Tom-Tom

Why would you assume that everyone needs naked pictures of themselves,” my therapist whose name, like mine, is not Chelsea but the name that is not Chelsea is the same? Don’t they? I ask. “No!” She says, her voice rising. “Many people never feel a need to take naked pictures of themselves.” This is a new perspective I need to consider. I took it as a truly universal: a person in possession of a body must be in want of photos documenting it, naked. It felt incomprehensible that people who had no pictorial evidence of their own fleshy erotics wouldn’t want to have them. If nothing else, as they grow old, would they not want to yellow, creased, beloved photos to take out and rub with their bony fingers?  “No,” my therapist said. “Not everyone does. I don’t. I have memories, and that’s all I need.” Weird, I said. I don’t get it. This past Thursday,  Adult Magazine  published some naked photos of me, and, almost incidentally, an essay about it. The reaction...