hmm I feel quite qualified to answer this OP. As I am a former NUTS magazine, ring girl and calendar girl (if you remember nuts men’s mag). I never went completely topless, down to tiny underwear. This was after I did pageants. I was early twenties.
I can honestly say now as a woman in my thirties I have 0 of those images on my social media although they are of course out there online. I have a professional job and own family.
The photos of me from pageants to men’s magazines are objectively attractive, sexy, beautiful etc. I know they are. I could post them now and it wouldn’t affect my self esteem if every single comment was ‘hideous’ or ‘ugly’.
I couldn’t care less. Not because I am devastatingly beautiful or anything, but because it doesn’t matter. My self worth has little to do with my appearance.
Back then, when I was in the thick of it, seeing the beautiful images coming back from the photographers, I had the same urge as you to want the photos EVERYWHERE! Why? Because I had attached beauty to self worth and self love. The more validation I got the more I felt I ‘loved myself’ and had ‘empowered’ myself. I had chosen to take the photos, I had chosen to put them out. I had the power! But that’s not really true.
So what changed? Well a lot did they opened my eyes but not in the way a lot of posters think. I didn’t and don’t feel degraded or embarrassed. I still actually have the calendar I was on the cover of up in my dressing room with a few other bits from that time. But that’s more as happy memories to me of a different time in my life.
I don’t post anything from it and I don’t hide it either. Because it has NO meaning whatsoever. They are just pictures of me looking attractive. Like there are millions of photos of people looking attractive.
Looking attractive in a picture isn’t an achievement. So can it improve your self worth? People telling you that you look pretty in a picture isn’t an achievement nor a failing. It’s just a nice picture.
A lot of the girls in the industry back then are now similar to me funnily enough. Really not bothered with beauty as a whole. I think we’ve all got high self esteem in terms of our value as being a literal centre fold of attraction shows you just how meaningless it is. So it doesn’t bother you when someone doesn’t think you’re attractive, because you know it makes 0 difference to a lot of things.
However there are a minority of girls from those beauty days that still haven’t had the ‘click’ moment and they are still posting half naked pictures well into their thirties. Some getting aesthetic work done and even paying out of their own pockets for shoots. A horrible comment would crush them.
You need to dissociate beauty with self worth. Get to the point where you can have a fully clothed photo of you looking objectively stunning and still not be arsed to post it, because it doesn’t matter either way to you what anyone else thinks.
Some days I’ll be bored and play with my makeup and do my full glamour look and pop in some extensions and go out. I’ll get treated similarly to the way I was treated at 21 by the general public (and I giggle to myself inwardly at the ridiculousness of it all). Then the next 6 months I’ll go back to looking like my scruffy self. I don’t feel any better about my self as a person when I go out in the glam look or my scruff ball look.
Do not associate yourself with your outwards shell. Your body is literally just a shell. Society will tell you it’s more and that your external shell represents your internal self. It doesn’t.
Sorry for my rambling. There is a lot I could say on the subject but I’ll spare you the boredom.