Farewell, Dear Friend: Saying Goodbye To Nerve’s Photo Section

This week, Nerve.com announced that they'd hired a new CEO—and with this new hire would come some changes to the website's format. I'll cut to the chase here: Nerve is moving its nude photos offsite.

It's a sad announcement, and one that sucks on many levels (which, of course, I'll get into down below). And I guess it's especially sad for me because of my personal connection to the company. You see, years ago, when I was in college, and Fleshbot was but a twinkle in a pervert's eye, I worked as an intern for Nerve.

I applied to be a Nerve intern in the summer of 2002. I was on the verge of entering into my senior year of college, and though there were many things I was still unsure of, there was one thing I knew for sure: I wanted to get an internship some place cool. Specifically, some place doing interesting work around the field of sex and sexuality. Nerve was a perfect fit for me.

What I loved about Nerve—a website devoted to "alternative stimulation" and "literate smut"—was the intelligence that it brought to the topic of sex. Through a range of essays, Nerve touched on topics deemed too shocking for most media outlets, discussing them in a thoughtful, highbrow way. I loved it.

And then, of course, there were the pictures, which solidified Nerve's commitment to destigmatizing sexuality. It's (relatively) easy to write about sex and still distance yourself from the arena of "smut" or (gasp!) porn; bringing naked pictures into the mix makes it harder to defend yourself against charges that your project is about more than simple titillation. But Nerve braved that barrier, unafraid to showcase the work of erotic artists like Clayton Cubitt, Autumn Sonnichsen, and Chase Lisbon—and, what's more, to showcase sometimes unabashedly sexual photography alongside thought provoking essays, treating them with the same level of respect.

But those days are now over, it seems: apparently, showing is more shocking than telling, and Nerve must now do away with its naughtier bits and fall in step with the rest of the media. And it's truly sad to see Nerve attempt to conform to a model "that's a lot better for more conservative companies," to shift the nudity to something "occasional and relatively incidental." Dare we say it? It feels like we're witnessing the tragic fall of one of our allies in whatever war this is that we're waging on the American attitude toward sex.

It's a sad day for smart sex on the web. We can only hope that somewhere out there, there's another brave soul willing to pick up the baton that Nerve has dropped.

· Nerve.com Hires New CEO, And New Plans To Downplay Nudity (businessweek.com, via Gawker)
· Photos from "Nerve: The First Ten Years"