And now, it's story time!
....a small, virtual child with unrealized yet great magical powers known as the "Internet" embarked down a long adventurous road into the wild western wilderness ("www"). Following in pursuit of this child, Brad decided to open a virtual village tavern for travelers and drifters, called a "discussion forum", to come and engage in communal discussions about a very strange but wondrous phenomenon sprouting up across the lands, and those that came were from the far reaches of the virtual world...
Okay, okay, so now you're thinking, "OMG, not another Al Gore claiming to invent the net!". Hold on buckaroo - before your mental thoughts interrupted my delightful story, I was going to present in a metaphorical way that it really wasn't me that created the Internet nor the momentum that produced "CFNM", but the Internet itself. Uh oh, wait! You're same wandering thoughts are now thinking "Al Gore + CFNM, ugh - stop it thoughts! Why am I reading this!?" Please put clothes back on that mental image and hang in there with me. You see, the Internet brought us bulletin boards, newsgroups and forums that allowed people to anonymously connect with a gazillion (that's 1,000 bazillion) of others to discuss all types of stuff. But unlike coffee table talks with your Aunt Ginny, the anonymity of these new forums resulted in some pretty taboo discussions as well, such as having kinky sex with rubber balloons that looked like Snoopy - stuff nobody wanted to admit when Aunt Giny was still in the room (at least until little Lisa walked in carrying the inflatable Tom Jones doll she found under Aunt Ginny's bed).
So my kinky interest I brought to the Internet was to have events where all females were completely clothed, but all male guests would be totally naked. At the time I assumed it was a bizarre and weird and unusual type of kink...I was so naive about just how kinky the Internet could get. Hence, from the computer desk I kept in my closet (back to my metaphors again), I created a forum on an old forum server based out of San Francisco called "Bianca's". Early net aficionados may still remember Bianca's as the grandmother of all social networks for perverts. I sought to describe my kink in a way that would just put it out there and hope that there were enough women that would find it desirable. The most important aspect of it was to embrace female voyeurism and their desire to turn the tables on the men.
But it was never meant for male exhibitionists of the genus mallparkinglotus erectus. So the concept of "visual sensations" that focused on the voyeuristic orientation sounded good, and it was for women, so thus "Visual Sensations for Women" was launched. The forum was meant to educate everyone, particularly women. On this forum we chatted about this erotic concept and searched in vain for pictorial examples of it. In the first few years of the Internet, there were less than just a couple of dozen quasi-related pictorial representations that depicted nude men in the presence of clothed women. However, the reverse - naked women around clothed men - were in numbers to which only astrophysicists can relate. This was because all nude porn was being produced by men that only wanted to look at naked women, and if a guy was shown nude in a photo, the inner brain-voice of these men would say "OMG! You're looking at a naked man - delete it now before you become gay too!" Lacking any pictorial examples of CFNM, enthusiasts with this erotic proclivity would even use Photoshop to create them, or, snail mail real CFNM photos to each other as scanners were still considered high-tech machinery out of the reach of mortals. Members of our forum were naming the concept in many ways, such as Naked Guy/Clothed Gal ("NG/CG"), Nude-Man-Clothed-Woman or ("N-M-C-W"), Clothed-Women/Nude-Men ("CW/NM") and a series of other acronyms. Despising inconsistency and being the benevolent dictator of the forum I was, I one day nailed an official proclamation to the forum's wall stating that from hence forward, all shall use the same terminology "Clothed-Female/Naked-Male", a.k.a. "CFNM", to define our erotic passion. Further, any violators that posted alternative acronyms would be met with a response of "huh?" And thus on that day, CFNM was born. There were no angelic horns blown nor any star up in the virtual heavens marking its birth. Surprisingly, Anderson Cooper never mentioned it on CNN either. Just kinda happened quietly.
For the first several years, only members of our VSFW forum used the term CFNM. It exclusively defined us in our little perverse corner of the Internet. We were a club but not a cult, that latter term being held exclusively by people that give way too much shit about something. During this same period, one of our members started a separate Yahoo Group using the CFNM acronym, and others followed. Then, something strangely wondrous happened - people began joining these forums by the tens of thousands. CFNM started to go viral. But we didn't use the term "viral" as back in that era, a "virus" had something to do with pathogens (it's true - look it up on Wiki!). When Bianca's closed down due to funding, I moved the site to other web hosts who allowed me to park my virtual CFNM RV in their server's parking lot. Some of these hosts demanded putting ads and popups on our home page. I get it, but if someone wants to put sex graffiti on the walls of my house, I sorta want some artistic say in it...but they never gave it. I finally decided to host it myself, and, change the name to capture what we really were, kind of an island of misfit toys. So we renamed it to CFNM Village, of which I'm either the mayor or the village idiot, depending upon who you talk to.
