Selfies
are all the rage in today’s modern technological society. It has become so easy, so effortless to take
pictures of oneself in all sorts of situations with different people in
different surroundings, reacting to different experiences. One never has to worry about running out of
film in the way people did in the old days.
One doesn’t have to pay for developing and printing film. All one has to do is take the picture, store
it online, maybe send it to other people via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat. And there are not only many different ways to
send these photos out to other people, but there are many different ways to
store them and preserve them online forever.
I
have often talked in this column about the dangers of living too much among
phenomena that lack material substance.
Living too much in a vacuumized screen reality and away from an external
world reality. But that is not the main focus
of this article. The subject under
consideration here is the use of selfies for one particular kind of subject
matter, namely the growing use of the selfie method by young women to take
pictures of their naked bodies. Some of
these photos get sent to young men through Snapchat, an avenue for transmitting
photos where the photos disappear a short time after the transmission. But many of these photos get sent through
other avenues and wind up in places where they can be preserved seemingly forever. Sometimes it is because these young women
send their nude selfies to men as texts, thinking the photos will remain
private. It is called sexting. And then the men, for joking or vengeful
reasons, transmit the images all over Facebook or Twitter or some similar
Internet site without the women’s permission.
Sometimes hackers go into women’s e-mail accounts and steal the
selfies. In both of these cases, it
obviously causes the women great consternation.
But sometimes, the woman voluntarily sends her nude selfies to sites
where they can be displayed permanently.
It is this latter situation with which this article will be concerned.
Voluntarily
displaying one’s body to the world represents a profound shift in sexual
attitudes. In the original sexual
revolution, a woman or man would expose their bodies to different lovers, but
when they finished making love and being with their lover of the moment, they
would cover up and display a sense of modesty to the outside world. This was even true of people who participated
in group sex. Unless a person was an
artist’s model, a magazine model (as with Playboy) or a porn star, nakedness of
a sexual nature was primarily displayed in those situations where the sexual
act was actually occurring.
But
with nude selfies, a woman’s nakedness never ceases to display itself. I should say at this point that men send nude
selfies to women, but these are frequently focused on photos of the male
organ. Obviously a direct attempt
(although a misguided one) to get a woman interested in making love with
him. But this kind of photo does not represent
the creation of an image that is easily identifiable by most of the people
around him. A nude selfie of all or most
of a whole naked body with face included will be identifiable by family and
friends alike. Why would a woman want to
have nude selfies of herself placed permanently on the Internet? The Internet sites for nude selfies don’t
provide contact information to contact a woman, so it is not like the
presentation of the nude image on the website is going to create an opportunity
for future lovers.
As
has been discussed before, free love was not simply a response to improved
contraception and to changing social attitudes.
It was the result of the gradual loss of organic stimulation from more
traditional natural living environments and the increased sensory distortion
created by modern technological living environments. People needed a variety of organic
stimulation to feel fully alive as animals, and the only readily available
source of organic stimulation was other human bodies. A variety of human lovers replaced the
variety of sensory stimulation available from a forest or jungle or a more
traditional village. A variety of human
lovers created a cumulative organic grounding in the mind that helped to defend
people from the sensory distortion in a modern living environment that
alternately understimulated and overstimulated.
This is why I called it a vacuum and tension-pocket environment. Having many lovers meant that lovers made and
received many different organic imprints from each other. But there were fewer deep-bonded
relationships, fewer of the intimate relationships that would have worked
against the sensory variety from free love, at least during adolescence and
young adulthood when free love would be more prevalent. As people got older, some of them did finally
decide to settle down in monogamous relationships for purposes of intimacy and
having children. But the lack of organic
stimulation in modern technological living environments has meant that a great
deal of pressure is put on marriages and living together relationships to
provide the variety of organic stimulation that traditional natural living
environments did provide in the past and that a variety of sexual partners has
provided in the present.
As
modern technological environments encroach on more and more space in our living
environments, people are becoming more and more desperate to find sources of
organic stimulation. Many young people
are engaging in more and more hookups with different sexual partners to obtain
a variety of organic stimulation, even as the sensory distortion that surrounds
them makes them less and less predisposed to deep-bonded relationships. Young people are trying to fight numbness
from their experiential vacuum. But the
numbness is becoming stronger and stronger.
An interesting sign of this is the number of young men that are taking
drugs for erectile dysfunction like Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. These were drugs created for older men who
developed a natural diminution of their sexual capacities as they got older. But now younger men are taking them to
increase the sensation they experience in the sexual act.
The
point is that people are not only becoming more sexually numb, but emotionally
numb as well. And men are becoming so
concerned about dealing with encroaching sexual numbness that they are
incapable of effectively focusing on dealing with their encroaching emotional
numbness. But in spite of their
involvement in free love, most women also want to have intimacy as well. They not only want to make and receive
temporary organic imprints through sex, they want to have the preserved organic
imprints from a sustained emotional relationship and they want one of their
partners to experience them as a preserved organic imprint as well. In other words, these women want intimacy,
love , commitment. It is a desire that
conflicts with free love, but free love and committed love do represent
contradictory needs today: the need for a variety of organic stimuli from
different bodies to replace the relative lack of organic stimuli in modern
technological living environments and the need for deep organic grounding in a
deep-bonded committed relationship.
But
when young women find it impossible to find young men who are unwilling to
preserve in their minds some of the organic imprints they receive in their
relationships with women, unwilling to commit, the young women try to find love
from the only source they feel they can rely on: themselves. Nude selfies become a source of narcissistic
admiration, as other people can gaze approvingly (hopefully) on their bodies,
and these women then can see themselves mirrored by an image of themselves that
can last on the website seemingly forever.
Now
the imprint of the nude selfie that the woman is leaving of herself on the
Internet is an imprint being left on screen reality not in external world
reality. There is a contrast between the
sensory immediacy of a woman’s body, the strong primary experience component,
and the vacuumized nature of the medium being used to store and display the
imprint. As a result, the imprint itself
becomes more distant, attenuated, vacuumized.
As a result, it really doesn’t have the capacity to pull the woman or
the anonymous viewers who see it on the Internet out of their numbness for a
long period of time or to a great extent.
It provides a weak imprint and a weak source of stimulation to pull a
woman out of numbness and into self-love.
It is a deficient source of satisfaction for narcissistic needs. Nevertheless, it does provide a vehicle by
which a young woman can leave some kind of organic imprint on herself by
stimulating her self-love through the image of her body.
The
woman’s self-love and the admiration of her anonymous viewers is truly no
substitute for a deep-bonded committed relation with a man who is willing to
preserve in his mind the organic imprints that she leaves on him. A nude selfie displayed on the Internet is a
rather desperate move for a young woman to pull herself out of the numbness she
experiences both because of the technological environment in which she is
living and the lack of intimacy in her life.
By the same token, the photos by young men of their male organs are a
desperate attempt to pull themselves out of the numbness they are experiencing
and to prove their potency. These
selfies don’t end up giving young males a grounding in their potency just as
the female nude selfies don’t end up being a substitute for a committed
relationship. Nude selfies represent not
only an illusion of immortality but also an illusion of romantic love, as the
only real love that comes from the mirroring by the selfie is narcissistic
love. These selfies are an unfortunate
substitute for satisfying the real emotional needs that these people have.
(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow
