We had the mannequin challenge a few weeks ago. Now, it’s old.
We had the ice bucket challenge before that. It, too, disappeared.
Does anyone remember the cinnamon challenge? Yeah, me neither.
Internet challenges come and go like wildfire. One moment they’re at every second scroll of the screen, the next they’re forgotten and floating around the ether, banished to the shadows of our memory along with the name of our second-grade teacher and the recipe for salmon mornay.
The latest trend? The One Finger Selfie Challenge.
A challenge where (mostly) young women take a photograph of their naked body reflected in a mirror, holding one finger horizontally in front of the camera to ‘cover’ the breasts and vagina.
Confused? See below.
New online hype: #1fingerchallenge #1fingerselfiechallenge #onefingerselfiechallenge pic.twitter.com/mqHWi6HdSa
— Matthijs Pontier (@Matthijs85) November 29, 2016
Top Comments
Cover your breasts and vagina? The vagina is the internal bit and not visible externally, how can you cover that? Mons Venus, pubic area? Shouldn’t the writer know how to accurately describe parts of the female body?
Has anyone else noticed that the furor over this "challenge" far outweighs the number of people who have actually posted images, AND a significant portion of the images are of people making fun of it?
This is a media-generated sensation, nothing more. Hardly anyone is actually doing it.
I'd also like to respond to the statement in the article, "doesn’t the ‘fun’ of it darken when nudity is involved?"
Short answer, no. Long answer, NO-oh-oh-oh... :P
There's nothing inherently "dark" about nudity. The darkness is in puritanism, which demonizes our bodies, or in our society's reactive tendency to sensationalize anything to do with sexuality, or in the whole "rape culture" narrative.
You could argue that it's encouraging women and girls to sexualize themselves in an exploitative fashion, and that's bad, etc. etc. and I'd probably agree with you to a point, and that's probably what you intended to imply, but the idea that there's something wrong with nudity itself is nonsense.