Some of Us Use Internet Exhibitionism... to Cope?
Shirtless pictures: desperate bid for attention or opportunity to heal? You decide.
They say it’s a bad idea to let your looks dictate your self-esteem. Maybe that’s true for some people. What about those of us whose self-esteem had nowhere to go but up?
I was a fat kid. Which meant, no matter how adorable I may have been — and looking back, I was actually kind of adorable — to my peers, I was always going to be a fat kid.
Being the fat kid was a substantial part of my identity throughout childhood. That I wasn’t exactly socially gifted only made the matter of my weight a lot more prominent — as if I wasn’t prominent enough.
The trauma of the fat kid is two-fold. It makes you hate your body in and out of clothes. Nothing looks good on you. Nothing is made to look good on you. Because your body is not worth looking good. To be seen at all is a nightmare.
I remember being sixteen years old, sitting alone in my house, and weeping because I thought I was so ugly, I wasn’t worth the air I breathed. I had decided that my romantic life would never amount to anything but lots of time in front of the computer and a handful of whatever lotion happened to be on hand.
As a teenager, you spend all day looking at other people who seem to “get it,” (even though neither you nor they would even know what the “it” was that everyone else seemed to “get”) unless you’re one of the truly special people, you always feel like you’re looking into another world that’s just beyond reach.
Let’s face it, though. If you never spent an entire afternoon crying alone on your family’s couch because you think you’re too ugly to live, did you even have an adolescence?
In 2011, I graduated from high school, turned eighteen, and everything changed… For the worse.
My friends took off for college while I stayed and took a year at junior college to keep costs down. I had never been lonelier — or more in need of anti-depressants, as it turns out.
Like many depression-addled late millennials, I sought comfort and community on the Internet. Which, I’m well aware, can go very, very wrong. The net gain may not be worth the cost.
But of course, the Internet was not the same place ten years ago. It was during my time on Tumblr that I saw the first sparks of what would become the “Cancel Culture” debate. Back in my day, we called that “Callout Culture” and just as many narcissists with grudges made a home in it as they do now.
In the summer of 2011, I started a Tumblr blog. If you’re not familiar with the platform, think of it as like a Twitter with longer tweets, more gifs, and more virulently anti-social behavior if you can believe it.
I soon found a group of musical theatre and classic film-obsessed 18–22-year- olds like myself who were just as adamant about their favorite Mama Rose as I was (Angela Lansbury all the way). As I posted about more of my interests, there was a sense of freedom and excitement to the whole endeavor because I’d never really engaged any of my real-life friends with these interests. Or, if I did, I bothered them with it. If you and I went to high school together and you didn’t get a link to a YouTube video of Liza Minnelli belting out “New York, New York” to a crowd of thousands, we weren’t besties.
The other side of Tumblr, which I soon found out, was a bit more salacious than Bernadette Peters videos and talk about which Hitchcock movie was the gayest and which Meryl Streep Oscar nomination was least-deserved.
Tumblr was a hotbed of sexual exploration, nudity, and straight-up pornography. #ToplessTuesday, or the endlessly suggestive #TT, was a weekly event on the platform that involved users uploading photos of themselves nude from the waist up. The thing that grabbed me about this space was that it seemed like there was an audience for all body types.
There were entire communities, colonies almost, of gay men — some of whom were chubby, even chubbier than me — who were meeting one another, online and sometimes in person, while celebrating their bodies through shirtless selfies. Some of it was presented as body positivity (“It’s taken me a long time to accept my body…”) and some of it was presented for what it usually was — a bid for attention.
Either way, it completely smashed my ideas about whether or not a body that looked like mine could be desirable.
The very first shirtless picture of myself that the Internet did see hit my Tumblr in late 2011. It was a grainy shot of me from the groin up, courtesy of an HP Pavilion webcam that left a lot to be desired in the quality department. I stood with my arms in a kind of upward-palmed shrug — because it was less embarrassing to look noncommittal than to try looking sexy.
Luckily, I have no record of what I’m sure was the overly long, achingly earnest post about my body and my struggles as a fat kid that went along with it.
The response was fairly good. In fact, I got hundreds of “notes” (Tumblr speak for likes + “reblogs”) and earned a fair amount of new followers. Just for taking my shirt off.
Almost overnight, I went from thinking I was the ugliest thing on the planet to actually believing I may be some people’s version of aesthetic and physical perfection.
All this from posting a grainy, badly-lit shirtless selfie.
It’s as close to the classic “pretty girl takes her glasses off and is suddenly supermodel gorgeous” trope I’ve ever gotten.
So, I did what any self-respecting Internet figure did in this situation. I posted more. Between truly groan-worthy posts about the movies I loved and hated, I salted and peppered my Tumblr dashboard with pictures of my ample frame.
My poses got a bit more suggestive. A hint of hip, a bit of butt. I’m only human. I was seeing not what I could get away with, but what I could stomach. The more I showed and teased, the more people wanted to see.
