Hey cuties... I've been getting requests that you guys would..
🕑 Added 2020-04-24 15:51:29 +0000 UTC
Hey cuties... I've been getting requests that you guys would be interested in seeing my writing! I'm actually working on a bigger writing project right now, so maybe I can post snippets for y'all so you can tell me what you think :3
Some will be sexy and fun, this is a more serious piece on selfies! It was inspired by that annoying NYT article about selfies published earlier today. <3
I’ve been taking self portraits for a long time now. I remember being maybe three or four, and watching my mother take photos using a disposable camera. I asked to use it. I took a photo of the sky, which I thought was very beautiful.
“Don’t waste the film,” my mother scolded me.
I loved taking photos. There was something so thrilling about being able to capture an image. I was so in love with being alive, I wanted to grab all of it and record it. I loved the thrill of waiting for the prints to come back from the lab. I would hold the negatives up to the light as my father explained to me how the chemical reactions allowed us to capture the light of a particular moment.
Of course, I occasionally turned the camera back on myself. I had no tripod, no fancy camera with a timer, and I was too small to figure any of that out anyway. I took photos of my face. I was too short to see myself in the bathroom mirror, soone of the only ways I could look at myself was through photos. Of course, the first few “selfies” (are they selfies if they’re handheld, only with a film camera?) looked strange, my face distorted by the close range.
When I was in high school, my parents gifted me a digital camera. I was incredibly excited. How cool to be able to iterate on photos so quickly, to be able to see how they came out. I would plug the camera into my computer, downloading all the photos, meticulously archiving them in carefully sorted folders. I took photos of my dog, my friends, my family, of plants I liked. I took self portraits obsessively.
At that point, I had a laptop with a webcam as well. I received a phone with a camera as well. I used every camera I had to take photos of myself. I would hold out my hand, or use a tripod and a timer. I posted everything on social media. In the beginning, when I was posting them, I don’t even think there was a word for “selfie.” At the time, I believe the term was “GPOY” - gratuitous picture of yourself. And the “gratuitous” part was really felt. I would pretend to be ironic, posting them, pretending I was a vain girl obsessed with my image. But of course, I knew by posting them, I was still performing the act of being a vain girl. The self deprecation was meant as a shield against criticism. Girls were taught early that being too obsessed with our appearance was a grievous sin.
I was in an intensive arts program in high school, so constant self portraits didn’t particularly disturb anyone I knew IRL. To be honest, I’m not really use anyone cared, besides guys at school who thought I was hot. As I started reading more art theory, I started writing a long paper about women, vanity, self portraits, and social media.
After I finished my paper, and started talking more about this stuff on social media, I fell in with a group of much older women artists. It was exciting, hanging out with a bunch of cool girls who had just finished their MFAs and were starting to be taken more seriously by the art world.
I went to Sarah Lawrence after I graduated, in part so that I could stay close to the city and continue participating in this exciting new movement. The word for “selfie” was starting to be used more. The Kardashians were gaining in popularity. People were skewering selfies in op-eds, claiming it was foolish teenage girls being vain and self obsessed. Selfies were destroying the youth, or they were too sexual, or they were preventing people from reading, whatever. I was infuriated.
In 2013, I released a piece I was very excited about, something exploring self portraits, narcissism, and women. That year, “selfie” was Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. The New York Times started writing about selfies as a serious art form. It was cool to see people finally take selfies more seriously… just annoying that they still were not acknowledging the hard work all we girls had put into making selfies a serious art form.
Now these selfies are how I earn my living. While many people still don’t value sex workers and the work we do, I think sites like OnlyFans allow us to practice our art and make money. While porn piracy is still unfortunately common, I think people are more comfortable than ever compensating us for all the hard work we do to bring some cutie sexy smut into the world!
