thing to being covered with another thing. For me it’s like saying that a photo of a person sitting at a desk is “porn” because I can imagine that they might not be wearing pants. They may or not, but there is no visual basis for assuming either way.
That is a common factor of my apparent idiosyncrasies - I strive to minimize implicit assumptions.
This is all relates to other weird traits, such as radical detachment and depersonalization. I don’t assume that “face” means the head, or that “naked” means the genitals, those seem pretty arbitrary to me.
Right, I’m not discussing any entrepreneur but the not really “fetish” it originated from where someone took pictures of their “friends” and asked others to make nudes of them.
It’s generally creepy, independent of any sex workers that found their niche.
While it isn’t very titillating to me I do find it interesting from a psychological perspective. Do the bubbles trick us into seeing sexual content that isn’t there or does it allow us to see the sexual content that is in much of our advertising but has been normalized to the point of being invisible?
I see the clothed and naked at the same time and think it’s a funny trick. I understand what they’re doing, but I don’t see it as literally the only option, just one of many. To me, it more confuses the social context than eliminates it outright.
I don’t see the faces in the cartoon you posted, though.
The difference is that clothes signal a deliberate act from the subject
to cover him/herself. It’s the act that carries meaning, not the cover
itself; and it’s a meaning that generic culture sensitivity will detect and
translate. Without confirmation or even suggestion of the act, our mind
assumes that no such act was undertaken at all, so the final reading is
different.
The cultural interpretation of clothing mores is something as old as
humans, and is full of all sorts of overloaded meanings and signals (a
bikini is ok on the beach, but not in the city; nakedness is ok with your
doctor, but not with your friends; etc etc). This is one of those cases
where the process of interpreting such signals, the algorithm governing our
cultural reading of the world, is deliberately hijacked for comedic or
titillating effect. It is basically a form of double-entendre with pictures.
