I had no idea the upcoming ABC sitcom Selfie was going to be a thing (this fall if you for some reason care) until I saw an ad spot for it while half watching the World Cup or something. Very suddenly I was more than half watching, and within a few seconds I was tweeting angrily.

I mean. Read the premise (courtesy of Wikipedia).

Using a premise similar to Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, the series will follow the life of Eliza Dooley (a modern day version of Eliza Doolittle), a woman obsessed with becoming famous through the use of social media platforms (including the use of Instagram and taking selfies), until she realizes that she needs to actually find people that she can be friends with physically instead of “friend” them online. This prompts Eliza to hire Henry Higenbottam (a modern day version of Henry Higgins), a marketing self-image guru who is left with the task of rebranding Eliza’s image in the hopes to show her that there is more to life out there than just playing Candy Crush Saga with an iPhone and connecting with a Facebook page.

As one of my Twitter friends put it, “The problem with Pygmalion is that Eliza just liked herself too much, said no GBS fan ever.”

No, but seriously, though. My anger had a lot more than just to do with general knee-jerk Feminist Rage. That was, of course, part of it, and part of it was also the tired, irritating, silly stuff in there about anything done via social media as less real (is this really a thing we’re still doing?). But a more significant part of it was also related to some emotional work I’ve been doing recently that’s left me feeling intensely vulnerable and has been much more difficult than I expected.

I’m doing selfies.

Mostly on Twitter, mostly of makeup. I recently got majorly into eyeshadow (I will stop LJing at some point, promise) and at first it just seemed like a fun way to record my experiments with it, but soon I was doing it a fair amount. So yeah, so what? Lots of people do. It’s in the dictionary in an official capacity, for crying out loud.

The thing is that it hurts. It makes me want to cringe every time I hit send, an awful moment where I feel like I’m betraying something. I’m doing a wrong thing. A lot of it is probably personal neurosis, but I don’t think anywhere near all, and anyway, don’t all our neuroses have social contexts? Don’t they all come from somewhere?

I was familiar with the fraughtness of the selfie. Most of us should be by now. Selfies are great, selfies are awful, selfies are feminist, selfies aren’t feminist at all and are in fact tools of the patriarchy, selfies are things stupid attention whores (I use that term here very, very mindfully) do because they have no self-esteem and need people to tell them they’re pretty. Duckface. Duckface duckface duckface.

Intellectual familiarity does not prepare you for something like this.

The discourse around selfies is fraught because selfies are complex locations within which gender and mental wellbeing and the attention economy and the politics of self-presentation and a hundred other things all collide into a tangled mess of a thing. Selfies are fraught because almost everything of which a selfie is conceptually and culturally comprised is controversial.

(Alliteration!)

But what I see in almost everything being said about selfies is that it seems impossible to not, in one way or another, feel bad for taking them. Whichever way I turn, there’s conflict.

The idea of selfies as something that vapid, appearance-obsessed women (always women, even if non-binary people like me are doing it, even if men are) do is especially toxic, I think. Witness the Selfie premise above. There’s also the now-infamous piece in Jezebel by Erin Gloria Ryan that characterizes selfies as “a cry for help”. She’s ostensibly writing in the service of feminism, and it’s not that she doesn’t make some good points, but the form in which she does ends up being pretty shaming, in a way that Ryan herself appears to feel intensely.

Nor is the proliferation of selfies into a generation of women who are old enough to know better a promising development; it’s a nightmare. The picture that accompanies my byline on this very website is a selfie. I’ve posted selfies to Facebook, and Twitter. I always feel bad about it; it always takes several tries to not look stupid, and even now, I kind of hate all of them. “Hey guys, I’m by myself!” my selfie says, “Can you please somehow indicate that other humans are out there so that I do not collapse into my own loneliness????? LOLOLOL” Please, god, no.

I know that feel. The thing is, I can’t escape the powerful suspicion that I feel that way only because I’ve been made to.

