Girl, Own Your Face: Let’s talk voyeur

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: what’s with social hatred for selfies?

The art of the self, or my excruciating vanity?

We’ll get to my unforgivable sins in a minute, but let’s rewind. The image of woman has been one almost exclusively controlled, created, and distributed by men for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Paintings were painted by men, commissioned by men, and sold by men. Sculpture was an entirely a male space. The laws that dictated what women were allowed to portray, or be portrayed doing, were governed by men. Artistic taste was entirely governed by male critics: especially super weird ones like Beau Brummel and John Ruskin. We view the feminine image as a frippery of bows, petticoats and fake eyelashes, inexcusably rococo in it’s meaningless frivolity.

In a society where ‘feminine’ has always meant looking pretty for the male gaze, the female image, that is, everything from your drunken Instagram story to Kim K’s latest photo-shoot, is under incredible scrutiny from all sides. We can understand this through three sentences if this is getting a bit too SOAS for you:

The Rules Of Being A Woman In A Picture

1. The feminine image is expected to conform to standards of aestheticism (looking attractive, but not ‘weird’ or ‘slutty’). ✔
2. The feminine image is expected to conform to standards of feminine compliance (modesty, humility, submission). ✔
3. The feminine image is expected to be understood as primarily for a male gaze (what Dave thinks about you showing your cleavage matters more than whether you like your hair in that selfie) ✔

Reader, I’ve broken all the rules.

1. I care more about costumes and drama than whether I’m ‘attractive’ in my images, even if that means dressing up as a murderous witch. ☒
2. I love dressing up and taking pictures of myself! ☒
3. I think about whether I like my pictures instead of whether a man will think they’re too sexy for Facebook. ☒

It’s really funny how extreme the reaction is from society to women who post a lot of selfies, or even paint their own portrait. It’s seen as vain, shallow, arrogant and promiscuous, even though we consume images of both men and women every single day by the thousands. And woe betide you if you aren’t ‘pretty’ or straight size enough to enjoy expressing your image in public: not only are you humiliating yourself, you’re a bad moral influence and a symbol of everything wrong with society these days. Women aren’t really allowed to enjoy being pretty: they are to be looked at, not to enjoy looking at themselves.

It’s so bad that women can’t even appear as lawyers, doctors, politicians or activists in news features or documentaries without being absolutely slated for not being sexy or hot enough. Carole Baskin is too fat to talk about feline inbreeding in private zoos. Theresa May really needs to get botox when she’s discussing an equitable education spend in a fiscal announcement. Caitlyn Jenner is disgusting for not having surgery to look more feminine when she discusses her sports career. Even female murder victims are constantly pulled up for how blonde they are, pretty they are, sexy they the are. The female image isn’t allowed to be anything other than acceptably attractive.

Women are considered brave or newsworthy for showing acne or a post-baby bump. Female artists are constantly sneered at for music videos where they are too immodest about their bodies, too proud of themselves, too fat, too thin, too sexual, too frigid. Women participate in this girl-on-girl hate too: I’ve had to reprimand many a friend for pulling a face at a plus-size selfie or being nasty about a girl who isn’t ‘hot’ enough to ‘pose like that’. The fetishization of the female image is also incredibly creepy: I’ve had numerous men message me about my ‘black stockings’ in pictures that were obviously anything other than intentionally sexy.

And before you say ‘MeN haVe It BaD tOo’, men don’t get told to kill themselves for taking a selfie at the beach with their friends, men don’t get harassed for appearing on BBC News while being plus size, men don’t get pulled up on whether their selfies were ‘too sexy’ to expect not to be murdered by a stalker, and men don’t get called vain and arrogant for posting a picture of themselves in a new t-shirt. The way we understand the male image is not inherently through aesthetics. We can understand and value the presence of men as smart, funny, interesting, well informed or creative without ever asking whether they are hot.

There is nothing wrong with me, or any other woman, enjoying dressing up, selfies, re-enactment, costumes, cosplay, and sharing our creativity and existence with the rest of the world. There is nothing wrong with choose to appear on an interview or a zoom call without having waxed your top lip or put in some hair extensions. Your form is yours, your face is yours, your image is yours, your nudity is yours. We, as a society, have to get better and fast at understanding that we don’t live in a world where women have the sole duty of looking hot anymore, and that men no longer have the power of veto with whether a woman is pretty enough or not to model, act, or sing.

You’re not vain. You’re a creator, and you’re challenging the rules.

Race you to the thrift shop.