The Paradox of the Thirst Trap

Still from Jaws taken from the BAMF Style blog

As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly undeniable that I’m at least a little bit neurodivergent. Probably not in a debilitating or even interesting way, but enough that I’m often left feeling like an alien observing how strange it must be to feel like the hu-mans do.

One inconsequential but long-simmering example: it’s getting to where an average guy can’t take his shirt off anymore. The thing that first tipped me off is when several years ago I posted a photo to Instagram of myself at a water park.

That was during a period when I was spending a lot of time on site at theme parks, with my smart phone as my only social outlet. For the first time, I had unfettered access to some pretty great water parks, which I’d never visited, in large part because I was mortified at the thought of going out in public in a bathing suit. To be clear: not a speedo or anything, but your standard not-that-far-above-the-knee bathing suit.

But at the time I was working on building up my confidence, being less insecure and self-deprecating, and generally becoming more comfortable in my own schlubby body. I started to think of this as an essential experience, a chance to level-up in self-confidence. I did a practice run at a hotel pool — even going down the water slide that I’d spent years watching from a safe distance! — and after not dying from that experience, decided it was time. I went to Typhoon Lagoon and spent an entire afternoon baring my shockingly pale, hairy body to the unforgiving Florida sun.

It was a blast. So much fun that I actually got pretty angry with myself for being too insecure to go for so many years. It really did feel like a small personal victory. And I posted a selfie to Instagram to commemorate the day that I’d finally braved a water park in public.

The responses weren’t what I’d expected. I had been steeling myself to try and not care about any comments that saw me as I saw myself, i.e. pale, overweight, and under-muscled. But I wasn’t prepared for people to react as if I’d posted a thirst trap. (At the time, I wasn’t even fully aware of what a “thirst trap” was). It was as if I’d posted something so scandalous that I had to triple-check the photo to make sure I wasn’t accidentally flashing hog or something.

It would be disingenuous to make it sound like I was completely naive. This was also the time when I was getting comfortable being fully-100%-out-of-the-closet-no-take-backs, and seeing a lot of guys around my age online who seemed to be much more comfortable with themselves, so I was hoping I’d be getting a little bit of attention.

But I did genuinely think it was an almost entirely innocuous photo. The kind that might get one or two flirty comments because internet’s gonna internet, and hey that’s fun and flattering, but not the kind that would have anybody reacting like I was suddenly posting soft core. And the reactions weren’t on the scale of “how dare you post such offensive trash?!” but more “oh look somebody’s thirsty!”

Obviously, it stuck with me. It taught me that the line between “tastefully normal” and “scandalously thirsty” wasn’t where I’d thought it was. And more significantly: that the line had moved since the time I was growing up, and nobody had bothered to tell me.

I would’ve sworn that all through the 1970s and 80s, and from older photos I’d seen, that people regularly took and shared snapshots from pools or water parks or just generally living their lives, and it was never treated like anything at all remarkable.

But then I started wondering if I’d simply misread it all these years. The more essays that I read or watched about cinema studies and media literacy, the more they made it sound like everything was subtext. Practically every image that had ever been put before me had some kind of sexual connotation to it, whether explicit, codified, or suggested. And I had simply been too naive and not media-savvy enough to recognize it.

As society got more liberal, more people started rejecting shame, and there was an increased emphasis on body positivity — as well as the inescapably long-running truth that Sex Sells — then “normal” sites like Instagram became outlets for people to fearlessly get it all out there. Hell yes I’m sexy and I want people to know it, and by the way I also happen to be collaborating with this line of products, link in bio.

Which led to what’s long felt like a paradox. Here we are in an environment of liberation that would’ve blown the mind (and elsewhere) of emerging adolescent me, and yet it also feels even more prudish than it did when I was growing up. While it was gratifying to finally be made aware that even someone who looks like me could have a small but extremely vocal audience — as Lore Sjöberg said, “I’m somebody’s fetish” — it was also a drag to see that there was practically nothing you could share that the internet wouldn’t try and interpret as sexy. Stuff that would’ve been considered completely unremarkable back then was now treated with a back-handed kind of acceptance: good for you, you naughty, naughty dog!

