How strange it must be to be a fourteen year old girl and awake and find yourself half the world’s object of desire. But that’s precisely what happened to Angie Varona. Like so many other young women, she took some photographs of herself for her boyfriend–and confirming every internet sceptic wagging a finger about not putting things online, her account was hacked. It could have ended at just that. But through chance of biology, Varona’s newly womanly body inadvertently reflected the web’s predilection for the hyperreal. As a result, her pictures spread like wildfire, and as the Gawker piece on her story noted, Googling her name will net you 356,000 results. To be young and suddenly changing must itself be strange enough. But to have the image of yourself and your suddenly changed body (are those different things?) ricochet around the world, caught up in this vast economy of desire…this feels new. Of course, the circulation of images of women’s bodies is neither new nor unique to the web. But in millions of images of that pose–of the cameraphone raised in one hand, standing scantily clad in front of the mirror–what exactly is reflecting what? Do we produce ourselves for the mirror? Or is the web an enormous reflective glass that creates us in its reflection? In psychology, there’s a concept called the looking-glass self, which suggests we gain our identity from how others perceive us. It’s nothing so straightforward as “giving in to peer pressure” as it is upsetting the idea of our identity as being inside us. Instead, it’s only in the back and forth between outside ideals and reactions that we form our sense of who we are. To be conventionally pretty or “hot” must have always done something to that process. To live with that constant looming capacity to elicit desire in others must do things to a person–and arguably different things for men and women. But what is it to be beautiful in an era when self-documentation is exponentially more widespread and immediate? What is to be “desirable” in the age of the web? I suppose it’s time I put my cards on the table; as a small, funny-looking male in his thirties, I have precisely no idea. But I guess what I’m trying to figure out is a chicken and egg dilemma. What comes first: the grand online mirror? Or our desire to display ourselves there? It is, after all, a strange phenomenon. On the one hand, the web is this new place to put ourselves and our identities, engaging in interaction somewhat freer of the prejudice that can so often be placed upon bodies. At the same time, like any other space, there is still a desire to compete and succeed – and putting up conventionally desirable images of oneself seems a pretty sure way to do this. So it’s almost as if the self-portrait in the mirror is a way of reasserting traditional ideals of beauty onto a medium that, for the tiniest fraction of a second, let us escape them. This isn’t just blind conjecture. Researcher Ori Schwarz took a long look at Shox, an Israeli social networking site in which users often post provocative images of themselves to show off their cultural capital. In the course of his work, he discovered that stylized, sexualized images were a form of currency, a way of putting the self into relations of exchange for consumption by others. Like we once clothed ourselves to perform our knowledge of culture, we now photograph ourselves to perform our capacity to be consumed. Oh, the name of Schwarz’s article? “On Friendship, Boobs and the Logic of the Catalogue: Online Self-Portaits as a Means for the Exchange of Capital”. But just as important, Schwarz argued that there was no clear line between the offline and the online. We carry our online portrait albums around with us. To shake the hand of someone you know only through the web is to also engage with what Schwarz calls the “corporeal capital” of their self-portraiture, which the academic is careful to note brings about benefits in certain situation and drawbacks in others. We are a collection of images, and for good and ill, images are always bound up in the desires of others and ourselves. It would be disturbing and regressive to argue that the display of female sexuality is an evil–that good little girls should cover up. But there’s something discomfitingly circular to this logic of the catalogue: one emerges as what others desire to then continue to reflect what others desire. But if you awoke in young Angie Varona’s body, could you resist taking pictures of yourself and asking at least one other person to look? Could you say no to the strange, sometimes-sickly feeling of thousands of eyes upon you, filled with want?
