Should You Post a Selfie Or Not?

On the one hand, the idea of posting a selfie is pretty simple: you want a picture of yourself, you have a device that allows you to take a picture of yourself and share that picture with your social media crew, and what happens next is so obvious it really shouldn't require a lot of analyzing. And yet selfies have been analyzed to death in recent times, especially since Oxford English Dictionary declared "selfie" the word of the year in 2013. And what ought to be a totally natural, totally normal phenomenon is now so freaking complicated it makes my brain hurt.

There are lots of people who see selfies as narcissistic millennials being narcissistic. Other camps see selfies as empowering, even downright feminist, by letting people (and women in particular) present themselves to the world however they want, declaring themselves to be beautiful no matter what anyone else thinks.

The humble selfie, which once no one thought anything of, has been dragged into national conversations, sparking news articles galore and think pieces by James Franco. Selfies are everywhere. Beyoncé takes selfies. The vice president takes selfies. Elephants take selfies. Ellen took a selfie that broke the Internet. And the upshot of all these articles and think pieces and general attention is that taking a selfie, which for us ordinary folks was once so simple, now goes a little something like this:

Though if this woman is trying to play the "selfies are feminist" card, I think she's going about it the wrong way.