Tag Archives: non-selfie

The mystery of the non-selfie selfie

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘selfie’ as  “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media”. Although countless millions are taken every year, the ‘selfie’ is also a tool widely used by the internet self-publicists of the Kardashian variety.

The vast majority of these women (a significant proportion of which have what might be called a feminist bent)  one imagines  would typically empathise with #MeToo. However, the photographs  invariably involve themselves in various states of undress, showing as much flesh as possible without showing anything which would otherwise require (in the US at least) a black blob of modesty.

This exhibitionist behaviour (can it be anything else??) is normally described by the actors as ’empowering’, whilst presumably they would simultaneously denounce any male slavering over them as the spawn of Weinstein.  Anyhow, that inherent contradiction of the feminist agenda (about which Grumpy has previously pontificated) is not the purpose of this post.

Rather, the contradiction here is that these ‘selfies’ show the (invariably) woman holding the very device  which – if it were truly a “selfie”-  would be taking the picture. They thus cannot be selfies (as the camera would not be in shot), and rather than being the impromptu snap the taker wishes to convey, there is clearly a photographer invited into the lady’s bathroom (and it always seems to be bathroom or bedroom, possibly to rationalise the state of undress)  to take the unashamedly self-promotion shot.

Although one has to admire the Kardashian women’s commercial acumen for making million of dollars for  merely displaying their infeasibly large arses, it gives Grumpy some satisfaction to imagine the presence of the photographer is  because these vacuous (and generally less than beautiful) women are too thick to operate the phone themselves.