Emma Holland Selfie Response

Emma Holland

July 6, 2018

The depth and detail that the paper “Fear and Selfie-Loathing in America” by Jessica Leigh Maddox goes into about today’s selfie forces the reader to think in a more expansive way towards these potentially mindful photographs. I appreciate the numerous ideas it brought forward, even though I do not completely agree with some of them. A major concern in the essay revolves around the connection between selfies and selfishness. In my mind, this is not the case in most scenarios. When we did the selfie exercise in class, it showed that a lot of people take selfies to remember a moment or story, alone or with others. In special cases, selfishness may be linked to someone’s obsessive selfies, but overall I do not think that because one takes a photo of themselves that they are selfish. Towards the middle, the essay starts to head in the direction of explaining who’s selfies should be “accepted”. On page eight, it further explains that, “Men and teenage girls are thus discursively constructed as polar opposites— real men do not take selfies because they are those things teenage girls take”. This idea or concept places gender roles or labels onto selfie-takers. With the language used around teenage girls, it creates a stigma that is not needed. One can assume that this message is saying that, because a majority of selfie-takers are the young women, young women are the most narcissistic. I am not sure if placing people into categories of whether or not they take selfies is completely accurate or necessary, because at some point, everyone does for different reasons. Taking a self portrait of yourself does not automatically make you narcissistic, selfish, or conceded, but I agree that these things can be shown through selfies in specific cases. I thought the points made about selfies and iconophobia were interesting, being that iconophobia is the fear of other people’s beliefs and values. I completely agree with the comment inside the essay that iconophobia branches from our own instability and insecurity. On page eighteen, the essay states, “the fear of iconoclasm resides in the thoughts of others, which,like an individual’s desire to produce an image of him- or herself,cannot initially be controlled by anyone else. Fear of what one cannot control mixes with fear of Others’ agency and these two anxieties have become a hybrid super-fear in the rise of the selfie”. I thought this was very accurate in today’s society and the argument was very well presented. Overall, I believe this essay was very well constructed and brought a lot of new ideas about selfies into my mind. However, when it comes down to it, I think we should all step down from our iconophobia-like tendencies and control what we can: ourselves.