Did you hear that the Oxford Dictionary proclaimed “selfie” to be the word of the year for 2013? Did you also hear that some people think selfies are self-indulgent (why is that a bad thing?), ridiculous, and even “a cry for help“? And here I thought selfies were just a way to take nice pictures of and feel good about ourselves. Silly me.
Some people think that we take selfies to troll for compliments, and that selfies reinforce the idea that looks are all that matters. That we can’t feel good about ourselves until social media validates us by telling us that we look good in pictures we snapped of ourselves. Selfie critics say this is especially problematic because teenage girls take the highest number of selfies, and we need to teach them that they are more than what they look like.
We are all more than what we look like, but why can’t we believe that and also enjoy taking pictures of ourselves? These are not mutually exclusive ideas.
I’ve taken a bunch of selfies that I’ve never shared with anyone. Not because I didn’t like how I looked in them, but because I took them for myself. Sometimes I just want to see what I look like at a particular moment. Sometimes I’m having a wicked good hair day. Sometimes I take a picture of myself so that maybe I can see how I look to the rest of the world. And yeah, sometimes I snap a selfie and think I look great, and I decide to post it to Facebook. There are dozens of reasons why we take pictures of ourselves, and all of them are valid, and none of them are sad or pathetic or a cry for help.
One of my favorite selfies, taken last winter. What a cry for help!
It’s pretty sad that some people can’t see the fun – and even the joy – in a good selfie. There are so many things in the world today that are designed to make us feel bad, from the media and pop culture reinforcing the idea that there is only one type of body that is good/acceptable, to the endless barrage of ads reminding us that we will never be thin enough, but we sure as heck had better keep trying. If selfies combat that, even for the split-second it takes to capture our image, why would we make fun of that, why would we mock people for doing it?
A no-makeup, spur-of-the-moment selfie I took while writing this post.
My hair might be a cry for help…
Here’s another thing about selfies: They allow us to see the amazing variety of people and bodies in the world. I almost never see anyone who looks like me on TV or in a magazine, but on social media, I see all kinds of shapes and sizes, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Up for a little challenge, BFDers? Send me a selfie. A new one, a classic, whatever you like. I’ll showcase all of your lovely faces in a future BFD post, if you’re willing. Snap away, friends!
