So after months of seeing Kim Kardashian and practically every Z-list celebrity posting selfies online, we wake up to the fact that the Maltese are equally engaged in posting photographs of themselves online. A news item that made the headlines this week was that about explicit selfies of several young Maltese women having been posted onto Tumblr.
There were fears that this could have been a case of vindictive posting of the images without the subjects’ consent, but from the accounts given, it seems that the uploading was consensual. The daring selfie has made it to the main stream media only just now, but it’s not a new phenomenon. Girls have been posting provocative pictures of themselves for some time now.
Take one website with a local address. It seems to be a place where Maltese women (and a couple of men) are rated on their looks, their physique and perhaps their modelling potential. The whole rating process seems to go something like this: the girls post pictures of themselves in the obligatory sultry poses. One is sitting down with legs splayed open with a scrap of denim and an arm obstructing a close-up view of her nether regions. Another gives us a fair view of what Beyoncé would call her ‘lady lumps’ protruding from a miniscule excuse for a bra.
Click on the different profiles and you’ll see the whole gamut of what passes for glamour modelling – the duck lips, the jutting hips, the mussed-up hair, the deep ravines of cleavage and ultra-push-up bras. The men get by with showing a six-pack or keeping their shirt on and just glowering at the camera.
The viewing public then gets to vote for the sexiest of the pack. It’s not clear who won the dubious accolade of being the sexiest of the two dozen or so contestants on the site. Although the site indicates that there are prizes to be won by sponsors, it’s not clear what these are.
The site boasts that it was receiving some 6,000 unique visitors monthly. That may, or may not be, the case, but very few of these unique visitors are posting comments. The two people who comment under practically all the photographs posted go under the usernames of Flix and Fashionwindow. They give ‘advise’ (their spelling) to the girls – usually recommending that they get a breast enlargement.
This was the recommendation given to this perfectly lovely 16-year old with fresh skin and without the ‘done’ look. Another girl was given the thumbs down by the anonymous judge who did not find her to be sexy enough. His verdict? “I really don’t think you fit a model or sexy look”. As far as I could see, the only advert featured to the site was Maltese.xxx – one where visitors could engage in erotic chat online.
The website bills itself as the online hub for the sexiest male and female models in Malta and boasts that people can join for free and “showcase themselves on this really popular website”. And yet a mere glance at the site and the erotic chat line site linked to it will show that it’s not the kind of platform for the next Kate Moss or Cara Delevigne to be discovered.
Girls aspire to look like porn stars
The cheap graphics, the misspelt advice, the constant get-a-boob-job mantra, the link to a chat site where older women wearing Santa hats offer sexual relief….it doesn’t really spell out style or a stepping stone to the runways of Milan, does it?
And yet the girls who submitted their photos didn’t seem to feel uncomfortable about their images being published and being used to draw visitors to an erotic chat site.
Most of the photographs and profiles uploaded have been there for three years. The women appearing in them don’t seem to be unduly bothered about their ‘sexy’ shots being crystallised forever in the ether, potentially transmittable all round the globe an infinite number of times. They either haven’t thought of the consequences of this, or aren’t bothered about them.
Don’t get me wrong, the photographs are not shocking or pornographic, some are just verging on the tarty. But that look might not serve you well in future in a scenario which is removed from that of glamour-modelling.
Most employers prefer the place of work to be manned by competent and professional workers rather than women re-arranging their thongs and worrying about their spray tan. Now the girls appearing in glamour shots may be the most highly qualified and diligent workers but it’s not exactly the impression potential employers may glean when glancing at photos uploaded well before the women hung up their G-strings. I imagine that the subjects of these kind of shots already know this, which leads me to the other reasons why girls (mostly) are constantly uploading explicit selfies online.
The perennial preening online is due to a dependency on peer approval and the belief that beauty equates to looking sexually provocative and available. Social media sites seem to have given rise to a generation of users dependent on ‘likes’ on the daily trivia they litter the Net with. It’s as if, they don’t feel fulfilled unless they have a set number of people liking their post or snaps. On these lines, American writer John Paul Titlow says that selfie posters “are seeking some kind of approval from their peers and the larger community, which thanks to the internet is now effectively infinite”.
Add to this the changing aesthetic where young girls’ idea of beauty is someone like Kim Kardashian with her tedious ‘side boob’ shots and bottom with its own postcode – perennially on show and being flashed around the world on a zillion websites, and you’ll realise why young Maltese girls are stripping for the camera.
It’s the ultimate victory of porn culture, girls aspire to look like porn stars and where their ultimate ambition is to be a Playboy bunny. The likes of Hugh Hefner must be cackling in their dentures.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt