Nope

[Content Note: Violence; descriptions of abuse; dehumanization.]

Hitting it out of the park as usual, CNN has published a piece by Sally Kohn originally titled "Are selfies bad for us?" and currently titled "Do selfies erode our humanity?" in which Kohn wonders if "selfie culture" reflects "us as we've always been or is it turning us into something worse?"

To make her case, Kohn relates several cases of sexual assault and violence which has some connection to images published on social media, and then argues:

But, social media seems to have increased incivility or hate speech in our society by making us more aware of its prevalence. People who were once shouting sexist and racist epithets from the windowless basements of their parents' homes now have Internet connections and can share those epithets on Twitter and beyond. The assault on civility, just like the assault on women's bodies, is nothing new. The new part is that even the loneliest of people now have the tools to broadcast their assaults far and wide.

There is so much wrong in that paragraph, I hardly know where to begin. The reiteration of the stereotype of harassers as losers and loners. The implication that the internet amplifies harassment, as opposed to just making more visible to privileged people the harassment directed at marginalized people all the time in our offline lives. (Again: It's not like no random dude ever called me a fat cunt before I started a blog.) The suggestion that rapists and other abusers only began boasting about their acts of violence in tandem with the emergence of a "selfie culture."

Absolutely not. Boasting about rape and other acts of violence is a feature of rape culture, and it existed long before social media. Bros bragging about their "conquests" to their buddies. Husbands bragging about "putting the wife in her place" to their coworkers. Paintings and sculptures and stories and films have been created to document artists' acts of abuse, or the acts of abuse committed by conquering heroes in oft-told legends.

The man who raped me wrote a poem about it which was then circulated among our classmates.

To imagine such casual and unafraid and bellicose boasting started with selfies. For fuck's sake. What a luxury.

Kohn concludes:

We take more selfies than ever before, and yet we seem to be less self-aware. Social media allows the narcissism in all of us to come out. Some people take it to the extreme by posting assaults of violent acts. One has to wonder how much this public platform has eroded our humanity.

This is the thing: Many women use selfies to humanize ourselves. Which is not about narcissism, but visibility. To conflate that with the dehumanizing and self-serving shit abusers do, I can't even.

[H/T to Lauren Chief Elk.]