So looking back, "CFNM" was coined simply as a convenience to name this curious and interesting pastime I and a number of others were exploring using the Internet. So what's the big deal about that acronym? Well, you got me. But evidently the rest of the world thought it was something neat because as I write this, a Google search shows there are 121 million hits on it. This means you now have to go to the twentieth Google page of links to finally find the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi, with the twenty preceding pages of links are all about the same thing - "clothed-females with naked-males". That foundation must really hate me.
CFNM was pretty cool for our small group until it caught the eye of a producer of gay porn in the UK. Now I'm not gay, but I don't mind gay porn...except the ones with midgets in sombreros, they scare me. In fact, the original co-founder of our CFNM forum in the 1990s is a very dear friend Scott (a.k.a. "Scooter"), who is gay and still serves as a moderator. But I digress...this producer took any photo he could find from newsgroups or our forum, claimed ownership by slapping his own logo on it, then created a pay-site selling "his" collection of CFNM materials. Despite the theft of both the concept and photographic imagery, he would come after anyone that would disseminate his CFNM branded materials, including sending me several threatening messages like "We own that and our attorney Bernie will sue you if you even LOOK at it without paying us!" Evidently, it was financially good for him because he began to hire actors and make full length CFNM videos prompting other porn producers to do the same. So if you now Google "CFNM", those porn videos are often the first links shown.
But here's the problem. Those porn videos were tailored exclusively to their male customer base while excluding any consideration as to what women would want in a CFNM experience. They depict fantasies that often include a bevy of buxom blondes stripping a guy naked as he sadly endures their forcing him to have sex with them (poor, poor man...oh the humanity of it!!), or, for their male customers into female domination, videos that include a stockade, classroom of young virgin female students that have never seen a penis and a schoolmarm with an attitude. Hence, the different varietals of CFNM started to ferment and find their own followings. If you ever encounter any of these men that know of CFNM solely from these videos, walk by carefully and quietly - never startle them with "uh, that ain't really what it is", because the wrath of their response will be worse than stepping into a Scientology meeting and announcing their religion is based on a science fiction story now in paperback.
Concurrent to all the CFNM imagery being cranked out for sale, I was doing something a bit different, and that was creating a CFNM reality that included...drum roll please...REAL WOMEN! (for the mothers of porn actresses, yes, yes, I know, your daughters are real too, but they are "PMBs" - professional make believers). But ultimately, the result was that our original forum, by itself, failed its mission to educate and bridge the chasm between women and men in a way whereby CFNM events would spontaneously generate. To ultimately achieve that goal, it required my reaching out to women in person and explaining to them that CFNM was not just another misogynistic attempt by men to trick women into attending orgies. This included meetings in person, and after years of effort, it proved to be a success and the first events called "CFNM parties" were hosted. The lessons learned were plenty, and we've provided our Organizing & Hosting CFNM Parties page dedicated to help others successfully organize and host CFNM events.
It was during this period that I learned that although not called "CFNM", events that were based upon a CFNM protocol had already been hosted, which you can read about on our CFNM Tea Parties page. In fact, I would never claim to have invented the eroticism of clothed-female/naked-male interaction as one can find examples all the way back to the Ancient Greek Olympics (Brad's trivia for the day - did you know that the word gymnasium comes from the Ancient Greek word "gymnós" which literally meant "naked", and was how all male athletes competed?). What I did do was to draw brackets around a concept, define it and give it a name. That means that no one else can legitimately claim they have a more correct definition.
One can now find "CFNM" in the erotic lexicons of all major countries of not only the US and UK, but also in Russia, Australia, Germany, Spain, Mexico, South America, Mexico, Netherlands, Italy, China, Japan, India, and I *think* Canada, but I'm not versed well enough in Canadian to make that call, eh? It's propagation around the world has resulted in many folks claiming a divine all-knowing understanding of it and will vehemently pound their fist in disagreement with me yelling "NO! CFNM IS...(fill in the blank)." All I can say is that I no longer care that much about defining it, but am happy to watch it grow into what it wants to be, kind of like raising a bizarre but lovable parrot from an egg then letting it fly away. And that's really kind of nice.