Against my will, I’m slowly making peace with the fact that the #Balfie (Bathroom Selfie) is not a fleeting fad in our era of smartphones, Instagram and obsession with taking selfies but a defining characteristic of our time.
One search on popular, photo-sharing social site Instagram for the #BathroomSelfie and a whopping 845 394 posts result is what I was dumped with. This number excludes variants such as #BathroomSelfies (249 029 posts), #Bathroomselfiesfordays (1 433 posts) and #bathroomselfieswag (889 posts).
Just how much swag is dripping from pictures of people hunched over their basin in a duck-faced pout with their toilet bowl as a backdrop is an anomaly to me, but, one thing that is clear is that hoping for its demise is as futile as hoping, according to some, that good ol’ JZ will #PayBackTheMoney.
Now, far be it for me to tell people to just STOP trying to bring sexy back to the crapper, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the many problems that these faux studios pose for us mere voyeurs.
Firstly, no one – and I say this with much confidence because I can’t imagine the opposite being true – finds the sight of a toilet bowl (that’s clearly in regular use) appealing. Surely, I can do without seeing the final resting place of your food at all, let alone when I’m probably having breakfast or lunch as I scroll through my Instagram.
Also, specifically to the gents, when your Balfie compulsion takes over you in a public toilet, maybe you can snap yourself up SANS the row of urinals in the background? But most importantly, and I implore you on this, do so without your fellow man in the middle of ‘draining the main vein’ as part of your scene-setting – it’s rather gauche.
Unless there is a new trend in aphrodisiacs that I have missed, I also can’t understand how a toothpaste-stained mirror as the tool for showing us your ripped abs or sexy hello kitty panties can be a part of bringing sexy back. I’d love to assume that we have advanced enough in evolution that all of us brush our teeth AT LEAST once a day, so, you don’t need to show me your entire week’s toothpaste splatters as proof. A freckled mirror reminiscent of my young nephew’s splatter artwork at crèche is guaranteed a scroll past your masterpiece, sans ‘double tap’ and probably with an ‘unfollow’ thrown in just for control.
And finally, and this I cannot stress enough: if you take only one thing away from this, it’s to ALWAYS PUT TOILET PAPER IN THE TOILET PAPER HOLDER. Seeing the good ol’ brown log with that last thread of tissue bunjeeing in celebration of its escape from its intrinsic purpose leads me to assume that you JUST dropped a load before you decided to turn around, poke your booty out in your thong and snap up your “squat deep” derriere. Eeuw.
Azizzar Says... 