I deleted my first and most popular blog on the platform in 2012. For all the talk about the Internet being frozen in digital amber, so little of my time on Tumblr is easily accessible to me. Of the few pieces of evidence I could find, this “review” of my Tumblr persona/blog/self seemed appropriate:
My posts racked up likes and reblogs. My blog found more followers. My inbox filled with questions and nudes from other users, sexual propositions, admiration — which was fun, to a point — and, eventually, other people telling me how much it meant to them to see me with the courage to not only bare my body but show it off. For so long, I felt as if I didn’t deserve to feel anything but contempt or shame for my own body. I didn’t realize at first that just seeing me comfortable in my own skin meant something bigger to someone.
Now, I’m not saying I changed lives here. But I can only tell you what people told me. The same confidence I gained from seeing others with my body type embracing their body was the same confidence I was giving to others.
I didn’t think of it that way at first. I’m not one for touting my own importance. But I have to tell you, it felt nice. Not only was I feeling better about myself, but it seemed like my bids for attention in the form of half-nude selfies had more of an impact than I ever thought.
I was lucky. My experience could have gone very, very wrong.
I don’t think Internet exhibitionism is for everyone. I used the admiration I received as a tool to bolster my confidence but there was something in me, lingering distrust of that socially-stunted kid I used to be, maybe, that kept me from depending upon it.
Putting your self-esteem in the hands of others is never good. Whatever it was that allowed me to compartmentalize the admiration I received and keep up my defenses against predatory behavior served me well.
Once upon a time, Tumblr felt like the Wild West of the Internet. A place where you could indulge in your interests (and obsessions) with a vigor that would have worried your real-life or the relatives on your Facebook. A place where you could be “yourself,” whatever that was, and because you generally didn’t use your full name, it was hard to find you in there. Not impossible, but almost.
Tumblr’s not what it used to be. Anybody could tell you that. The sexual freedom and expression that once marked the site are gone. OnlyFans and Twitter took up that mantle. I still keep in contact with a lot of the people I met on Tumblr, and I’ve even met a few in real life, but the ones I met through my exhibitionism are largely gone.
Children are the perennial scapegoat when American lawmakers want to pass puritanical legislation. Ask them how far they’ll go to make sure American children are fed and housed and their feelings get a little murkier.
Nearly as misguided as OnlyFans’ similar announcement in the early part of this year — which they promptly walked back — Tumblr was already losing its relevance to Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms when it banned adult content.
After this ban, which listed “female-presenting nipples” among its big no-nos, Tumblr had effectively hobbled itself. Ironically enough, any shirtless selfies I tried to post on the site were always rejected because of this “female-presenting nipples” rule. I guess Tumblr couldn’t handle these babies. Just goes to show how weird our obsession with policing women’s bodies is.
For me, personally, this ban didn’t matter much. Once I went away to college, I spent less time on the platform and channeled my exhibitionist thrills into my suddenly very active sex life. Armed with the knowledge that someone, somewhere found me attractive, it gave me a new perspective of my body. I think this, more than anything, added to whatever confidence deficit I had in my actual life.
Psychologically, I don’t feel that earning some much-needed confidence in this way has done me any undue harm. I enjoy how my body looks, but even if I play at narcissism from time to time, I’m well aware my body is not traditionally desirable. If it had been, I might have been more tempted to go down the rabbit hole of total self-absorption.
Even after I embraced my own body, there were still plenty of people — on the Internet, on dating apps, and the culture at large — who were intent on making sure I knew I was worthless.
But that’s what it’s like for all of us — even those of us who are “traditionally attractive,” whatever that is. There will always be someone hostile to confidence. Confidence attracts critics as much as it does admirers.
For every few compliments I got on Tumblr, there would be one or two that were vile, ignorant, and hateful. After a while, I was posting to aggravate these idiots just as much as I was posting for myself and for the people who wanted to see me.
Spite can be just as motivating as adoration.
I still post shirtless pictures (even more on my super-secret alt Twitter shhh) but at a certain point, it became less exciting and more normal. Still freeing, but less transgressive. It’s a human body, after all.
Because I always knew I wanted to be a writer, the “professionalism” of plastering my body across the Internet didn’t affect me and it still doesn’t. I like to show off. If someone is inspired or emboldened by that, all the better. I have no ambitions or delusions about being a body-positive activist. I’m just a big person who enjoys how they look, and enjoys the kick of being seen, and knows that just over a decade ago, I never would have thought this kind of confidence possible for myself.
What I’m Watching: My boyfriend and I are currently alternating between Riverdale (which I’ve seen) and You (which neither of us had seen).
For the last month, I’ve been compelled to watch the British version of Big Brother, most notably Celebrity Big Brother. It is absolutely wild to know that the kind of reality TV we were watching in the mid-Aughts, where contestants didn’t have to take things like social media followings and dignity into account, was still alive and well up until 2018. Highly recommend.
What I’m Reading: Behind the Horror: True Stories That Inspired Horror Movies by Lee Mellor is a morbid but fast-paced look at the real-life inspirations behind movie villains and movie crimes like those in Psycho (Ed Gein), Rope (Leopold & Loeb), The Exorcist (the reported demonic possession of a boy in Maryland), and M (literally any number of German sex criminals in Weimar Germany).
What I’m Listening To: Adele’s 30, of course.
If you’re so inclined, buy me a cup of coffee at Kofi for a one-time donation of $3.
The Red Sweater will be updated once per… let’s just say it’ll be updated once, periodically, until the end of time. It will cover developments in my life, work, and all the stupid little things I care about. More of my writing can be found at Medium and on my website.