Please Don't Like My Thirst Traps
by Sarah Jane Souther
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world
– Mary Oliver
The “hot girls” on Instagram drive me mental. And when I say “hot girl,” I don’t necessarily mean physically beautiful. I mean girls who post photos of themselves and pretty much only themselves. Incessantly. Sultry selfies captioned with Rupi Kaur poems. Six photos of them doing six different poses in the same dress. Swimsuit pics, “look back at it” pics, vacation pics, selfies with wine, with the dog, in their workout clothes, reading a book. The only point of it all—to show off what they look like.
But maybe what annoys me more are the thirst-trap-liking men who can’t see through the charade. The guys who play the game, who comment and slide into the DMs of that girl who posted that photo, ass to the camera in a little red dress captioned “Made you look,” *sparkle emoji, heart emoji, eyes emoji*. I can hear the commentary now: but she’s so fun, so confident, so hot.
Or maybe she’s a narcissist?
But that pesky verse from the Gospel of Matthew keeps resurfacing in my head: Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your [sister’s] eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own…
All of this hot girl stuff was annoying me to a point that was making me uncomfortable with myself. Why am I so irked by it? Is it touching on my own insecurities about my appearance? Am I jealous of their beauty or their apparent comfort with their bodies? Or am I envious of the attention they get from men? Worst of all, is there some tiny little part of me that wants to be a hot girl?!
And so I decided to get to the bottom of this. I tried becoming a hot girl. And here is what I found…
To start, I gave myself some guidelines:
I wouldn’t post anything that violated my personal convictions about how much skin I was willing to show on the internet.
I would post on Instagram approximately every other day for two weeks maximum, mostly selfies and other pictures of myself.
No interesting captions. No trying to be humorous or self-deprecating. In other words, hotter and dumber.
Let me tell you a few things about hot girls. When hot girls can’t choose between two photos, they post both. Hot girls know their angles. Hot girls can spot good lighting from a mile away. Hot girls ask their friends (or their mom) to take photos of them. Hot girls are always thinking about Instagram.
Being a hot girl is exhausting.
For my first post, I capitalized on my fresh haircut and took a selfie, head tilted, hand in my hair. Thanks to Vanessa Van Edwards, I knew about the lower lid flex—the expression you see all those models making on magazine covers. But even without that trick, I shocked myself with how well acquainted I was with different hot girl poses and expressions. I’ve absorbed so much through online osmosis. This is the language of my sex and our generation, and without realizing it, I’ve become fluent.
My haircut selfie got more attention than anything I’ve posted on social media in a long time. Instagram rewards those who seek its little red heart buttons with self-aggrandizing imagery. But anyone who’s ever posted on Instagram knows this already. Photos of you, photos of faces in general “perform” better than other types of images.
A few of the responses I got from men in particular, both on this first hot girl photo and some of the others I posted, were disconcerting, making me feel uncertain about friendships I had assumed were platonic. And I found myself feeling relieved that I wasn’t posting to get one particular man’s attention, thinking of the potential hand-wringing that might have caused. But some of these male responses also poked at my annoyance. It felt so shallow. One photo of my face with good lighting and a lower lid flex and suddenly you’re paying attention?!
Next, I asked my friend Audrey (after I let her in on the secret) to take a few photos of me putting on my lipstick after we went out for drinks. I posted these to my stories with sparkle emojis. The following day, I left for a work trip and used the next week as an opportunity to post fit check videos, hotel room self-timer pics and more selfies.
A nagging question I’ve had about the hot girl posting was whether there was some confidence boost benefit I was missing out on. Does posting a lot of photos of yourself and receiving attention for them give you more confidence? Was what I read as narcissism actually helping these women in some way I didn’t understand because I’d never tried it?
I had become my own lab rat and started recording how all of this was affecting me. Taking the photos, especially the selfies, because I had the most control over how these turned out, did give me a little confidence boost at first. But when I took the extra step of posting them, something else happened. An adrenaline rush. The anticipation of how many people and who would respond. And then something more sinister—exposure, vulnerability.
