4 September 2009
The Girl Can’t Help It
My inner feminist is sometimes irked by the demographics of the profile photos on my Facebook page: nearly all of the men have solitary headshots of themselves, but a much greater number of the women have photos of their kids, their husbands, or years-old wedding portraits. This is a general trend, and I can totally understand the logic of keeping your friends updated with photos of you and your rapidly-growing baby (seriously, what is it with the kids and the growing?). At the same time, though, it does give me pause when I see that a thirty-year-old acquaintance has transformed overnight into a baby, or is preserved in time as a svelte, airbrushed bride in black-and-white, because men seem to never go through similar transformations.
Along those lines, I also get irked by the assumption that, as one of the legions of women with a DSLR camera, I must use it to take pictures of flowers and natural-light portraits of beaming children. Again, not that there’s anything wrong with those things, but between Pete and me, he’s the one much more likely to come home with a camera full of photographs of trees and clouds, whereas I’m the one more likely to drag us (and my photographic equipment) down dark alleys.
Sebastian naps with Birthday Bear, originally uploaded by Bork Bork Bork.
Of course, then Sebastian has to go be all cute, and break my resolve.
OH SO FLUFFY. So fluffy. Also, Slate covered this a few months ago, but in a whinier, more controversial, and less OH SO FLUFFY AND ADORABLE way. http://www.doublex.com/section/life/get-your-kid-your-facebook-page
The Facebook thing annoys me as well. I’ve learned not to comment, though. People get really, really offended. I don’t mind when people put up profile pictures of themselves WITH their kids or husband. Even the bride thing doesn’t annoy me all that much. It’s when they remove their photos and replace them with photos of their kids that I just want to barf. Occasionally I get a friend request and for a moment think, “Eliza? Who could this be? I don’t know anyone named Eliza who is six months old and chews on stuffed giraffes! This person looks too young to type! Something seems fishy here. Ohhhhh…”
If six months from now my picture is replaced by one of a couple of months-old little people, please hit me over the head.
Yeah, pictures *with* children are great, but the symbolic overtones of a mother’s image being completely overwritten by her child’s is what unnerves me. (No disrespect to the legions of friends out there with photos of themselves with their kids on Facebook or Google or whatever — seriously, keep them coming. Also, an informal survey of my friends reveals about as many fathers pictured with their kids as mothers, which is awesome.) I find the wedding portrait thing odd because there were a couple of times that I saw a woman submit one for professional purposes, which seemed… a little tone-deaf.
That said, Marcy gets props for having photos of herself with one of her cats, which requires superior wrangling and timing skills.
I wonder what your take on cartoon characters as avatars is…? :) Love the picture of Sebastian. Too cute.