This video is of a guy who is raising money to save Rhinos from extinction. So far he’s raised over $60,000 and according to him, he’ll accept just about any dare, naked. I say good on him.

Nude Skydiving #15 from Naked Skydiving on Vimeo.

Australia has had an appalling week this week in terms of how we are treating women. The person mostly feeling the brunt of the stupidity and developmental retardation is our Prime Minister. At an opposition dinner a menu had a quail dish named after the Prime Minister citing her enormous thighs, tiny breasts and red box. Deeply offensive. A radio host asked the Prime Minister to her face about the rumours that her partner is gay. Seriously? Julia Gillard cops a ridiculous amount of vitriol because she is a woman that a male PM, if he’d done everything exactly the same, would never have had to put up with. There is a great article on what’s gone on this week, here.

I don’t think of myself as a feminist. I’m not waving banners and chanting for equal rights, but maybe that needs to be done. No, I’d like to think that just by the way I treat the women around me that I’m fighting a quiet battle. It astonishes me that women are paid considerably less across the board for the same jobs as men. It’s 2013.

Where did I personally learn how to treat women? Like most things, at home. My mother is a strong woman. Strong in opinions and in actions, without being confronting or rude. She knows when she’s been wronged and when she’s been dealt with unfairly and she doesn’t wait for a man to come and rescue her. My mother will sort out her own problems.

My main instructor in how to treat women has actually been my father. He’s more quiet than my mother but he’s not being subservient in any way. While we were growing up my father was the bread-winner for the family but my parents operate as a partnership. They make decisions together as a team and when they argue, even in playful tiffs there is no hands around the throat like Nigella Lawson’s ignorant husband. There is no violence or threatening. My father, even after 43 years of marriage will still playfully pinch my mother’s butt as he walks into the kitchen to make them both coffee. They still hold hands in the street and the both treat each other with respect.

How many fathers out there are not passing on these lessons?

After wrapping up my “Freedom” exhibition a few months ago I was pretty disappointed with the number of sales and the apparent lack of success. Everyone seemed to like the images but that didn’t translate to sales and as one blog commenter said, it might have been different if “you couldn’t find something the same in two minutes on google” which was a bit harsh but possibly true. As you know I’ve been toying with some face/body paint and tribal inspiration but the outdoors shots weren’t achieving what I wanted at all. So I’ve spent a couple of months reflecting on what I want to do and how to do it.

My flatmate, myself and another friend have just invested in some studio lights and my flatmate and I have rigged up a studio backdrop at home so we now have a lot more flexibility to shoot and experiment without the cost of studio hire. I’m taking the tribal inspiration and I’m taking it back into the studio. Even thinking about the tribal imagery I’ve been too literal and in the past few weeks I’ve finally settled on what I think is a good approach. I’m stripping it right back and it will be lit like my “Shrouded” exhibition and with some similar dark moods.

I’ve got a few models lined up already and I’m dying to start playing. I’m not putting a deadline on this series. I’m just going to play and see what happens. The images above are not my own images but are where some of the tribal inspiration has come from. The trouble with being inspired and following a theme that has been done many many times is finding my own way of interpreting the styling and imagery. Fingers crossed.

First up is Adam who has only just invested in a good camera and sent in this photo of his cat.

Next is a shot from Bruce who took a photo of “Rudy” at a Star Trek convention.

Andy has sent this photo of a red vinyl clad butt from the AIDS life cycle red dress day.

Curtis snapped this shot of some red plumes topping off some uniforms.

Abby send this nude photo (I’m not sure if it’s a self portrait or not) that at first seems to be entirely black and white but the model is clutching some red underwear above his head.

Most people, on deciding to finally take the brave step of coming out to their parents and friends, do it a couple of people at a time. We might test the waters with friends that we feel safe with, and gradually tell people that we either don’t care about their reaction so much or we are confident they’ll be ok. It’s often our parents that are the last to know.

If you are Mitch Anderson from Belton, Texas that mustn’t have seemed exciting enough because he chose to come out to everyone at the same time, parents, friends and teachers while he was giving a graduation speech. His speech is eloquent, serious, funny and so brave. According to this article, where you can read the whole speech, his parents were very accepting afterwards. My mother would have killed me, being the private woman she is. Below is just one paragraph of Mitch’s speech.

“There were moments when I believed I was next to nothing. But I learned that what others think of you is not nearly as meaningful as what you think of yourself. You cannot owe the quality of your existence to other people. You must evaluate your life and give it purpose. You must recognize that you are an expression of the divine, a being made perfect through celebration of your perceived imperfections.”

I had a conversation last night with my flatmate about something that has been in the back of my mind for a while now. We were talking about a couple of people that we both know that really irritate the both of us. We all have those people in our life that either through their politics, the way they treat people or just their general demeanor really piss us off. The kind of people that when they walk into a party make you want to leave. This is where the interesting part kicks in that we were discussing. They always walk in with friends.

Think about all those people you have had negative run ins with or you generally just can’t stand. They always have loyal friends, just like you and I do, that would jump in and defend them if you decided to finally tell them all those home truths that you have been holding back. Friends that they can easily sit around and chat with, that they enjoy doing all the regular things, just like you and I. God knows how many times I’ve wanted to ask someone how on earth they can stand being friends with Mr X. Don’t they know he’s a rude objectionable dickhead? Apparently not. My guess would be that they are toying with asking my friends similar questions.

I guess it’s pretty similar to when you see someone out and about dating an ex that you don’t like. You want to run up to them and either congratulate them on removing him from the dating pool, or offering them a shoulder to cry on when he’s become a repeat offender of the truly heinous behaviour that you know him for. Different people bring out different behaviour in different people.

Even with that in mind, there are a bunch of people I’m still going to think are assholes.

The submissions for the “Red” Challenge aren’t exactly flooding in. I hope that means you are all out there trying to be creative and think of something to shoot. Tonight I bring you a self portrait, treated to bring out the red, by regular reader, commenter and challenge participant, David. David runs the blog Natural City Man and is a regular nudie.

You have until the end of the month to send your “Red” Challenge submissions in to me by emailing brenton.parry@gmail.com

What happens next is the bit that I love. Two guy run up the steps and stand near her and launch into a very passionate kiss which pretty much stops her ranting dead in it’s tracks. The response from the crowd is fantastic too. LOTS of cheering and applauding. Love is always going to win over hate.

On Wednesday this week I really wanted to slap some sense into a couple of people and sit down and cry. Why? A friend has, from my perspective as a man who wants a relationship, thrown away a perfectly good one. Of course when rationality kicks in and I think about it from his perspective, the relationship wasn’t right for him at the moment.

My friend had reunited with an ex boyfriend and they were living together and it was all going well. That was until my friend decided that monogamy wasn’t for him so he mentioned opening the relationship up with the boyfriend who wasn’t at all interested in the idea. Where to go from here? Well, when two people want fundamentally opposite things from a relationship then it’s just not going to work, so they broke up. Allegedly my friend had already started putting into practice the open-relationship mode and I saw him on Scruff and the n0w-ex-again boyfriend essentially said that my friend had cheated.

While the logical part of me says that it wouldn’t have survived if one wants monogamy and the other doesn’t, the emotional romantic insecure side of me wants to scream at my friend because he’s essentially done what I am always so scared that someone will do to me. That is basically waving a huge banner in my face saying I’m not good enough to keep them entertained so they are fucking off to have some fun. While I don’t agree with what my friend has done, this post is more about me than him. From where I’m standing, the boyfriend seemed to be one of those fantastic guys that you would be mad not to snap up and here is my friend deciding that a bit of random sex with strangers (which I usually find unfulfilling) is more important and satisfying than regular sex with emotion and a real connection.

So on Wednesday night my faith was very much shaken. The gay world jokes about the fact that you may as well be dead at 40 but as I approach that very number in a few months, it’s feeling very much like a real death sentence to any chance I have of meeting someone I can trust and be confident that they aren’t going to tell me they want to fuck around.