Thirst traps and useless men

I'm in Tablet

after long await…here’s my hit piece on thirst traps:

“Yo you looking hella ockey bro. For real,” Guy One says to Guy Two as they leave the locker room. The lights turn off. I notice that it’s 9:59 p.m. The last worker on shift wants to leave. Guy Three pulls up his weathered black Nirvana T-shirt to dab the sweat from his forehead, then pulls it off. His two friends follow suit. “My traps hurt like hell, man,” one of them says.

All three pull out their phones and tap on the Instagram icon. They gather in front of a floor-length mirror as I awkwardly attempt to slip past them without making eye contact. They tense up their cores, flex one arm, and take a selfie with the other before switching arms and repeating the process. “Gotta show them these gainz, bruh,” says Guy Two. They throw on sweatshirts and grab their bags. “Yo bro,” one says on his way out the door, “did you check if she saw your story yet?”

A thirst trap is, according to Urban Dictionary, “a sexy photograph or flirty message posted on social media for the intent of causing others to publicly profess their attraction.” Thirst traps range from the simple to the highly curated, from the informal mirror selfie to the “candid” beach pic. The goal is for the poster to “trap” their prey in a fit of lust, leaving them with no choice but to write a comment or send a direct message indicating their sexual interest.

Thirst trappers must cautiously navigate the line between posting a photo that is too subtle, and thus unsexy, and one that is too sexual, and thus desperate and in poor taste. This is supposed to be a trap, after all.

At first glance, thirst traps perpetuate our culture’s oversaturation of sex. Yet the true intention behind posting a thirst trap, says one especially astute Urban Dictionary user, is not sexual pursuit—it’s to “feed the poster’s ego or need for attention.” Perhaps the thirst trapper, like many porn addicts, isn’t consciously aware of what it is they really want. But a thirst trap isn’t passive. Unlike the porn consumer, the thirst trapper actually stands a chance of getting human affirmation within a cosmos that seems hollowed out of lasting hope or objective meaning.

It is this aspect of individual assertion that explains why thirst-trapping has become increasingly popular among men, who are “flooding” social media platforms with their unabashedly sexual posts. Art critic John Berger famously quipped that “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” But now, with much of our lives mediated by screens and many traditional male social roles rendered obsolete, men also, increasingly, want to watch themselves being looked at. For growing numbers of young men, the thirst trap is a small cry, a demand for acknowledgement from a world that no longer needs them.

continue reading at Tablet.

photo taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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