Should I stop posting bikini selfies on Instagram?
When I do, I lose followers, A LOT of followers… But: why? And: are THEY wrong? Or - am I?
I hadn’t taken a holiday in five years. Insanity, I know. Anyway - I finally did, last week. On reaching my bedroom in a stupidly pretty villa up a mountain in Provence for the first time, I stripped off, because, gross and sticky after eight hours travel - on doing which, I discovered that: a) one wall in this bedroom was hung with The Perfect Selfie Mirror, and b) the light in this bedroom was dreamy. Far more flattering than any damn filter. Furthermore, it hit my body… well. Like this:
So I popped a bikini on, and took a selfie, which I posted on Instagram. Just a Story - 24 hours and it evaporates, nothing too in yer face.
The next morning, I did another.
And the day after that. And so on.
I got leaner as the holiday went on, partly because I was swimming loads, which makes me abs pop, mostly because I was sharing the villa with five teenagers (and their respective parents, it wasn’t just me and them, that would have been really odd). Teenagers, it transpires, live by that five second rule on it still being OK to consume food five seconds after you drop it and it hits the floor - only with them, it’s more: you’ve got five seconds to eat all the food there is FROM THE MOMENT IT ENTERS THE VILLA. They ate everything we adults foraged and gathered in the local Monoprix, and they ate it fast . It was like The Hunger Games in that gaffe, I was lucky if I got a sniff on a stale corner of croissant once every couple of days; I swear I lost three kilos in a week. I was a little bit hungry most of the time.
But, you know. Good for the definition.
So I did more bikini selfies.
At the end of the week, on the TGV back home - feeling rested and chill and deeply content, if still a bit hungry - I posted a lil slide show of all the bikini shots I’d taken, this time on my Instagram feed main page, where it’s more attention seeking, more permanent, a bigger statement. “A week in bikinis and en Provence”, I called it, then sat back to see what happened next.
Which was disingenuous of me - because I knew exactly what would happen next. I’ve been posting bikini selfies from my hols for the last sevenish years (in Covid, I posted from my kitchen, poses I accessorised with kitchen utensils, whisks, colanders and so forth; oh, come on! Like you didn’t go quite mad in Covid…); every time, the exact same thing goes down. I get a flurry of Likes and lavish compliments, far more than I’d get for a non-bikini post – simultaneously, I get an exodus of followers. They leave, in their tens and their twenties and their fifties and hundreds, and I never see them again.
And whaddaya know? It happened this time, too. Within 24 hours, that one bikini post had accumulated 1300 odd Likes and a hundred odd comments (a lot, for me); and I’d lost somewhere between 100 and 200 followers, (also a lot, for me,). Of course, some of the deserters may have been Bots, stirred into action from their fetid Bot stew, behaving according to instructions issued by their Bot overlords - and some of them may have been people who’d forgotten they were following me at all, the sudden flurry around that post pushed me up their algorithm and they’d thought: ‘I have no idea who this women even is, Unfollow!’,.
But some of them definitely walked away in disapproval. Disgust. Dismay.
I know this for sure, because in the past, some have paused in the Unfollowing process to tell me why they’re off.
“It’s a nice body, but I follow you for your words, not your arse…”
“Your narcissism is off the scale…”
“I’m not jealous, just bored…”
“When did you become cut-price Elizabeth Hurley?”
“You’re trying to body shame me…” (after one of the kitchen utensil posts.)
“You should value yourself much more highly than this, Polly…” (no… really?)
And so forth.
The first time it happened, during a 2017 fortnight in Spain, I found it surprising, shocking, a little distressing. Social media is a popularity game after all, a likability game, a relatability game; my body seemed to make me less popular, less likeable, less relatable, which felt - harsh. The second time it happened (Spain again, 2018), I got irritated, bemused. My deserters admired me when I was dressed, apparently; why was my less-dressed body so appalling, they couldn’t so much as glance at it without recoiling then pressing the Unfollow button in pique? The third time (Puglia, 2019), I was amused, the fourth time (Covid) I had a go at the one who said I was trying to body shame her, and so on and so forth, until now - when I’m beginning to wonder if they might have a point.
