BIO:
Gal Mariya Rivers (stillinmetamorphosis) is an NSFW content creator and artist who shares her body and her pleasure to challenge societal norms and inspire change. Through erotic solo videos and slice-of-life content showing body experiences usually hidden behind closed doors, Gal Mariya shares intimately and authentically. Starting in 2015 with nude photos on Reddit, she found confidence and discovered her artistic voice. Today, she creates both NSFW and SFW art to explore and share her perspective and to embrace her imperfect self. With nearly a decade of experience as an NSFW content creator, Gal Mariya connects deeply with her audience by offering a unique blend of authenticity, sexiness, and empowerment. She invites others to embrace beauty in all its forms while fostering conversations about self-acceptance, body liberation, and autonomy. By embracing and sharing her unique body (hairy BBW with small breasts and a big butt), Gal Mariya challenges traditional beauty standards and shares herself with those who want to see more body diversity in adult entertainment.
My project is about my biggest secret: I am a nude model who uses her self-photography to tell stories.
How it started
Up until 2015, I hated my body. I cried looking at it naked.
Most people had no idea. After all, after losing a massive amount of fat in what I believed then was a safe way[1], I looked closer to what society deemed acceptable than I ever had before. But I felt worse than I had a couple years before, when I had been my heaviest.
Desperate for relief, I posted nude pictures online to a body positive forum of non-sexual nude photos. Seeing on my camera the first ever nude photos of the body that so disgusted me, I cried. But I posted anyway.
My body image went from 20% to 70% in a weekend. It would certainly be a statistically significant difference, if one could ever draw such a conclusion from a sample size of one.
It wasn’t so much the outpouring of nice comments that made the change. Sure, it felt good to have people tell me the body I hated didn’t shock or appall them but rather appealed to them.
But that wasn’t it. Rather, it was learning that my perceptions could be so different from how others perceive me. If bodies like mine are attractive to a wide range of people, how had I missed the message? Why had I wasted so much brainpower and time on hating my body and wanting to change it?
My life transformed. Now feeling an urge to show what I learned, I left a career in which I felt no such passion. I started communicating more effectively with my loved ones. As I served as both a model and a photographer for more and more nude photos and learned to more effectively use my artistic tools, I felt creative for the first time in my life. My confidence grew and my insistence on battling insecurities with radical honesty and acceptance solidified.
Nothing was the same after I realized that my perception of myself was so different from how others perceived me. And I wasn't the same after I made the scary step to post the body that horrified me to the internet. From that day on I am a person who takes action even if it scares me.
What to expect
My pictures are raw, unedited, and authentic. Those who find me by searching nudes to get off to also find something unexpected: a woman with a beautifully flawed body refusing to accept limits set on her and talking openly about her bodily experiences in the moments between the shots.
You’ll find me sharing a photograph or video every day in 2018, as part of my 2018 Body Gratitude Project. Some days, my focus is aesthetic and some days it’s functional. Some range from serious (not having and never having had cancer) to simply thoughtful (my knees don’t hurt the way they used to). Some remind us that the brain—which we can easily forget is also part of the body—brings much to be grateful for too.
To a viewer who knows my history, many aesthetic-focused posts demonstrate the sharp contrast between my now and my then. For example, the first post of the project celebrates my disproportionately small breasts, which used to be the cause of so many of my tears. Some posts are unabashedly grateful for the sexy adventures my body brings me, so explore the project at your own risk. Some posts are clothed because my body is valuable when it is clothed too.
What you won’t find is a reliance on “flattering angles”[2] or me pretending my home organization is any more perfect than my body (so yes you will see clutter and no I don’t usually make my mirrors spotless). You also won’t see my full face, at least for now. This has nothing to do with me feeling shame and everything to do with needing to navigate the very societal barriers that I’m trying to knock down.
I hope you observe growth over time in both my body and my art. Since the first time my nude pictures hit the internet in 2015, my body has changed and so has how I carry and portray it. I no longer scrub my body of its abundant hair for fear of the internet’s hatred. I don’t avoid angles that betray that my chin sometimes has a second chin keeping it company. I certainly don’t pretend that my body won’t keep changing as I age; instead, I prepare myself to celebrate that growth too. This project is deeply rooted in antiperfectionism and growth mindset, so I post consistently, try new shot styles, and welcome feedback from people who care about the project.
What keeps me going
I’m desperate to help others stave off the misery that I wasted so much of the first 25 years of my life on. So the messages that tell me I’ve made a difference already mean everything.
Women have told me that seeing me confidently show my very imperfect body makes them feel better about themselves. Men have told me that whereas before they were only attracted to model-looking women, they now find themselves attracted to a wider range of women as a result of seeing me share my body with so much energy and confidence. People of various genders have told me that they wish they had seen my project earlier in their life. I wish I had had this project earlier too.
I took radical steps to free myself from a culture that told me I was aesthetically worthless and from my brain patterns that reinforced these dangerous perceptions. The toll of fucking with body image in the name of media profit includes tears, missed opportunities, sickness, and death. Luckily[3], it only took me 25 years to realize it was bullshit. I hope to free others too.
I had never seen anyone with my body shape portrayed looking attractive and the effect is indelible. I still feel like an anomaly but now I'm proud to be one. I show my body to those who consent to see it because there needs to be no doubt that strong confident women come in all kinds of proportions. If the images aren’t already out there (enough[4]), I’m going to create them myself.
My willingness to be naked both physically and interpersonally is a power and I am using it. As hard as it is to change society in a meaningful and lasting way, I have to try. I appreciate the kind words that help me believe I'm on my way.
Notes
[1] I lost weight through daily calorie counting and moderate exercising. I later regained the weight, including because calorie counting didn’t actually teach me about my hunger cues nor did it address the reasons I was eating when I wasn’t hungry. I now am focusing on eating based on hunger and opting for joyful movement (mostly swimming) instead of calorie-burning-focused “exercise”. A shocking lesson I took from my weight loss is that it absolutely positively did not make me feel better about my body in the way that I had been promised it would all my life. Now that I’m learning my hunger cues, I can understand better the reasons I eat when I’m not hungry and find more non-food solutions for problems that food won’t solve anyway.
[2] I got over my fear of “unflattering angles” when we adopted a rescued black cat and I realized that to include both his face and mine in a photo, I couldn’t be picky about angles. Avoiding the appearance of a double chin was not worth missing out on sharing his adorable furry face. Even if the angle betrayed that my face can get furry too.
[3] In actuality, luck was only a small part. This happened because of my actions combined with those of the founder and community of the subreddit Normal Nudes.
[4] If you do know of artists/models/actors/etc. whose body looks something like mine, please let me know.