ENF artist (and pillar of the ENF community) LadyDianaShy has asked her followers on Twitter “What do you like about ENF and ENM?” While I answered her question on social media, I thought I would give a more detailed answer here, I hope it provides some food for thought.
By the way, I assume you all know that when I’m talking about ENF, that it is short for “Embarrassed Naked Female”, which is a style of erotic/fetish art and fiction that involves a female being naked and experiencing embarrassment about being seen naked? Everyone got that? Good, ‘cause I’m going to be saying ENF a lot in this blog.
(If you’re new to my type of writing and want to know what some of the acronyms and genre terms I use are, check out this blog here).
Anyway, I like ENF. Maybe it’s not my favourite nudity-based fetish (I will always argue that having a woman display confidence while they are naked is the sexiest thing, so my fetish of absolute choice is probably “Only-One-Naked”/public nudity/CFNF/CMNF being performed by someone who is either enjoying being naked, comes to enjoy being naked, or simply doesn’t get the big deal about it), but it’s one that I enjoy, especially when I’m seeking out inspirational artwork.
(I think ENF works really well visually, maybe better than written down sometimes).
What I like about it, ultimately, is really what I like about other nudity-based fetishes. I like the idea of putting a naked female character into a location or scenario where it would be extremely out of the ordinary for someone to be naked there (in public, in class, at a party, and so on).
If you’ve read my writing you’ll know this happens a lot, although in what I write it is often through the character’s choice to be naked in that situation, while ENF is more about the nudity happening in spite of the fact that the character doesn’t want it to happen.
For me, that type of scenario is a lot of fun for many reasons – the reactions of other people, the character’s feelings and experiences, the busting of societal taboos about female nudity. But one thing I really like is the juxtaposition, whether visually or in the imagination, of a singular naked woman with a group of clothed people around her. That’s why I like Only-One-Naked most, of course, but you get that a lot too with ENF. It’s an image of vulnerability and sexuality that I really respond to. I enjoy naturist scenarios but I rarely find them sexy (naturism is not sexual) – but put everyone else in clothes except one woman, and it becomes very exciting to me.
But what about the embarrassment? Well, I will not deny that the embarrassment and humiliation aspect can be a turn on, but not for me in the way it is perhaps for some people.
Many people who have fetishes identify early experiences at crucial times in their developing sexuality that might have contributed to their enjoyment of that fetish, and I do have early experiences where I sometimes now look back and think that might be why I respond to ENF. Like many males, my earliest encounters with female nudity for titillation were probably ENF-type scenarios, as comedies on film and TV often dip into the ENF jar in the form of having things like “male character walks in on female character showering” “woman locked out naked having to be rescued by male” and so on. When your introduction to the unclothed adult female body comes in the form of these type of scenes (even in otherwise “family” comedies or even kids TV), it’s no wonder that you might retain a response to seeing naked women embarrassed.
It’s doubly true if, like me, some of your earliest encounters with naked or half-naked girls are in situations where the girl is embarrassed to be undressed. When I was a pre-teen/early teen, I had a few experiences where I saw girls my own age exposed despite their own embarrassment. For example, I used to do a lot of youth theatre, and as you can imagine, when costume changing goes on backstage there isn’t always time for privacy. I have a very clear memory of being backstage at around the age of 12 waiting for my turn and seeing a girl my age being helped (by a female stage hand) to quickly change her dress and being briefly topless, and noticing particularly her embarrassment that her breasts were exposed. For me though it was probably my first time seeing a girl’s breasts fully in real life, and it was definitely formative for me, as I did develop a crush on her for a little while.
But as an adult who is happily married and has access to real life female breasts as much as I like, I don’t need female embarrassment in order to get my nudity fix. So is the embarrassment actually a necessary part of the liking ENF for me – especially, as I have said, that I definitely rank confident nudity higher on my fetish-enjoyment scale than embarrassed nudity?
Well, I think the embarrassed reaction is still something that I can enjoy and appreciate, because it is a very human reaction and can humanise the naked female character and make them seem more like a real person. While I enjoy most of all the idea of a woman confident in her own body and power, comfortable walking naked in public or being nude in a room full of clothed people or up on stage naked, in real life women who feel that level of confidence and power are (sadly) not all that common. Feminism and body positivity have helped women to feel more confident about their bodies, and we are seeing more relaxed attitudes to female nudity with each generation, but in real life and away from empowering social media posts (and beautiful exhibitionists creating content on video sites like Fansly), most women today would not enthusiastically welcome the experience of being naked in public in front of strangers… or friends… or co-workers… or fellow students.
That’s not intended to be a criticism of women who haven’t embraced some sort of inspirational body-freedom yet – it’s an understandable natural reaction, given the societal taboos against nudity, the potential for other people to be judgemental, the fragility of female power in a patriarchal society, and the general sense that being naked in front of another person is an intimate act (which is out of balance if not reciprocated). A real-life woman who is naked in front of others, unless it is something she is very used to, is more likely to feel stared-at, self-conscious – embarrassed – and want to cover up than she is to think “to hell with it” and parade around joyously with everything on display.
So in ENF, the embarrassment makes the subject of the art or fiction more real, and thus more believable as an actual person and not just a collection of words or pixels. Because of course they are embarrassed – as most people would be. Believability helps the scenario have impact, it helps the other person’s fantasy connect with yours. As a writer, the ultimate goal for me is to create believable characters – as an erotic writer, that believability is especially important if you want your characters to seem something more than just plastic dolls to be arranged and fucked. So having them display human reactions and natural emotions – which includes embarrassment when naked – enhances the erotic aspect and draws in the reader.
ENF, and enjoying ENF, is not for me about liking to see women in distress or humiliated. I don’t look at a woman and think, she needs taking down a peg or two, and write a scenario in my head in which she is publicly stripped.
But it is about enjoying seeing, and imagining, real nudity depicted in a realistic way, including realistic reactions from the naked person to being naked, which I do think is extremely sexy.