Feeling sexy is everyone’s right. But I’ll take to the grave that 2014 was the last good year of the thirst trap.
Once defined with heteronormativity as “the act of showing yourself in a more or less lascivious manner to attract the attention of the opposite sex”, the thirst trap has now lost all lustre in a world where taking photos of yourself is swamped by comparison.
Recently snapping a series of selfies on my iPhone, I couldn’t help but feel it had become harder to take a photo that made me feel sexy compared to my late high-school days.
I’ve stopped bleaching the shit out of my hair, stopped fake tanning to a psychotic level, gotten Botox, and I fuck way sexier guys now… so it’s not because I’m older.
The problem is our cameras. Too high definition, too polished, creating photos we’d never dream of, telling anyone who’s interested that, yes, this is an accurate representation of what we look like in real life. But the sheer volume of photos we can take of ourselves, with different angles and lighting, makes us forget what we all actually look like.
2024 can’t compete with art like this. (Image: Instagram @corymkennedy, Twitter @rihanna)
I don’t have a huge following on Instagram but still know that within 24 hours of a thirst trap post going live, I’ll almost definitely receive likes or DMs from the so-called reply guys of the moment. This small army of reply guys are mostly men I’ve never met. It’s not that I’m not hot in real life, they just only know a curated version of me.
Pre-2014, the majority of your friends on social media were friends who knew what you actually looked like. No one on Instagram followed what now are known as influencers, who became a thing in 2015. Now you don’t have a realistic reference point.
The people thirsting in our DMs these days are just delusional… they don’t know the real you. No matter how much it’s drilled into us that “social media isn’t real”.
Before 2014, sexy selfies were snapped on Photo Booth, a shit-hot Motorola Razr (no other pre-iPhone mobile phones exist in my eyes), an early iPhone or a digital camera. They were low-definition: they clearly didn’t replicate reality.
We’d post on Facebook in albums amongst party photos, sunsets and brunches, and we didn’t even care as much if they got “likes” or not. Facebook didn’t even have a “like” feature until 2009.
Dumping blurry selfies of us shit-faced on goon in the park, posing in front of the posters plastered on our best friend’s bedroom wall, or carrying our heels in our hands at the school formal afters became a thing of the past.
We were out there getting sexy pics taken of us on party photo blogs, like anything in Australia could come close to the LA-esque party full of Myspace and Tumblr it-girls and B-grade indie musicians. Being sexy on social media could simply be you sitting on a gutter with a bottle of vodka in your hand: it was sexy to be a mess online. None of this unrealistic “clean girl” shit.
And when you did want to pose for a selfie sober in your bikini, with a fresh face of cakey Maybelline mousse make-up at pre-drinks with your friends, you didn’t have millions of seemingly perfect influencers to compare yourself to. You didn’t feel as shit about yourself.
Why can’t we be more like MegSuperstarPrincess?? (Image: Instagram @megsuperstarprincess)
We posted without FaceTune and Face App editing, operating in a world of social media that was generally more candid.
There was also less pressure to look as unreal as the porn stars we’d see on PornHub. It was just not as expected. Photo Booth photos just simply didn’t look like something out of a porno. We could tell the difference between them. Now, OnlyFans stars are flooding our feeds with some of the most curated photos out there.
It didn’t matter if your face was blurry, or covered by the reflection of the flash in the mirror, or if you looked as if you’d just ripped a bong in your older brother’s friend’s garage while you were meant to be writing an essay on Hamlet in your English class.
Bring back dirty, sexy sleaziness. Bring back being a hot mess and shit-posting on social media.
You can be a mess when you’re not fucked up. Try it. Do your make-up as if you’ve slept in it, take a blurry, sexy selfie then hard-post it. Take cues from iconic NYC-based micro-influencer MegSuperstarPrincess who religiously uses a blurry Android camera to take all her selfies.
Be ‘Brat’. It’s undeniably sexy to not give as much of a fuck.
Lead image: Instagram @megsuperstarprincess @corymkennedy
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