I love Andy Crouch’s definition of vulnerability—exposure to meaningful risk. But the vulnerability I felt when posting photos of myself on Instagram was exposure to a risk that wasn’t meaningful at all. “Success” would be measured in the amount of likes, DMs and comments I got. This made me feel like I was beautiful enough to be worthy of attention. “Failure” made me self-conscious to the point of anxiety, like I wasn’t worthy of that attention. Or enough of that attention, which is a strange thing to admit, because how much is enough? Would it ever be enough? And if this was where my sense of confidence was coming from, I would be tethered to the feedback of other people, a yo-yo on the string of their fickle thumbs.
As I was doing some research for this essay, I came across something David Brooks wrote about confidence. He critiqued the idea of self-confidence—that ever-shifting feeling we have about ourselves—and recommended thinking of confidence as connected to our competence instead. He argued that when we focus on that self part of confidence, we are just fueling our fragile egos. But if we can shift our idea of confidence from our inner world to the outer world and observe our competence, we have something real to wrestle with. What are you good at? What gifts do you have that you can use to serve others? How does this connect to your purpose?
Posting like a hot girl was affecting my self-confidence, but it wasn’t doing anything to help me gauge what my competence levels were. Unless you want to count how good I was getting at finding the best angles of my own face.
Partway through the experiment, I took a trip with my mom, and I enlisted her help. She snapped shots of me with trees and views of the ocean. At one point, while we were out for a hike, I found myself walking through the fragrant, piney woods, thinking, That patch of sunlight would be the perfect place for a photo of me.
I love the woods. It’s one of the rare places I feel my mind go quiet. Was it possible that in the course of a week, my brain had already started forming new patterns and ways of seeing the world? Instead of reflecting on the beauty of the woods, did I now see it as a backdrop for my own melodrama?
I’ve previously perceived the habits of women who post incessantly about themselves as a possible sign of already existing narcissism, but is it also true that the more you post about yourself, the more narcissistic you can become? The answer is yes—social media posting can be a catch-22. In one 2018 study, researchers found that in a group of 74 participants ages 18-34, posting lots of images of oneself resulted in a 25% increase in narcissism.
I’d hoped that my hot girl posting experiment would reduce my annoyance. Sadly, I can’t say that it has. But I do understand more about the toxic feedback loop that keeps you coming back for more likes, more comments, more DMs, whether it’s because you enjoy the affirmation or because you feel like you’re not getting enough. Maybe this photo, maybe that angle, maybe if I wear a lower-cut top, if I show more of my legs… more people will notice. Or my crush will notice, or my ex, or that person who hurt me. Instagram has become another way for women to sell themselves on the internet. But does the fact that we’re choosing to expose and exploit ourselves make it any less corrosive for our hearts or our minds?
Every woman longs to be admired for her beauty, and we know this about each other. This one reason why women respond to other women’s hot girl pics so often and with such enthusiasm. Forget the Instagram algorithm; we understand the deeper, more important algorithm of womanhood, the gnawing hunger of wanting to be beautiful, desired, perfect. We are trying to prop each other up with flame emojis, heart-eye emojis, “U r so hot” comments. While this is nice sometimes and might help if you’re having a bad day or feeling bad about your appearance, it remains true that Instagram rewards narcissistic behavior and pulls us all into a world where the most important thing about us is what we look like.
This essay is a documentation of my own experience, and perhaps other women have very different experiences. Perhaps they are able to detach more, or maybe they are less sensitive to the feedback loop, or the comparison temptation is not as strong for them. But for me, this experiment made me more self-absorbed, more self-conscious, more likely to compare my physical appearance to others and more addicted to my phone.
And it was starting to form me into someone I don’t like. I think Freya India, a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, After Babel, might be onto something:
“We talk endlessly about how editing apps and filters give girls and young women anxiety and body dysmorphia, which is important, but never about how they make us competitive, envious, vain. Sometimes it’s not my self-esteem I’m worried about. It’s who I become when I obsess over my profile and image and what everyone else is doing…
But I also think a good place to start is to change the way we talk about social media. Not just about our vulnerabilities but our vices. Not just about our anxiety but our arrogance. And to look at ourselves, honestly, all of us, and think, for once, not only about how all this is making us feel. But who the hell is it making us become?”
A very profound commentary, thank you for sharing this!
soooo good!