I mean, I’m not. Not really.
Although: maybe a bit?
Because I do absolutely concede that the posting of a bikini selfie is a questionable act.
“Bikini-ism”, the magnificent fashion director of The Telegraph, Lisa Armstrong, once called it, with reference not to me, but to JLo, Amanda Holden, Elizabeth Hurley, Kate Beckinsale, and those other 50 something women who while away the summer posting images of themselves in various fetching states of undress. Armstrong disapproved on legitimate grounds, narcissism high among them (ref the “ism” in “bikini-ism”), and I take her points - while also recognising that those kinds of accusations are only ever levelled at bikini selfiers aged… What? 44 and above? Because we should know better, no one’s expecting that sort of self-awareness and restraint from the 20-something brigade?
Or because of straight up ageism?
Meh. One or the other.
But, look. I herewith propose to properly interrogate my own motives in posting bikini selfies, thus: try and work out if I should do it, next time I go on holiday.
1) I do just think I look good. Not “for my age”, not with that vile little mealy-mouthed mean-spirited adjunct anywhere near me, or anything I am, or feel about myself; no thanks, luv… Nope. Just good. And I think it’s ok to think that. I did not Just Wake Up Like This, after all; I got into fitness 10 years ago, pretty much by accident, having avoided it like ze plague since the indignities of PE at school. I discovered to my absolute amazement that I liked it, really, really liked it - and that it worked. Did what it always claimed it would, ie: allowed my body to operate better, to function better. That body, as a consequence, now not only looks 10 years older than it did before I started training, it also looks 10 years better. (NB I’m reasonably confident that, had I Just Woken Up in my 20s to discover my bod had changed into this overnight - give or take the sun damage and diminishment in elastin - I’d have been delighted.)
2) I am definitely thirst trapping. I want a couple of people from my past to see these and weep. More than a couple, honestly.
3) I have worked for this bod as surely as I have worked for my career. I’ve put in the hours and the graft, I’ve changed up the weights, did all the end-of-range pulses, it is bought and paid for, in sweat, time, effort. So what’s the difference between me celebrating it on Insta, and me celebrating, eg, the writing awards I periodically win, for which, I also worked really hard?
4) I am definitely posting these pics because I want people to be impressed.
5) Although: I have no desire to make them feel less good about how they look in comparison. Why on earth would I?
6) Also: I know women with bodies far more beautiful than mine - my trainers, other women in my classes - and I love looking at them. It doesn’t make me feel less - it makes me feel good. I particularly love looking at bodies more beautiful than mine, when they belong to women roughly in my age group. It gives me a sense of what’s possible. The fact mine has got stronger and more toned with time and age, never ceases to thrill me. I never knew I could be a fit person, a strong person at all; to discover it was entirely within me, that I am capable of reinventing, that profoundly and that usefully, and at forty, was and remains friggin glorious to me. Worthy of showing off; not least cos it’s potentially a spur to other women, who might be thinking of taking up a little exercise. I think I see bodies more beautiful than mine, almost as an extension of mine - if that makes sense?
7) Yeah, but - I am still showing off.
8) And why do I need to show off? To seek applause and exterior validation – validation in my physical self – when I get really quite a lot of it, in other ways, from other sources? On account of my writing, or, the way I dress, or for being funny - for my exceptional cooking skills?
9) I dunno: because we’re all at it, these days? All showing off, all the time? Maybe not as (metaphorically and literally) nakedly as me… But nonetheless. Those pictures of the incredible meal you had at that incredible restaurant everyone’s desperate to go to? “Sundowners on the terrace with This Guy”? Your children looking angelic in a rock pool? The tasteful tiles on your tasteful villa’s floor, the gallery you found the time to go to because you’re quite cultured, actually, the truly authentic tapas you tracked down, the melon stall manned by the charmingly rugged old dude? It all amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? “Admire me. Be impressed by me. Think I’m having a lovely, picturesque, full, enviable, real life.”
10) I am still thirst trapping, tho.
11) My body, though technically inadequately young, nevertheless adheres to society’s restrictive notions of what it is to be female, and look acceptable. By posting pictures like these, I am only perpetuating them, which is harmful and excluding to those who don’t.
