Quote:
Originally Posted by winston optic beer
The seventies for me, too.
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Once again I apologise for completely missing out the option for the 70s! 80s seems to be getting all the extra votes, which I suppose is fair enough.
I have to throw my lot in with the current period, just because I can vicariously live through everyone else's experiences from previous eras through their stories, pictures and videos, which of course we can access today with ease and in privacy, without any awkward encounters with magazine vendors (or in some cases, hedgerows).
My second choice though would probably be the late 90s/early 2000s when the Internet was just beginning to appear in pretty much everyone's homes, if not yet on their phones. Broadband was making video-conferencing accessible to most people for the first time, and there were a whole bunch of sites popping up allowing both private 1-on-1 conversations and group chats where you could choose to watch maybe up to 8 feeds at the same time. Jennicam was a big thing, a girl who just streamed her entire home life onto the internet, no filters. But you could find plenty of Jennis out there, from countries across the world, who found you just as exotic as you found them, who were young, chatty, fun, and most significantly, uninhibited. There are women from that period I'm still sporadically in touch with, now married, with adult children that I remember as bumps in bellies.
It didn't last long, as soon as the pay-cam sites opened to amateurs the most uninhibited ones migrated there and other less blatantly sexual sites gave the remainder of the pretty, chatty girls an opportunity to keep chatting to men but make tips while doing so, and all the free sites started enforcing no-sex rules then (who would have guessed) lost customers and wound down. It suddenly got much more difficult to meet new "interesting" people (though I had a respectable number who I kept in touch with on AIM and MSN). But it was fun while it lasted.
That period was also the golden age of the Naked Mile and pre-Katrina Mardi Gras whose videos I'm sure we have all seen and appreciated that seem to have an eagerness and innocence about them that you don't often see any more, and was also the time when Spencer Tunick was just becoming well known and the stuff he was doing was still novel, unusual and exhilarating for those taking part, as I learned in 2005.
So the 2000s are my second choice, and I would put the 2010s third because that's when I personally got to experience the WNBR, Cap d'Agde, performance nudity in Live Art and theatre, and various other things I participated in which involved making diverse fascinating new friends and seeing many of them naked. Those opportunities just weren't there in earlier years, though even if they had been I'd probably not have had the confidence to throw myself into them at that time.
I guess if I'd been born in a different decade I might have a different perspective. It's hard for me to imagine what it's like for young'uns for whom the Internet has just always been around, maybe that innocence and "first time" exhilaration is harder to find now because parent filters are so easy to get around, but maybe they are just more comfortable and confident with their sexuality at a younger age now? The crazy permissive stuff from the 60s and 70s is also mind-blowing, but also only lasted for a relatively short period of our history. They all seem like good times to be alive!