Not all heroes dress up. This gained significance this past week when Los Angeles-based model and influencer Kaylen Ward said that she sold naked clothing to earn at least $1 million for Australian bushfire assistance. A n-de photo of the influencer, who goes by the moniker “The Naked Philanthropist,” went popular on social media after she pleaded with her followers to donate at least $10 to charities that aid those affected by bushfires. $20 in donations will get you two naked photos, and so on.
She told BuzzFeed News, “I was reading all the tweets about the Australian fires and I was extremely worried there wasn’t a lot of media coverage and not a lot of people donating.”
Even Kaylen was surprised by how quickly her proposal to get money by selling naked photos went viral. She said she only anticipated raising $1,000 in a statement to Buzzfeed News. However, as with all positive things that occur online, goodwill frequently comes at a personal cost.
Soon after publishing her first post, according to Kaylen, Instagram deactivated her account on the grounds that she had broken its rules. Instagram has already taken strong action against users who share “sexual” content. A handful of adult film celebrities came together earlier this year to join a union in opposition to Instagram deleting their profiles.Before that, Instagram has often come under fire for deleting images of women’s nipples, inspiring the well-known “Free The Nipple” campaign and, strangely enough, Jason Derulo’s thirst trap.
The backlash wasn’t just caused by Instagram being deleted. On January 5th, Kaylen tweeted: “All because of that tweet, my IG got deactivated, my family rejected me, and the guy I like won’t talk to me. However, screw it, save the koalas.However, despite the support of her supporters, the online bullying eventually got to the point where Kaylen claimed that trolls had “made the Internet such a terrible place [for her].” Even worse, she claimed that thousands of unsolicited emails had been sent to her as a result of the exposure of her personal email.
Finding the cause of the reaction does not require expertise. A woman still lives under patriarchal oppression if she choose to sell consenting adults body image photographs for charity.People have attempted to project their biases and ideas onto the bodies of women for millennia despite the fact that these actions are not acceptable. Even if Kaylen Ward wasn’t selling her underwear to raise money for a good cause, it is solely her business as an adult woman to decide whether or not to do so.
It’s also important to point out that, despite the Internet hordes descending on Kaylen’s personal pages, very little is being spoken about the thousands of people who are purchasing her n-des.In addition to starting a GoFundMe for fire relief, Kaylen has stopped accepting donations through n-de photo. She stated that the World Wildlife Fund and the NSW Rural Fire Service would get all revenues.