I’m aware that most women still reading this are probably rolling their eyes at a man struggling to come to terms with the concept of the male gaze. I’m not trying to make it out to be some huge crisis, and I’m definitely not suggesting Oh I totally get it now, my sisters, and I have become one with your experience. I’m just saying it’s a drag is all.

It’s just meant that at a time in my life when it seems like I should be more free and liberated and open than I’ve ever been, because I’m no longer feeling any insecurity or the need to compete with hot guys who’ve seen the inside of a gym before, I’m instead even more super-conscious of what I’m wearing and how I look.

Unlike the other middle-aged men in my neighborhood, who evidently don’t spend such an unhealthy amount of time on social media, I avoid going around with no shirt on, even when I’m inside the house, because what if someone might see? And even though my work towards self-confidence backfired and turned me into a narcissist who takes way too many selfies, even by 21st century gay man standards, I still treat anything not cropped at the shoulders as if it were sensitive material that must not escape containment.

For a long time, I was content albeit disappointed to believe that That’s Just The Way It’s Always Been. That any time you’re in public, you’re presenting yourself and your body for attention. And my memories that it was ever any different were just false memories of a naive boy, in much the same way that I used to assume that when a movie showed a man and woman and faded to black, they were probably just kissing.

So funnily enough, it was re-watching Jaws in IMAX for its 50th anniversary that let me know it wasn’t just the Mandela Effect, and things did used to be different. That movie has plenty of scenes set on a beach, and seeing bare-chested middle-aged men having long conversations on a three-story-high screen reminded me that it really was treated as a complete non-issue. There are plenty of behind-the-scenes photos showing the crew and the director wearing nothing but cut-off jeans, and everybody understood that yeah, that’s what happens when you’re making a movie mostly set in the water. Roy Scheider seemingly ad-libs a joke about how hairy Richard Dreyfuss’s chest is!

Even the traditionally-attractive young people in Jaws aren’t treated as sex objects. I think the young woman at the beginning who’s the victim of the first boating accident is supposed to be at least a little bit late-70s titillating, which is part of what makes that scene so horrific. But the young man she intended to go skinny-dipping with is stripping on the beach before passing out, and I thought the vibe was very much “fun stuff that kids in the prime of their lives do” instead of overtly sexual.

A lot of the TV I grew up watching was absolutely intended to be as sexy as they could manage with network standards and practices in full effect. The super-tight pants that Ponch and Jon always wore. That weird basketball game on Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much every single thing on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Even at the time, it was obvious that they were all about suggesting the things that they couldn’t show outright on broadcast TV.

But now thanks to the internet, you’re never more than a few seconds away from seeing everything that was suggested, streaming in clear 4K video. So why does everybody still act like we’re all late-20th-century repressed, and everything has to be a naughty suggestion of something else?

Which means I’m back on my bullshit, insisting that the rise of the free and open internet hasn’t actually resulted in people being more free and open. It’s just made average people even more prudish and self-conscious, while the “I’m sexy and I know it” types get to go around with the same careless abandon they’ve always had. At least in the US; maybe it’s better in Europe, where people don’t tend to get so hung up about it?

Whatever the case, if we treat everything as an attempt to be sexy, then nothing really is. I feel like I should be in my prime years of not giving a damn, letting it all hang out without being paranoid it’s going to end up on some site for Hot Gay Grandpa Bears or something. Basically, when I’m looking for attention, you’ll know it. Otherwise, let’s all try to recreate the vibe of the 1970s instead of the 1870s.

And finally: even after all that preamble, I’m reluctant to post it, but it also feels like a cheat to mention a photo and leave it entirely up to the imagination. Besides, it feels like I should put my money where my mouth is and become the completely non-erotic change I want to see in the world. So here’s the photo that was apparently Too Hot For Instagram, of your author after enjoying a day at a water park, finally at 42 years old getting comfortable in his own imperfect body. Or posting an embarrassingly shameless thirst trap, I don’t know, it’s small, leave me alone.

Okay in retrospect maybe that’s a little too much of my nipples. Free them anyway!