Instasham

Credit: Instagram

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I remember that having a digital watch with LED display was suddenly de rigeur amongst my classmates. Lee Flavell, Neil Attree, and Greg Mason, all sported these clunky, futuristic, hi-tec timepieces on their wrists, as if they'd stepped straight off the set of Tomorrow's World.

It was about the same time that electronic calculators became must haves and school-children everywhere discovered to their delight what an amusing number 80085 was. Indeed, if I remember correctly, you could even get a digital watch that included a calculator ...   

However, being full of punk scorn for any attempt by straight people to try and look cool - and contemptuous of anything deemed trendy - I obviously despised digital watches and, in order to demonstrate my implacable opposition, I cut a picture of one out from an ad in the newspaper and sellotaped it to my wrist. 

Why do I think of this now, over forty years on? Because I read in the press recently of the anti-rich kids who have taken to Instagram to mock those who post photos in order to flaunt their privileged lifestyles and display their designer wardrobes.

How do they do this? They fake things - including expensive watches. Pranksters from around the world have shared images, under the hashtags #NotARichKidOfInstagram and #BudgetLife, of their amusing attempts to both replicate and ridicule the good life as conceived within consumer society.  

Whilst I obviously can't claim to have inspired this, I do like to think I anticipated it with my own actions back in the day (and demonstrated an early dislike for the digital age about to dawn). 

On the Female Nipple

School of Fontainebleau: Presumed Portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées 

and Her Sister the Duchess of Villars (c. 1594) 

Oil on canvas (96 x 125 cm)

The female nipple is a small, anatomical structure designed primarily to secrete breast milk into the mouths of babes and sucklings. But it is also considered an erogenous zone; i.e., a part of the body highly sensitive to sexual stimulation.

It wasn't surprising, therefore, when a 2006 survey discovered that a large majority of young women said their level of arousal was significantly enhanced by having their nipples fondled, kissed, licked, sucked, bitten, or clamped. Indeed, some respondents claimed to experience orgasm directly from nipple play alone.

Female nipples are thus subject to both fetishistic fascination and rules governing modesty and so-called indecent exposure. On social media sites such as Instagram, for example, they remain taboo and subject to strict censorship, whatever the context in which they appear and regardless of whether they're erect or not.

Amusingly, a gender-equality campaign called Free the Nipple was launched in 2012, inspired by feminist filmmaker Lina Esco, to challenge this policing of and discrimination against female bodies. However, I regret to report that the latest predicted trend in cosmetic surgery is to do away with rather than liberate the poor nipple. At any rate, more and more women are apparently requesting ever smaller, Smartie-sized nipples.

For in this world today, where a shrinking number of modern women choose to breed and where, amongst those who do, there's an increasing reluctance to breastfeed, there's really no bio-functional point in having embarrassingly large or ugly-looking nipples - even if there remains a lingering, rather nostalgic, erotic justification for holding on to them for just a little while longer ...                 


Notes

To watch the official trailer to Lina Esco's film, Free the Nipple (2014), on IMDb, click here. 

For a related post to this one in which I develop the above ideas, click here.