rightnowbb:

I think I know what the print media’s game is, and I don’t like it.

You know how papers and sites like The Daily Mail, Heat, and so forth, continually attempt to lower women’s self-esteem and self-image by posting stalkers’ pictures of famous beauties and circling their minor imperfections with jabbing criticisms?

Yes she’s thin and curvy and has great hair but look at her knee-wrinkles ew?

And their advertising pages are filled with dramatically photoshopped images implying that’s what women are supposed to look like, and what they will look like, if they buy the product in question?

And selfies are a big threat to that because all of a sudden, unabashed, unairbrushed, honest portraits of real and diverse women are being shared everywhere, and there’s not a thing they can do about it, and pretty soon girls are going to start realising that everyone has kninkles and cankles and even ~super terrible~ things like *gasp* fat rolls and also this doesn’t matter at all and you can still be happy and beautiful! The horror! How are pointless products and procedures going to be advertised now? How are they going to encourage women to be self conscious and competitive enough to read articles about other women’s faults?

Well…I think I’ve got it. Lately, newspapers won’t stop talking about selfies. They’ve got selfies as the word of the year; every other article is about selfies, they’re making up new words as puns on selfie, they’re declaring selfies as a major trend from 2013 (as if they hadn’t been going on since camera phones were invented and even before that; before the newspapers glanced up dopily and grunted “oh…kids are doing that picture sharing thing a lot now, aren’t they”). If we didn’t have reason to suspect their motives, you’d think they were actually promoting selfies.

And they are—for the time being. But pretty soon, they’re going to start declaring that the selfie is over. That it was a big deal in 2013 but now it’s so last year. That selfies are now widely regarded as passe and no celebrity would dream of posting pictures of themselves that weren’t professionally taken and made up. They want it to be a brief, passing trend and not a permanent change in how we interact with media. And all their language surrounding it, is geared around making it so.

Don’t let them.