Two Versions of One Afternoon

I filmed one thing last weekend. Then I sat down and cut it into two files.

One is the version that can travel anywhere — the one that shows up in the feed, the one your boss could theoretically see over your shoulder and not flinch. The other is the version that lives behind an age gate. Same room. Same window. Same body. Same forty seconds of me shifting my weight from one foot to the other because my left knee was cold.

And I've been thinking about the gap between those two files ever since.

What the footage actually shows

Let me start with the boring, honest details, because I think they matter.

The camera was on a tripod by the bookcase, slightly too low, which is a mistake I keep making. The blind was halfway up. Light was coming in flat and grey-white off a winter sky, the kind that doesn't flatter anything but doesn't lie either. I'd pushed the wooden chair out of frame, then pushed it back in, because the room looked strange without it — too empty, like a stage waiting for someone who never arrives.

My phone was face-down on the floor with the timer counting. I could hear the neighbour's mower starting up and dying, starting and dying. At one point my cat walked through the shot and I left it in, because it's the most honest thing in the whole clip.

That's what's in the video. A body, a room, a chair, a cat, and a man who was slightly cold.

What changed between the two cuts

Almost nothing. That's the point.

In the NSFW version, the camera stays where it is for a few seconds longer at the start, and there's a moment near the end where I turn rather than staying still. In the other version, I cut earlier and I frame tighter. If you laid them side by side on a table, you'd struggle to say which one is the scandal and which one is the art.

The body didn't change. The label did.

"NSFW" isn't a description of my body. It's a description of your workplace.

That word gets treated like a property of the content, but it isn't. It's a measurement of risk. It means: if this appeared on a screen in an office, someone could get in trouble. It's a sentence about HR, not about anatomy.

Which means that when a platform asks me to tag something NSFW, it isn't telling me my body is obscene. It's telling me that the internet still can't hold two ideas at once: that a body can be seen without being consumed, that nakedness can be quiet, that a person can be unclothed and unbothered.

I still comply. I tag things. I use the gates. But I've stopped mistaking the tag for a verdict.

The label does something to the person wearing it

Here's the part I don't say often enough.

When you grow up believing your body is a problem to be managed, you get very good at anticipating the label before anyone applies it. You cut yourself off at the pass. You crop the photo before someone else does it for you. You laugh first so the joke lands softer.

So the first time I made two versions of a video, I felt something strange — a small, uncomfortable flicker of shame that I'd made the other one at all. As if the uncut version were a failure of taste rather than simply a different edit.

It took me a while to notice that the shame wasn't mine. It was borrowed. And I've been slowly giving it back.

Why I still make both

Because care and shame are not the same thing, and I've spent years learning to tell them apart.

I make the gentler version because someone will open their phone on a train next to a stranger, or at a kitchen table with their kid doing homework. They didn't consent to anything unexpected, and their context deserves respect. That's not prudishness. That's manners.

I make the NSFW version because there's a whole adult audience out there who wants to see what an ordinary body looks like in ordinary light, without the gym, without the filter, without the performance. And there's something quietly radical in showing that — in a landscape that mostly sells bodies as products.

Both versions come from the same place. Neither one is the shameful one. Neither one is the real one, either. They're just two doors into the same room.

The unglamorous truth about filming yourself naked

Nobody warns you that it's mostly admin.

You check the battery. You check the focus. You notice a smudge on the lens that's been there for weeks. You do a take where your hair is doing something strange, and a take where the light dies, and a take where you're genuinely present and beautiful for about six seconds and then you sneeze.

Vanity is part of it. I won't pretend otherwise. So is awkwardness, and boredom, and the small comedy of standing naked in a cool room waiting for a red light to blink.

But somewhere in the middle of all that, something happens. You stop watching yourself from the outside. The body stops being an image and goes back to being a body — the thing that's cold, and tired, and carrying you around all day without complaint.

That's the part I hope comes through, in either cut.

Where the line actually is

For me it isn't drawn at a certain amount of skin. It's drawn at consent. Mine, and yours.

Age gates exist for a reason. Privacy matters. Nobody in my footage hasn't agreed to be there. I film in spaces where I'm allowed to film, and I don't pretend a beach or a forest is a loophole. If you're taking your own clothes off outdoors, check the local rules first. That's not me being a killjoy — it's me wanting you to keep having this experience for years instead of one bad afternoon.

Respect, legality, consent, safety. Those are the four walls. Inside them, there's a lot more room than people think.

So watch whichever one you like

The clip is up now — the quieter cut on the feed, the longer one behind the gate. Pick the door that fits your day.

But if you only take one thing from this, let it be this: the difference between those two files is a few seconds and a word. The thing they both show is the same. A person, standing in a room they chose, in light they didn't control, not hiding.

That's not NSFW. That's just being here.

Thank you for reading. Truly.