These cropped photos are a sample of the images compiled by Jon Hendren. They're a bit like jazz—if you have to ask why I like 'These 32 Naked Dads Setting Up Christmas Trees Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity...And More,' you'll never know.
Every Christmas, my parents and I watch Trading Places, the movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd where the comedic climax (spoiler!) is a bad guy getting raped by a gorilla on an Amtrak. And every December, I also revisit Eyes Wide Shut, where the dramatic climax involves secret society's orgy. These take place at Christmas, so they are Christmas movies, just like Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and those three films are preferable to the schmaltz-covered corn of It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Just because the holiday is based on the birth of Baby Jesus doesn't mean all your traditions have to point to Him.
Which brings me to newest "alt" holiday tradition: Looking at a blog post that is a list of naked Christmas dads. To be fair, I've only been able to do this the past two years because "These 32 Naked Dads Setting Up Christmas Trees Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity...And More" has only existed on Something Awful since December 2013. But I plan on making rereading it a longstanding tradition, and you should too. Like many things that warm our hearts on the holidays, it's difficult to explain, so you should just go to that link, read it, then come back here.
(Note: It's impossible to know whether the "dads" are actually fathers. But they looklike dads, y'know?)
In honor of the season, I caught up with its author, Jon Hendren (who you may remember from the Edward Snowden/Scissorhands video), to get the how/why. He assured me that my Christmastime preoccupations with both a Kidman/Cruise erotic thriller and set of terrifying naked dads were normal, because Christmas was "one of the sexier holidays."
VICE: First off, where did these photos come from?
Jon Hendren: Where did I get the naked old men? It's a labor of love. I sort of scraped Tumblr sites that are devoted to nude old men. Usually shirtless, usually kind of fat. I have a flash drive that's heavily, heavily encrypted but it contains about nine gigabytes of photos of just older men in various states of undress. Not performing any sex acts, mind you. But they wanted to record what was going on. It's a hobby?
How long did it take to find 32 of them?
Oh, I have way more than 32. That's just how many I felt were necessary. They just kind of accumulated. They're not categorized when I find them, usually. The Tumblrs are in different languages and I'm too lazy to translate, so I just scroll through and find the ones that are good. But out of the 9,000 or so, there's probably 200 or 300 that are Christmas- or holiday-themed. There's one guy that had painted his penis to look like a dreidel. I didn't include that one because it would have been too hard to explain why there was a dreidel in my Christmas-themed article, but that one's one of my favorites. I'm saving it for a rainy day.
How did you cull them down to 32, then? What makes a good naked Christmas dad?
They have to be enjoying themselves first of all. It has to be a picture they took because they were feeling erotic at the time. They have to have a certain look on their face—usually pride, but also a certain kind of confusion is good. I just generally look for guys who look happy in that particular moment.
Since you found the photos off of Tumblr, do you have any indication of what they were originally intended for?
I don't know, because the people who post them are obviously not the old men in question. They collect these things, just like I do, although their motivations are obviously different. I don't find it sexually appealing at all—I'm in it for the artistic value, the statement being made, if you will. I think a lot of these guys took these pictures to send to a loved one and to potential sex partners over the internet, or maybe dating sites. Every one has a story behind it, right? I would say that they're really, really happy with the state of their genitals and they wanted to show somebody.
Any opinion on whether posting the naked dads counts as revenge porn?
I don't think so. I very much doubt it. It's not mean-spirited on anybody's part. Nobody's getting revenge on anybody. It's just: "Check out this picture of a great big fat guy, and he's naked. His dick is out and it's resting on the table." It's more just a marvel. You know Guinness World Records? They make a spectacle out of kind of ridiculous things, like a guy who can drink a gallon of milk the fastest in the world. Well, I think that being 65 years old and 400 pounds and you get your genitals out and manage to take a picture with your foot, that's pretty good. I think that's just as valid as a Guinness World Record.
OK, so say I want to start my own holiday collection and make this a tradition. What are the key words I should be using to suss them out?
Step one is to open your browser to google.com and then just type in "old fat guy small penis tumblr," and you'll find several called things like "Chubby 4 Me" and "Very Ordinary Person." They're collections of regular guys and older guys that are fairly heavyset, and usually no commentary. Just picture after picture after picture. It's great. It's something to do when you're lying in bed at night and you can't sleep, but you don't wanna start a new TV show because that's gonna take all your attention. You just wanna look at something for maybe eight minutes, nine minutes. I think naked old guys are a good way to do that?
Thanks, Jon. Merry Christmas and thanks for the two years of joy.
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