Nobody talks about what they look like after sex and for a lot of people it remains a mystery. Until now. In accordance with the latest trend to emerge on Instagram, you post a selfie and tag it #aftersex, so the internet can admire your post-coital glow.
What's striking is that the pictures uploaded aren't poised snapshots of a couple sparking up a shared fag in an artfully rumpled bed, or of tangled naked limbs. This isn't the sort of cliched aftermath imagery we're inured to. They are real couples looking a bit flushed, glasses askew and grinning, having just had a great time. And for this reason, they feel even more deviant than the grottiest stuff you can dig up online.
We live in a porn culture, a sexed-up hyper-reality where everyone's either at it or talking about it.
But the sex that infuses our everyday life is, for all that it might be more graphic and readily available than ever before, a stylised and sanitised version of something far more intimate. The people putting their names, faces and other bodily parts to it are celebrities and sex workers, actors even.
The after-sex selfie taken by Just Finished of Wolverhampton and Rolled Over of Newmarket is something rather different. It isn't sexy, for one, and it's a crashing intrusion on the one – perhaps the greatest – frail intimacy left to us in a world where everything must be publicly uploaded to a digital timeline just to prove that we've done it.
The after-sex selfie isn't like the hipster who Instagrams his burger because it looks cooler and more expensive than yours. It isn't even born of that sort of centre-of-the-universe self-importance that social media so often breeds. Rather, it's just a smartphone-era reflex that costs us all a bit of our innocence in its knee-jerk thoughtlessness.
It's breaking the last taboo, if you will, to share the moment when it's done, successfully or not (let's be realistic here), that you and another person own between you. That moment, whether you nuzzle or not, whether you even like each other or not, whether you're about to put your tights back on and walk straight out, is the absolute peak of intimacy.
So to go public with it is a betrayal not just of the person next to you mopping their brow, but of everyone who ever enjoyed getting their breath back and patting down their bird's nest hair. There's no point breaking boundaries if all you're actually doing is breaking the thing itself.
WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT!
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