Survey on selfie habits of young men and women

This essay presents the results of a small survey conducted on university students examining their selfie-habits. Specifically, it surveys how gender specific tendencies in selfie-sharing on social media fits the theories of Nelson, Burns, Baym and Senft, and mainly confirms these theories, but challenges the idea of women being pushed into producing more selfies in a more sexualized manner.

One factor that relates selfies and gender are popularity and competition. A female by nature loves to be competitive specially to gain popularity. When a woman decides to post a selfie online, her main concern is how many likes and comments they get. If she doesn’t get enough likes or gets a negative comment, she either deletes the comment or removes the picture entirely. After removing the post another one is added; however, she posts a more revealing picture that is somehow sexual to attract attention as stated by Nelson,O (2013) on Dark Undercurrents of Teenage Girls’ Selfies. It somewhat turns into a competition with other girls to gain more likes and get even more popular and this makes them seem more credible.

Culture, gender, and race play a part in the different selfies taken by men and women. They ask themselves, what is normal to post? Depending on the above factors it effects the type of selfie taken. In “What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon, 2015” Baym and Senft gave the example that white women say that men should be masculine and should take the image properly as well as making it look as un-staged as possible. This is because of what is normal, according to their culture, their ideologies on gender norms, and their race. These factors combined, draws an outline on what a right and wrong selfie is relating to their gender.

In theory, there’s a huge difference between girls posing for a selfie and boys taking selfies. According to Anne Burns, young women tend to have anxiety and stress when it comes to the online discussion of selfies (Burns, 2015). But anxiety is not the only factor that encounter women when it comes to posting a selfie — also insecurity is a factor. Burns states that as a proof of narcissism, the gendering of selfies and its limitation towards how women’s personal photography is socially valued (Burns, 2015). It is a big pressure for women to post a selfie and get a large number of likes, so they go undressed. Giving the example of the photography “Facebook Girls, 2013”, the girl basically gets more likes as soon as she removes a bit of her clothes. So we can say this is the new creativity: showing off cleavage, hips and breasts.

So women post, not to show people what they are actually doing, but to show an illusion of a perfect life. Furthermore, the perfect life is composed of fake happiness and tons of followers and likes.

Senft and Baym (2015) quotes the saying: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” This shows how men are differentiated from women in how they pose to take a selfie. It is clear that men are in power and that women are considered a muse to them. In this text, men take selfies not to get more followers or likes, they take it for the fun of it. Also, a photography of “Moon vs. Bathroom”, 2013 shows that Neil Armstrong took 5 photos while he went to the moon, and a young woman took 37 photos just by going to the bathroom. According to John Berger, 1970 as cited in Senf and Baym, 2015, women have a bit of control over how to the present themselves and their bodies. This is to show that women are judged by their appearances while men pose to have fun.

The survey, which was conducted for this assignment, was based on the theoretical basis on which this paper rests, and was aimed at either challenging or confirming it by testing some of its gender-based claims. This was done by surveying the selfie habits of 34 women and 26 men through 6 questions — all answered anonymously. It is important to stress, that it does not fulfill the requirements for a reliable and representative survey.

However, this survey will carefully be used in this essay as a hint to how the younger generations produce and share selfies based on their gender.

The survey reveals, as shown in Figue 1, that men have a higher tendency to take between six and eleven selfies a day than women. Based on this, it would seem that men in fact use the selfie medium more often than women, which challenges Burns theory that women are pressured to post selfies in order to gain recognition.

However, when the sharing-perspective of the selfie medium is taken into consideration, the gender norms mentioned by Burns and Senf & Baymis more applicable.

As presented in Figure 2 and 3, the female respondents have a much higher tendency to share their selfies on a social platform for everyone to see, whereas men more often take selfies to share more privately with friends and family, which support Berger’s claim, that men take selfie for recreational purposes.

This tendency to share pictures with a more closed circle is also reflected in the media chosen for selfie sharing. As seen in figure 4, both men and women use snapchat 60 percent of the time, when they share their selfies. However, women use Instagram, which is based on sharing to a broad audience of followers, more often, while men use Facebook, which is usually targeted a more closed group of friends and relatives.

However, when it comes to the sexualization of selfies as mentioned by Nelson and Burns, men seem to be the most outgoing.

In Figure 5, which describes the respondents visual focus in selfies, both men and women places their face and hair in focus most often by far. But when it comes to including the entire body or just the upper body, men are more represented.

Based on the survey, it would seem that men take more selfies and sexualize the images more than women. This challenges the claims of Nelson and Burns, that women more often seek affirmation through sexualized selfies. However, when women take selfies, they seem to share them more publicly, which in return supports the claims of Burns. As a result, this essay must remain inconclusive as to weather or not women to a greater extend seek confirmation through the sharing of sexual selfies on social media.

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