or; sexualization and MySpace.
So I sat up on campus, logging into my Yahoo! Mail account, and the inbox was full of MySpace friend requests.
Now, this isn’t an odd occurrence, because a)I’m absolutely gorgeous and everyone loves me, and b)my band kicks some serious backside.
But I deleted them all, and decided to go to MySpace to see what I could see.
Logging in (and feeling sheepish doing so in a public place – MySpace is, after all, tawdry), I saw the faces of ten people I didn’t know, wanting to be my “friends”. Now, I’m stingy with my MySpace page – only people I actually know through other methods are allowed to be my “friends” on MySpace. In other words, people I know from places like JU or people from real-life are it. So I knew I’d be deleting all these people.
But I noticed that, almost completely, everyone had a shoddy self portrait for their profile image.
Now, some people’s self portraits aren’t actually that bad. But most people’s, especially on MySpace . . . are. And I had a thought. Is it really that hard to find someone else to take twenty seconds and snap a decent picture of you?
I looked around, still feeling foolish for looking at MySpace at school, to find that everyone around me in the entire computer lab was doing the exact same thing. So I didn’t feel so bad, and continued my ruminations.
And then I realized what it is – people like to post salacious pictures of themselves on MySpace, showing all manner of cleavage, etc. that I just don’t want to necessarily see in that venue. (Like my dancing around the topic there?) And that’s when it hit me – the reason people have self-portraits is because they’re embarrassed to have other people take the tawdry pictures for them!
Imagine little Annie coming home from school, changing to her sluttiest tank, and saying, “Mom, could you snap a pic real quick?”
Not happening. And the bawdiness continues unabated.
Man, I hate MySpace. BlueDev was right in calling it the symptom of a much larger disease.
And yet I keep going back.