Do you remember when selfies involved a mirror?
An apt metaphor for what seemed the apotheosis of neo-narcissism. Pictures of me by me. The brainiacs at Psychology Today and other high-minded journals spent years analysing the shit out of the phenomenon and concluded, yes, narcissists are selfie-prone — but so are people who think of it as fun, worthwhile, and normative.
Gone are the days when you ask some homeless bloke in a tatty raincoat to take a photo of you in the street with your beloved. You just use your Gollum-like elongated selfie-finger to take the pic. With mobile phones approaching equivalence with high-end cameras, when aren’t we Insta-ready? Every moment brims with Insta-possibilities.
The only question now is how selfies have developed since the primeval days of simply striking a pose infront of your bathroom mirror.
Qualifier: they still do that. It remains de rigeur.
Yet among many reasonable questions a cynic might ask, the first is, why are these attractive women taking their own pictures? Surely they’re not lonley femcels doomed to a life of bitter inceldom? Maybe it’s just marketing. Business goes before pleasure. Gotta build some buzz before they auction themselves off the highest bidder.
Belfies.
There was a time pre-Kardashian (PK) when being ‘two axehandles across the ass‘ was a bad thing. Now there’s no such stigma attached, and the interwebz are flooded with advice on how to blast your butt. I’m sure ‘doing a fire hydrant‘ was illegal in my youth, but apparently now it’s good for building gluteal stability. The fact women dream of ‘making my butt look bigger in jeans‘ means I have fallen down a rabbit hole and emerged in an alternate reality.
When they begin advocating for a bigger gunt, I’ll ask the Red Queen to chop off my head.
Obliged by spiteful paymasters to return to their pre-COVID workplaces, a bold rebellion is brewing in the selfieverse whereby office-bound ladies (and some men) defiantly whip out their chesticles (or other bits) during bathroom breaks. Laugh in the face of tyranny. I’m not sure what they call it, but you get the gist. While the line between inappropriateness and free promotional material might blur in some cases, I’m sure cash-strapped airlines (for example) wouldn’t object to a more bathroom breaks like the above.
The below, however…
Ballot-selfies.
Really only make sense in countries where voting is optional. In Australia you get fined for failing to vote. Why would you take a snap of you doing your duty? About as stupid as a selfie of you breathing, or taking a dump (more on that later).
Selfies usually involve you doing something cool and/or looking hot while doing it. So maybe there were millions of Americans who wanted to prove how ‘real’ they were, by posting evidence of them ‘taking a stand’ at the polling booth, or some other vapid shit.
Or maybe they thought they looked good, standing in a queue with all the other Walmart people.
Toilet selfies.
Really? Women taking smiling photographs of themselves doing the deed. Gloria Steinem, please have a word with these silly bitches, she’s set The Movement back at least fifty years.
I know there’s are dubious porn niches for this sort of nonsense, but do we want your kid seeing it in ten years time? No, is the answer. Do not take a selfie of you doing a poo in 2019 in case little Billy becomes a scatophile in 2029 and finds himself in an awkward situation.
Fish gape.
Resting bitch face yielded to the trout-pout, which was bumped by the duck-face. It’s hard telling what came next, because the chemicals involved mean many ladies got stuck with duck. If pushed, I’d say we’ve returned to our ichthyophiliac roots with the fish-gape. Different from the trout in that it gives a ‘subtle sense of allurement‘ the gape engages only three muscles in your face, which is handy because that’s all many girls have left. It’s hard to engage socially with gapers because you never know if they’re about to say something.
The hypocrisy-selfie.
Last is the evolution of the fake ‘no make up‘ selfie, which morphed to the “don’t-body-shame-me-for-being-fat OH MY GOD! Just-lost-a-thousand-pounds–now-I’m-so-motherfucking-hot!” selfie.
If I could have stitched ‘hypocrite’ and ‘selfie’ together somehow, maybe with shiny glaze of surgically-rendered fat pumped from Rebel Wilson or Adele, then believe me I would. I didn’t like ’em when they had their own postcode, now they fit into one leg of their old jeans, I dislike them even more.
And what did you do with that skin, ladies?
The skin.
I don’t doubt I’ll be back.
The truest word I uttered in this post was ‘normative’.
For example, fat has become so normal we don’t even react anymore to morbid obesity. No matter how you spin it, this must be a bad thing for the human race. Puts me on the hit-list for a million screeching harpies who can control everything in their lives except their weight, but so be it. Rewire your brain’s reward pathways from eating to exercise, is my non-medical advice.
We could eliminate half of these horrendous self-images in one fell swoop.
