Why I Share Selfies

The Male Gaze, Representation, and Self-Esteem

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I share pictures on Facebook. Why? With more than 2 billion users globally, it’s the most used social media platform on the planet. Love it or hate it (I side with the latter) most people you know are using it. I try to use that to my advantage, with both positive and negative results.

I share pictures of what I’m doing and myself. I share them with ‘off-grid’ groups, tractor groups, Toyota pages, and anywhere interested people will see them. Mostly the response has been awesome! People offer all kinds of advice, positivity, and interest in the same things as me. However, the response to pictures of my face has been mixed.

The internet is packed full of selfies. Men, women, kids, everyone posts pictures of themselves, and we like to look at them. Why? We have a psychological response when we see a face. We know it, and I think the algorithms know it too.

The Male Gaze

The male gaze it tricky to explain but - it’s about how women are often depicted in media, movies, books, etc. to pertain to straight guys. Think of Meghan Fox in the first Transformers movie. She was pretty much the main character, but she was reduced to a belly button, really. The male gaze isn’t something that men did or do wrong. It’s something that we all - men and women, play into.

What does that have to do with anything?

I’m my own main character. What I put out in media is me and what I’m doing. Though there’s a man in my life and I’m his Meghan Fox (haha), he’s my backup in my story. When I publish pictures of myself, I represent myself - avoiding gratuitous body shots and images that make me look diminished.

All of these selfies got some negative response on facebook, which only tells me that my demographic needs more representation.

Representation

It’s about being who I am and sharing what I’m doing. The response makes my heart swell. From women especially, as they see their own demographic doing something they want to do, or are already doing.

I want to encourage people to do whatever they want, regardless of how other people see them. There are often comments implying that I couldn’t be real. That what I look like doesn’t line up with what I’m doing. It’s so ridiculous, I don’t like to even acknowledge it. But it’s something that I see often.

That, and uneducated scrutiny. As I write, someone is attacking one of my pictures for the lipstick I’m wearing. Last week, someone went to my page to call me names and discredit everything that I do. There’s a lot of negativity to sharing a selfie, and that’s part of why I do it too. If my selfies stir people that much, more representation is needed.

Self -Esteem

There is a much higher positive response than negative, but the negative is hard on self-esteem and sometimes scary. It’s certainly not about boosting MY ego. If you know me and have been following my media, you know that I get most of my happiness from accomplishments. How I look doesn’t matter to the bunnies, Toyotas or the trees.

There are lots of people like me with the same kind of interests, hiding from scrutiny. Rightly so, sometimes I consider withdrawing from it all and hiding on my mountain. I can’t do that though, how could I abandon the good people online? I hope to motivate anybody to do whatever they want. Or at least to give it a try. Not only women but anyone that could use some encouragement.

Putting myself out-there in a way that isn’t diminishing, representing my demographic, and encouraging others to have the self-esteem to do whatever they want, too. That’s what it’s all about :)

I hope that in the future people looking for a positive space will use platforms like this, with more informed and thought-provoking content.