Not that selfies and what they do, when we’re talking about gender, aren’t problematic. Focus on appearance for the sake of affirmation is not necessarily a good thing, no, and when it’s a thing embedded in society organized along patriarchal lines, of course it’s profoundly troubling. But for me, then, there’s the feeling of I’m making myself look desperate and stupid and self-absorbed. I shouldn’t enjoy it when people say nice things about how I look. Bad feminist. Bad.

I should note that Ryan would probably disagree that what I post is a “pure selfie”, given that I’m usually showing off my makeup skills. But I think that’s hair-splitting of a pretty unhelpful kind. It’s still my face. I still want people to say nice things.

At the last Theorizing the Web we had an entire panel devoted to selfies, and Anne Burns noted many of the ways in which this kind of discussion is harmful in her paper “Disciplining the Duckface: Online Photographic Regulation as a form of Social Control”:

Regulating the selfie is a means for regulating the selfie-subject, where both are conceived of as being innately problematic and requiring control. As addressed in this study, notions of ‘too many selfies’ and the labeling of young women’s self-presentations as narcissistic, seek to limit both what, and how, women are encouraged to photograph. Such discussions impact upon notions of privacy and identity negotiation, but serve primarily to mark and marginalize certain groups. Therefore, through the limitations imposed on a certain type of creative practice, subjects’ behavior and participation within the public sphere is curtailed.

For Ryan, it’s (mostly sort of) okay to take a picture of you wearing a hat and post it to Instagram. Take a picture of just your face and you’re in trouble.

But as Jenny Davis has noted, the duckface itself is a kind of control over the form and presentation of the bodies we gender female:

[O]ne performs the Duckface by sucking in the cheeks and pushing out the lips. This makes the lips appear fuller, the cheekbones more prominent, and the eyes wider. It can also minimize asymmetry when taken from the correct angle. In short, this expressive configuration contorts the face in line with standards of feminine beauty.

So again, it’s not that there’s nothing troubling or problematic going on here. It’s not that the context of the selfie isn’t indicative of harm. It’s that for someone who isn’t cisgender male who wants to take a selfie, who wants to post a selfie, and who dares to want to hear nice things in response, there is literally no way to win. There’s no way to not feel at least kind of bad.

Guys. I just want to post pictures of myself wearing makeup on Twitter. It should not be this hard.

I want to emphasize that I realize how obvious these points must be to just about everyone who’s likely to read this. They are obvious. But these things are wound up in visceral, embodied emotion, and it’s easy to forget that when primarily what you’re doing with them is engaging in academic debate. It’s one thing to write and talk about a selfie; it’s another thing to post them and deal with the resulting emotional fallout. It’s another thing to take all the stuff you’ve read in blog posts and essays and papers about selfies and identity, and face the way they really do smash painfully together in your head when you’re announcing to your Twitter followers, as I did a couple of weeks ago, that for a few days you’re going to post a daily makeup selfie.

So why not just stop?

Because I don’t think this is fair, to put it bluntly, for all the reasons Burns describes. This is regulating the self and presentation of the self in ways that legitimize some things and delegitimize others. It reifies the idea that some kinds of selfies are okay and others are beyond the pale, that some kinds of selfie-subjects are acceptable and others are simply not. That, among other things, No True Feminist would ever do it. That enjoying attention is wrong, false, inauthentic, and vain in a way we almost exclusively ascribe to women.

We should examine where a desire for positive, appearance-based attention comes from. But can I please not feel ashamed for having that desire at all? I’m not saying that anyone has directly and intentionally made me feel that way, but that this is exactly why that discourse is harmful, and I understand that now in a deep way I didn’t before.

So what I’m doing about it is I’m posting selfies. Aggressively, like I’m making a point to myself, because I am. I’m trying to enjoy the positive comments as much as I can. I’m thinking about this a lot. And someday, maybe, someone will be like “hey, you look awesome today,” and I’ll be able to just smile, type “thanks :D”, hit tweet, and get on with my goddamn day.

LOOK AT MY FACE on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry