Selfie Contortions

Selfie contortions.  What do they mean?  You’ve seen them, and if you are a girl of the selfie generation, you’ve probably even done a few.  And yes, I said girl, because I think we can all agree right up front that, without exception, MEN SHOULD NOT TAKE SELFIES.  Period.

Selfie contortions, rattled off in rapid fire succession, are the near gravity (and anatomy) defying manipulations of the face, body and limbs, which are done in the quest of the perfect digital self portrait.  They are, to be certain, entertaining to observe, but I wonder, do they hint at an even wider problem?

Many before me have editorialized the selfie epidemic, but I want to suggest that perhaps we have only been looking at the tip of the iceberg.  If the typical selfie shared on social media is merely the end result of an extended round of selfie contortions, is the problem not exponentially worse than it seems?

How many shots are discarded in pursuit of a single post worthy selfie?  Five?  Ten?  How about a hundred?

I was sitting in Starbucks last December, when a lovely college age female came in, no doubt fresh from some last minute holiday shopping, and sat down next to me with her frothy white hot chocolate and a candy cane topped brownie.  It looked delicious, but she would never know.  After spending the next 20 minutes (not kidding) staging the perfect playful look-at-how-much-I-love-christmas photoshoot with her hot chocolate, at first frolicking joyfully with the whip cream and an impressive array of kissy pouts, she then started in on the brownie.  She did pretty much everything except eat them.  Once she had finished shooting, I thought ok now finally she is going to enjoy her selections, but oh how wrong I was.  She needed to spend another 20 minutes selecting/filtering/posting her choices (no doubt accompanied by suitable #extrahollyjolly hashtags).

Once all that was over, she actually leaned back in her seat to check her messages, and took a sip of her now stone cold chocolate.  Eww!  No wonder she pushed it away, gathered her parcels and bolted out the door (leaving the untouched drink and snack on the table as a very confusing barrier to whoever might next want to sit down).

At least she was fully clothed.  On a daily basis my social media feeds are bombarded by ever more provocative self captured imagery.  I used to get one, or two, a day, but now?  Its more like one or two a minute, is it not reaching near epidemic proportions?  And when did the word "throwback" come to mean "in my underwear"?  It must, because I don't think I have ever seen a fully clothed pic with that tag? Throwback…code for rememberwhenIlookedthisgood.  

All of this might be a new twist but its nothing new.  Even back in my day, we had a name for pictures of semi clad women in trashy lingerie, it was called “pornography”.  Today it is known by a different moniker, “profile picture”.  Hey don’t get me wrong, many of you are in fact very, very, veryyyy beautiful, I’m not complaining.  At least I don’t have to steal my father’s playboy anymore.

I get it.  Everyone is trying to “go viral”, which also makes me laugh, because when I was twenty something, believe me when I tell you that “viral” was not a good thing.  The last thing you wanted to hear was that anything you had was viral.  Trust me.

Is it really any wonder that my generation occasionally finds ourself laughing at yours?