Malingering’s World

Today I give you another piece of mail I received from another admiring fan. As you may or may not know, I am a collector of fan mail and rather enjoy reading the collection of letters and comments left for me. I received this rather benign e-mail which then stirred up a number of questions, and I am allowing myself to purge my blogsphere angst onto the page. You do not need to keep reading, but allow me my catharsis, please.

Flickr mail from: [name hidden to protect the belly] Subject: Wow! Yes, I have seen some hilarious photo ops myself. Yet I have chosen not to display the ones I did manage to shoot because I started to wonder how I would look if someone secretly took photos of me on a bad day, or at a bad angle. Who knows, maybe I have no good angles. I guess that I felt ashamed of myself after I got to the 5th or 6th photo of yours. I had to stop looking. I typed in the words ’stretch marks’ to see what came up. Mistake. I have a photo of my own belly, after 3 children, posted. Sadly, I do not wear those marks proudly. I never wear a short shirt or a bathing suit. I suppose you’re happy to know that. Ask yourself , Are you perfect? Do you have flaws? Are you self-conscious? Just curious.

Okay lady, my take on self-consciousness is this: Pretty much every person on this earth minus the arrogant narcissists are self-conscious. To deal with this there are basically two options.

1) To be self-conscious but do your best not to let other people’s opinions affect you, to laugh at yourself and others because no one is perfect, and to be happy with who you are regardless of how other’s view you because most people are idiots anyway.

or

2) To be self-conscious and then blame others for it, project your own self-loathing onto strangers and then get angry at them, and to not accept who you are or what you stand for and live in constant fear of criticism and general misery.

I also think the fact that if I sit and watch people walk around like this in public and comment to the person next to me, it’s okay, but if I photograph it and comment to general cyberspace, I’m an asshole brings up an interesting philosophical point. Does our existence within society suddenly change if it is “made permanent” by a photograph? Does the anger stem from not having a choice about who sees you (i.e. 500 Grove patrons vs. 200 Flickr users)? Do you believe your image is an ephemeral and intangible entity until it is frizen by a camera? Are very public spaces still considered to be private if 500 people look at you, but once a photo is taken, that privacy is invaded? I don’t know.I will have to look around for some philosophies which incorporate technological advances and then cling to them in order to give me an identity.

And I’ve said it once, I’ll say it 50 times: the point here is not to be “superficial.” It is to show how being superficial and focused on your image then backfires and achieves the opposite result. (See above.) It also should remind us that we can laugh or snicker or snark at how someone looks and while this has no bearing on our opinion of who this person is, one’s image is still a reflection of oneself onto other people, whether we like it or not. I don’t think that will ever change, regardless of how progressive we try to be. The obvious example of this point is women who dress like tramps/sluts/whores/skanks/etc. and by that I mean showing excessive cleavage, asscheeks hanging out the bottom of the skirt, bearing a large amount of belly skin. Sure, they could be sweet, loving, innocent, charitable virgins who haven’t once given a blow job at a frat party, but all of that is lost when a stranger looks at them and sees a tramp. That’s how our brains work and there is simply no changing that. So these photos are emphasizing that point: No matter what we do we will always be projecting an image onto the people around us, and we can choose whether or not we want to take control over that. In the end, we do live in a society and our brains are shaped according to our interactions within that society, and how we choose to exist within these boundaries is really up to us.

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