I have a fancy phone for two reasons: GPS and Instagram. GPS, because honestly without it, I will die lost in the woods, cold and alone. Even though when I was younger I traversed most of the 50 states and a couple foreign lands without it, I have become completely dependent on my phone telling me where to go in a period of less than 2 years.

Instagram, because I love it. I can’t live without it, EVERYWHERE I go I want to take pictures. On my block, in the doctor’s office, Target parking lot, corner store, church flea market… even in boring, dirty, trite little cities with terrible people and terrible art(geez I need to check my meds)… maybe even more so in these places. Like with all social networking sites, however, Instagram brings out my default setting of making sweeping, critical judgements on the moral character of individuals by how they use the internets.

I worry as I get older, I have these creeping thoughts in my head about biology, thoughts that where heartily dismissed in earlier years. Don’t get me wrong, my friends who are medical doctors have previously corrected my liberal arts ramblings about the non existence or little importance of biological differences between men and women, by simply staring at me confusedly until I remembered the whole child birth thing. So I very much do not dismiss biology and use it as often as I can as an excuse for my terrible behavior. But I don’t want to believe what Instagram “proves” to me about females in their “natural habitat.” The structure and interface(i really don’t know if i am using these words correctly)…the setup of Instagram is a program which enables the user to take photos of her environment, of what she sees. It enables the user to document their surroundings, the weirdness, humor, and complexity of the world in which she lives, of what is outside of her……you see where I am going with this. I click around for a minute in Instagram and it’s hard not to be depressed or let down, by it’s overwhelming use by women to do, not only the selfies, but post photos that are obviously taken at another time, with another camera, by another person, in some glamour shots manner and then transferred through a computer back to her phone to be posted through Instagram. (i’m smart and i read alot, that’s how i know about this, i CERTAINLY have NEVER done such a thing). There are way too many titties on Instagram and Twitter. Why is this women’s “natural” response to Instagram?

I am someone who has harassed people to tag me in a hot photo of myself. I am someone that has to approve images I am tagged in online. I am someone who has gone through her Flickr and deleted “fat pics.” I am someone who has a weird Instagram name because I wanted one image to post to Facebook and it wouldn’t so I made a whole new account,…yeah, I get it, I care about how I look online. If I weighed 120lbs, maybe I would use Instagram differently. What I like to think, HOWEVER, is that my Instagram would be HALF hot photos of myself and HALF awesome things I have seen. That’s all. Every time I think about posting a “hot” selfie(like right now, for this blog, oh man this is the perfect excuse!) I end up being like “oh man that’s too much work.” There is a great writer, Alicia Eler, who is doing a “Selfie Project” right now. I think it took me about two months to send her a selfie of myself. Which I am including in this post as well as two other hot selfies (one of them is me right now!)

Really the issue is not it isn’t kool that women do this, but why don’t men do this? hmmm? I wonder about such things all the time. I certainly am not looking for an Instagram full of dick pics, but this also highlights how men feel no need to become more nuanced in their presentation of themselves online. That’s a whole other blog: the prevalence of dicks pics in a world that continues to deny, not solicit, and unwelcome them. haha.

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