From Sydney Morning Herald, Jan. 25, 2019.
The glorious selfie is losing its female gaze.
For years, we thought about the selfie as the work of women about women. That’s partly why it got bad press – girlie, narcissistic, banal.
Look around you and you will see men are taking charge of couple selfies. They claim it’s all about their physique and their ability to get a wider shot, to get in more of that spectacular holiday view. But we know the real reason men have taken charge of the iPhone. They too want to influence how they appear. It’ll be the blokes wanting to frame you with fireworks coming out of your head on the nearest available public holiday.
Selfies, the images we take of ourselves with our phones and which we invariably share everywhere, are changing.
Of course, we’ve always known men love to run the technology – thanks to Alexis Walker’s groundbreaking 1996 research which revealed that when men and women watch television, it’s men who seize the remote control.
This is just the same, just another way of controlling what we will see. Damn phone hogs.
US selfie expert Alicia Eler, author of The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture has observed this new trend and says women must take back control of the selfie and be in charge of how they are represented.
She says the person who holds the iPhone controls the selfie frame.
“Now the guy is controlling how the image is created and produced . . .they are also framing the way that image is viewed by the friends, the general public or a specific public,” she says.
But as Eler points out, there is still some gatekeeping along the way. There is still sharing to be done, which means that whoever does the sharing also does the choosing of the image. Perfect, so long as there are some images to choose without a tree branch emerging from the top of your head and competing with your windswept beachside ponytail.
