Playboy model comes under fire for posing naked on a sacred Maori mountain

Travelistas beware, for a Playboy model who shared a risqué picture of her posing naked on top of a sacred mountain has outraged Maori locals in New Zealand.

As any social media fan will know, Instagram can be a competitive place to hangout, with users constantly striving to find a more striking, surprising or even shocking image to share with their followers.

And what better shot to post than a picture of you seemingly on top of the world, overlooking the clouds beneath you? Particularly when you’re stark naked!

That was exactly the thinking when Jaylene Cook, 25, climbed to the top of New Zealand’s Mount Taranaki with her photographer boyfriend Josh Shaw, 27.

Having reached the top of the 2,518m volcano, Jaylene posed for a picture looking out at the view with her naked breasts and bare bottom also visible.

And though the picture has been liked almost 10K times on Instagram, local Maori claim the move was culturally insensitive, due to the fact that the top of the volcano is considered sacred.

“It’s like someone went into St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and took a nude photo,” Dennis Ngawhare, a spokesperson for the local Maori tribe, told the BBC.

“It’s a sacred place and something like this is just very inappropriate.”

But Jaylene has defended her last minute decision to strip off, saying that she and her partner did their research on the history and cultural beliefs surrounding Mount Taranaki before hiking to the summit.

“There was nowhere that we read or were told that it was a bad thing to do, and we believe that it still wasn’t. We see nudity as art and pure and natural,” she told Newstalk ZB.

“I respect everyone’s views and opinions and I’m sorry that people felt we were being disrespectful – that was never our intention,” she continued.

But that doesn’t mean the glamour model wouldn’t do it again given the chance.

“We’ve had overwhelming support from local Maori and people from everywhere saying they’re not offended at all – they love the photo and it’s encouraged them to embrace their bodies as well,” she explained.

Although this particular stunt may not be part of the movement, there’s currently a cheeky new travel trend sweeping Instagram right now.

Cheeky exploits is both the name of a hashtag and of a standalone Instagram account featuring people posing with naked bottoms in various different travel destinations.

But while the trend has been attracting plenty of attention, it hasn’t come without controversy. Not only is public nudity a bit of a complicated issue, there is always the concern that in stripping off your smalls in an unusual travel hotspot may be considered disrespectful to locals.

So if you’re currently travelling in some Instagram-worthy destination, by all means take the #sorrynotsorry shot but try to keep your clothes on. The jaw-dropping scenery speaks for itself, the naked butt is optional.

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