How To: Snapchat

So Now You're On Snapchat

It’s the perfect invention! It solves all of the inherent problems involved with sending pictures of your junk across the internet! Which spans the globe and involves the greater portion of humanity! OK, not really. But it’s still the way to go, right? I mean, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, and your drunken little “check it out heh heh heh” JPG vanishes, leaving only a lingering, penis-shaped outline in the mind of your intended recipient. This is the future. Safe, clean, irredeemably vulgar – just as we had always imagined it would be.

Well, yeah – except screenshots. People can take screenshots of things. Things that they think are funny, or lame, or unwarranted, or that arrive at 3:17 a.m. apropos of nothing. They can take screenshots of those things and put them anywhere. Even on Tumblr. Even on checkoutthisloser.tumblr.com. Even on checkoutthisloserwhosenameismikethompsonofbloomingtonindiana.tumblr.com.

We’ll give you a second to copy and paste those links, and then to feel bad about yourselves.

OK. So. Let’s recap.

There is this new thing. It is a smartphone app called Snapchat. Its founder claims that it is not to be used for sexting, but that’s a bath-salts level application of bullshit. It’s really popular and reflective of what seems to be a sort of “trending mentality” (a phrase we hate ourselves for typing), and it’s so embedded in the sticky morass of post-Internet adolescent sexuality that Gawker (not even Jezebel – just plain Gawker) is finding it necessary to make appropriate-sounding noises about “the possibility of sexual agency under the patriarchy.”

Given all this, we think it is time to give you, the loyal AskMen reader, two reminders. Just two. We’re not going to get into Catharine McKinnon here, nor are we going to launch into some sub-Kurzweil production about technology and cyborgs and transhumanism. All we have are two really really key warnings, and then we will vacate this field of discussion permanently. Or until the next time a lot of people are talking about it. Whichever happens first.

Number One: Any image produced by a computer and received by a computer (and your iPhone is a computer, and a powerful one) can be saved by a computer. Once this happens, it can be uploaded to another computer, which can in turn serve it to the entire internet. With captions. Or mocking asides. Or personal details. This is all very very possible, especially given that…

Number Two: Girls are less interested in the pure mechanics of our reproductive organs than we are in those of theirs. Even if a girl likes you a lot — like, so much that she thinks about how your last name would sound, or whether you might want to do it while That Song is playing, or wonders what your eyes looked like when you were five – she is probably not killing herself over the fact that she hasn’t seen you from every possible angle. It’s not exciting for girls to see your shorts riding up a bit. They don’t lean in in hopes of catching a little “side nut.” It’s just not how they are. Even if it was common for guys to wear skirts, it would remain distinctly uncommon for any woman to create or view a site devoted to male “upskirts.” We’re not the same. That’s OK. Make your peace with it.

Do you see what we are getting at here? We don’t think this is a good idea. We don’t think this is the thing we have all been waiting for, nor do we think that this is the future of sex or flirting or relationships. We think that this is the future: Naked, terrifying, and irredeemably vulgar.

Just how we always thought that it would be.