I’ve seen a lot of chatter on Instagram – where else?! It’s not like I read actual news – about (mostly straight) women’s (mostly straight) male partners, and how crap they are at taking photos of said women.
“The pictures I take of him vs the pictures he takes of me”, is the usual caption, followed first by a stunning, gallery-worthy portrait of a man with a child and then by what can only be described as an accidental camera-capture of someone vaguely resembling a woman, usually blurry, often with eyes closed, frequently bending over / shouting / otherwise doing something that means this is simply not the time to capture a photograph.
I can’t help but think these women are lucky, honestly. My husband hasn’t taken a single photograph of me since our son was born, with the exception of the photograph I asked him to take “because we’re cute!” and immediately regretted because not only do I have my eyes closed in the photo, but there is baby poo on my top.
Anyway, there’s a lot to unpack about what this disconnect says about (mostly straight) women and (mostly straight) men, and the different ways in which we place value on the capturing of moments or, more accurately, the capturing of aesthetically pleasing moments. It is possible, I tell myself, that my husband thought I was looking stunning, at that very moment, with my eyes closed and baby poo on my top. Possible, but not probable.
This is not that essay; there will be no unpacking here.
What, instead, I wish to focus on is how I genuinely wish no one* ever in the history of the world would take photographs of me ever again. Don’t you dare point that thing at me! I wish only to take photographs of myself! Is this a cute moment? Perfect, allow me to dip my chin down slightly and smile, coyly, into the lens of my iPhone.
I have forgotten the name of the person I follow on Instagram (yes, thanks, I am an academic) who spoke at length about how she was trying not to be fatphobic in her selfie-taking and, furthermore, to post any and all selfies regardless of how subjectively “flattering” they were deemed to be. Even the notion of photographs – and clothing – being “flattering” is, she said, in and of itself, fatphobic.
This is probably true, honestly. The photographs I dislike of myself tend to be those in which the obvious markers of my fatness are visible: double (or triple) chins; rolls on my stomach; a lack of visible jawline. The fact that this is my face – my double chins, my stomach rolls, my doughy jawline – is neither here nor there. In photographs, I am clearly under the impression that it would be better for me to look entirely like someone else.
This is, to put it mildly, Not Great. I do not want to be fatphobic – it is not a great way to be. I try very hard to be aware of the anti-fat bias we each encounter, and feel!, in everyday life and to counter it with fat positivity and acceptance and all that good stuff. But it is hard.
The counter-argument is, “But why wouldn’t you want to look your best?” and to that I say, in conflating your “best” with your “thinnest” or, at the very least, “thinner than usual”, aren’t you therefore saying that thin is better (or best)? That is fatphobia, pure and simple.
And yet.
I am trying to get better at appreciating the photographs other people take. They are snapshots of life in a way that selfies are just… a veneer. Look! We’re all smiling! or, more likely, look! I’m gazing at my phone while other people are smiling! But it’s a moment, a moment I was in (whether or not I was present for that moment is a topic for another day and another newsletter) and an unposed photograph captures so much that a posed selfie cannot.
How I work on this is by looking at the other people in the photograph. The baby looks adorable! Look at Fox, gazing at the baby! Ah, Beatrice looks lovely. Then I get to me and I wonder what Beatrice, and Fox, and the baby – if he could have thoughts – would think of how I look in that photo and I think they would probably accept that I’m not at my best when gazing at my phone, but they’d like my cardigan and acknowledge my good hair day and the photo, as a whole, is funny, isn’t it?
Like I said, I’m working on it.
*Fine, except for Helen Maser, who took genuinely glorious photographs at my baby shower, which I admit grudgingly as I felt sheer incandescent rage when my sister revealed to me that she had booked a photographer for the occasion.
The Guilty Feminist has been doing a round-up of And Just Like That… episodes, and I only realised this today and am now raging as I would have enjoyed the weekly listen-along. They are very pro Che Diaz, which has made me wonder if I am pro Che Diaz. I will acknowledge that there’s something very sexy about them, but as a character do I enjoy them? Unsure. I know that I felt weird about them wearing trousers with a chain hanging off. Very me, circa 2005.
Nicola Coughlan on the cover of British Elle! Stunning. Just stunning.
Speaking of Netflix TV (Bridgerton returns in March), Feb 4th sees the return of Sweet Magnolias, which would be classified as a guilty pleasure if I believed in feeling guilt for enjoying things, which I don’t. I am very excited.