The glorious selfie is losing its female gaze.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
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.
But Australian expert Kath Albury, a professor of media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology, says there are two good reasons to accept that men should take couple selfies.
Blokes, with all their adorable largeness, are now participating in an arena which was once the domain of women. The average Australian man (179cms) is taller than the average Australian woman (165).
And here, she and I agree. I’m just 150cms tall and my lovely husband is 30cms taller. Not only does he have a wider arm span, he can shoot our selfies from his perspective, always more flattering than those underchin shots of which we see so many.
As Albury puts it: “If we are taking group photos, I always hand it to the tallest person.”
Shorter people just don't have enough arm for really excellent angles.
“That’s why the selfie stick was invented,” she says.
Unfortunately, we don’t always have those with us – and there are now heaps of places where they are banned. But Alicia Eler, The Selfie Generation author, thinks we should all have one in order to take back the pics of production. She’s also recommending taking photography classes so we can really be in charge of our own image.
That's probably all a bit too far for me — at this stage, I'm all for doing the old-fashioned thing and asking passing strangers for photographic assistance.
Albury notes that the way we talk about selfies has changed. The discussion has moved on, she says, from claiming the selfie as a sign of mental illness, a way to damage your body or putting your life at risk.
Here in Australia, we should have a particular loyalty to the selfie and how it has evolved. There’s no question (except by the selfie taker himself) that the term was invented by an Australian.
Karl Kruzelnicki says its first use was on a self-serve science forum he ran online.
“I was the handmaiden of the word selfie,” he says. Just 11 years later, it was the word of the year (although Nathan Hope, who used the word first online claims it was in common usage at the time).
And although it might have been born here, we aren’t the best at it. Even as we live by our brilliant blue seas and glowing red centres, Australia doesn’t even make it into the top 100 most selfie countries in the world.
Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.
