October 13, 2023
Ladies and gentlemen (but mostly ladies)! Fear not. Bobby Mars is here to address the most pressing issue of our day—gorgeous, gorgeous girls, their presence, their aesthetics, the photos they take and share of themselves online.
When it comes to photographs online, women have absolutely dominated the space for over a decade now. Social media especially has allowed women to mobilize the feminine aesthetic in hypnotizing manner. The audience behind the screen can’t get enough, we simply yearn for beautiful women and their images. We like every post, we compliment them in the replies. We can’t help ourselves, simps that we are.
We’re in the photographic universe now, and let me tell you, the ladies own this space. The feminine aesthetic ideal reaches its zenith and we cannot look away. Yet this experience for many, for women themselves especially, culminates in one of alienation. We all know, at our core, that the images we see are contrived. They are not inherently truthful pictures of experienced reality.
The modern adage, “the lives you see portrayed online are never as they seem,” has become rather trite. We don’t even need to go that far. We simply need to look to the nature of the mediated image itself, the inherently dubious veracity of the photograph, to understand this truth. Photographs are symbolic mediations, and what women are particularly gifted at mobilizing is their own inherent knowledge of feminine symbolism and archetypes.
The Trad Wife, the chthonic mother (to quote dear old Paglia), who we yearn to sink back into, to die for and with. Heaven and hell, a pagan figure of the underworld and supreme desire simultaneously. Few can resist her charms. This powerful symbol holds sway over our imaginations and, in a twist of profound irony, has captured the internet, the supreme archetype of masculine Apollonian will.
Yet, the camera is a simple toy. A crude painter’s brush. We can see it as it is, we can see photographs as they are, as symbols. Powerful, primordial symbols. Clever tricks to sway the mind. Objects of desire, yes, but more profoundly knowledge, bearers of the torch, transmitters of ideas.
Every e-girl posting a selfie exists in the same realm as the iconographer. Icons to nature, icons to a reality which is not quite real but is in fact, in its deep symbolism, more than real. Consider this weight, my dears, and use your power wisely. You’re far more powerful than you know.
With love,
Bobby