When the default became “alone,” the mirror replaced the room. Without the quiet calibration of seeing other unedited bodies—older, younger, softer, scarred—we grew harsher with ourselves. Privacy protected us from scrutiny, yes. It also starved us of perspective.
The pipeline is familiar: communal, private, isolated. Add a decade of front facing cameras and the result is a culture fluent in posing but uneasy with presence. We curated ourselves into fragmentation.
I’m not arguing for mandatory togetherness. I’m arguing for options. Spaces where nudity isn’t performance, where comfort doesn’t require an audience, where modesty and visibility can coexist.
Because the opposite of exhibition isn’t virtue—it’s connection. And we can’t rebuild it in a world that only sees bodies through glass.