12) Yeah, but my body is also strong. Those abs aren’t passive, babes. They’re flesh armour, which can, for example, withstand a substantial blow (as my beautiful boxing trainer Sunni once said to me: “You’ve got a body chin on you, P!”, translation: I can take a punch to the stomach, well). My abs also (more usefully, let’s be honest) keep my spine stable and functional, which means I am far less likely to suffer back pain - which is why I got into fitness in the first place. I achieved this body not because I was mindlessly pursuing a man-pleasing aesthetic, but because I was purposefully attempting to heal myself, trying to alleviate some long-term lower back issues. The look came as a surprise bonus. To be a woman and look and feel and be strong, to be a woman and be out of pain by your own actions, is, I’d argue, a purely feminist act. So my body is a purely feminist act.
13) But then, why do I need to post pictures of it on Instagram? All those things - the strength, the absence of pain, the feminism - will be true of me and my body, whether or not I parade it around the internet.
And why do I do it at all, if I know it winds some people up?
Because I am a bit of a wind-up merchant. I just am. If some women are going to kick off, then strop off, because of it: let them. They weren’t my people, anyway.
And if my body were bigger than society proscribes, presumably precisely those women who get cross with me for these bikini shots, would respond to the same images, the same swimwear, the same poses, with preach hand emoji and messages about how “brave” and “cool” and “strong” and “inspiring” I am. It’s not the bikinis they object to, it’s the slimness, which means you’re only a show-off narcissist if you’re slim. Otherwise, you’re a warrior.
Or maybe not. How can I possibly know?
And anyway, if women are Unfollowing me because they feel so wretched about their own bodies, so unsure and insecure, so low, so bleak, so miserable, that just seeing images of an internet stranger who apparently feels good about hers, is enough to send them spiralling deeper into those fathomlessly bleak feelings of self-loathing… Surely I should be mindful of that pain?
Unless other people’s pain just isn’t my responsibility? Can’t possibly be? I’d never post or publish anything at all, if I were constantly tending to Other People’s Pain - the whole spectrum of it - would I?
Ugh.
That’s it, that’s all 19 of my good, bad and deeply problematic reasons for posting bikini selfies on the gram - and I appear to be no closer to any sort of resolution than I did when I started listing them. Further away, if anything.
If I had to put money on it, I reckon I’ll be doing bikini selfies for as long as I like how they look - regardless of how much they p*** some people off. Which may not show me in my best light.
But, hey!
The selfies always will.
PS Paid Subscribers, shall I do mu next post on how and what and where I work out? Would that be good?Or overkill.
The point you made which resonated most with me was about liking to see other women. I find it encouraging to see people who have worked hard on their fitness. And - to hop to your question at the end - I would be very interested to read more about how you work out. I love to see images of female strength. It helps me to keep on showing up for workouts when I don't always feel like it. Even now, in 2024, we still need to normalise female strength.
For me there's also something here about the male and female gaze. It's obvious when a woman posting a bikini shot has packaged herself for the male gaze: the hair, the eyelashes, the contouring, the pose. I'm not for one minute saying you look unkempt but when you post a picture because you've just had your hair done and you're really pleased with the nice job the stylist has done, I feel like you're sharing your enjoyment and your admiration of the stylist's skills with women readers. When you posted all your holiday pictures, I felt like you were saying, "look at all the lovely bikinis I've hunter-gathered" and "I love how working out makes me look and feel".
I would have no qualms about my nieces (7 of them aged from 11 to 30) following you on Instagram or here, or reading your column in Grazia and seeing your bikini pictures but I would be concerned about my younger nieces following some other women who are presenting themselves in what seems to me to be an old-fashioned way and all about male consumption.
So I hope you keep on doing what you do.
I used to work with a girl who used to regularly unfollow influencers if their posts make her feel bad about her own body. I never used to understand it.. if someone I follow posts a photo of themselves looking ripped, it encourages me to go harder. Exactly as you said in your article Polly, especially women of a similar age as it shows you what’s possible which is MOTIVATING! I think it’s all about self love. You either have it and celebrate women of all shapes and sizes or you don’t.. and you unfollow..