Sarah White, the Naked Therapist, Turns Naked Rock Star

Sarah White, the Naked Therapist, has announced the first ever all-virtual music release party via Periscope for her inaugural EP, “Sex Rock,” at 9 pm EST on February 24, 2016. The EP is by ONA, and it is linked with her popular Instagram account, @OnaArtist. The online-only release party will feature a live cam chat, a screening of five music videos to songs from the EP (some never before seen), a digital swag bag, and an after-party story on Snapchat.

Explaining her move to music, and picking up on themes she recently published in an article entitled, “This Is Why I’m a Naked Rock Star,” Ms. White says, “I see this as taking my pro-male arousal approach into a new and exciting direction. I’ve learned so much about men in five years of Naked Therapy, and this experience has informed my song style and lyrics.” With titles like “Boy Love So Good,” “Open My Hips,” and “It Takes Two (To Be a Girl),” the EP looks to be a celebration of the power and beauty of male desire for female performance.

In “This is Why I’m a Naked Rock Star,” Ms. White uses Spotify listener data and music history to hypothesize a gender difference between “sexually empowering” and “sexually arousing” musical performer/audience relationships. Women get to be sexually aroused by male musicians (Elvis, the Beatles, Timberlake, Bruno Mars, etc.) and sexually empowered by female musicians (Madonna, Rihanna, Beyonce, Lana, etc.). On the other hand, while men can be sexually empowered by male musicians, it is not to the music industry that they turn for sexual arousal, but to the porn industry. This would indicate that for a female performer to be ultimately sexually arousing for a man, she needs to take off her clothes. However, due to current music industry and cultural stigmas against female musicians going naked, there is no such sexually arousing relationship for men in music.

To remedy this bias, Ms. White is doing something similar to what she did with therapy: she’s allowing and encouraging male arousal by becoming what she calls a “Female Elvis.” Not only is she releasing music as ONA, but she’s offering naked photos and videos on her site, OnaGram.com, in tandem with her music. This will allow her male audience members to have the same level of sexual arousal in a musical relationship that female audiences are allowed to have with their male performers.

But as Ms. White points out, it’s not all about men; it’s also about supporting creative freedom for women: “I think it’s time we address the prejudice against female artists using their naked sex appeal to its maximum economic and creative effectiveness. Male performers can be supremely sexy to their female audiences by staying clothed, but women have to go farther, and rather than criticize and lament this fact and slut-shame any female performer who decides to go there, I say it’s time we celebrate women who choose to artfully arouse men by getting naked.”