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Today is National Selfie Day (or #NationalSelfieDay, because we’re all millennials here and so fuck spaces), which means that people are taking a lot of selfies. So it’s just like every other day, then, except this time it has an official title and you can feel slightly less self-involved when you flip on that front-facing camera.
To celebrate this, er, momentous occasion, we can have therefore compiled a guide to taking selfies for men, featuring the most popular formats of selfies that you will currently find circulating online.
The “Emotionally Sincere” Selfie
Your life’s decent. You have a mortgage, a reasonably well-paid 9-to-5 career and a wife who harbors only a minimal amount of resentment towards you. Your kids might not visit as much as they used to, but all-in-all you can’t complain. This selfie reflects that. It’s honest, optimistic and entirely sexless. It’s you saying “I don’t want anyone looking at this to fuck me, I just want them to know I’m doing okay.”
The “This is my Job” Selfie
The majority of folks probably wouldn’t suspect that you can carve out a career posting photos to Instagram, but then the majority of folks don’t have abs lifted from the set of 300 and hair that looks like a cross between an America’s Got Talent boy band member and a stimulated cockatiel. If the response to you taking your shirt off for Instagram is treated with thousands of likes and not widespread repulsion, then you’re probably earning a living doing so.
Though your undisclosed sponsored posts are morally ambiguous, you probably don’t feel too much guilt about telling your followers to buy some shitty workout smoothie, considering that they’re mostly divided between porn bots and users so intensely creepy that, if you were ever trapped in the same room as them, they’d exit it wearing the flesh of your skin as a mask.
The “I Can Buy You” Selfie
There’s a vilified sub-section of Instagram in which teenagers go to brag about their expansive bank balances, by way of taking photos of themselves alongside the various luxuries they get to enjoy such as private jets, expensive champagne and money. Lots and lots of money.
Everybody hates them, of course, regardless of the fact that at its very core Instagram is a vehicle for letting everyone else know how well you’re doing. Still, if your definition of ‘well’ is ‘my father owns a Fortune 500 company and so I’ll therefore never have to work a day in my life,’ it’s not really surprising that others resent you.
The “Wrinkled Forehead” Selfie
No one truly knows why so many selfie takers deem raised eyebrows and a wrinkled forehead to be an inherently attractive facial expression. Perhaps it’s the incongruous amalgamation of shock and sheer boredom that does it; the upper half of the face looks as though it belongs to someone who has seen a man get hit by a car, while the bottom half looks as though it belongs to someone who’s waiting for a bus. Perhaps the individuals utilizing this expression believe that this facial contrast may make them appear more unpredictable as a result, and not at all like they’ve suffered a stroke. They are wrong.
The “I’m in Bed” Selfie
What’s the best way to convince people that you are a sexual being? A half-naked selfie in your own bed, of course. Posting a bed selfie is the universal symbol for “I am a man who sometimes has sex, and I want to express this fact to you right now.” You’ll likely post this photo alongside the caption “just woke up” or “finally made it to my bed!” but neither of those statements are correct. In reality, this is the Instagram equivalent of subliminal messaging, except instead of a product you’re trying to advertise your dick.
