News.com.au columnist Angela Mollard has had it up to here with your pouty selfies, ladies.
In an opinion piece titled ‘It’s time to get rid of porn face and bring back the smile’, Mollard criticised the rise of “the face pose which effectively makes them [women of Instagram] look like they’re trying to simulate an orgasm having taken a handful of Valium.”
jesus kylie ENOUGH!!!!1!!
In short, it’s the written equivalent of a bluetooth headphone-wearing businessman on a train asking you to crack a smile, sweetheart.
She writes:
“Dull-eyed, mouth slightly parted, chin tilted back and with lips as plumped as a whoopee cushion, they look as empowered and appealing as a blow-up doll.”
While the visual Mollard paints of the pose is pretty spot on, her sentiment is all wrong. Conflating a fashionable aesthetic with a lack of empowerment misses the money shot, and dare I say it, is a hot load of spoof.
“As columnist Sarah Vine, writing in the Daily Mail, points out: “Pornography has already corrupted the normal perception of women’s bodies. Now, it has extended its toxic aesthetic to our facial features.”
It would seem all irony is lost on old mate who did just earnestly pull a quote from the Daily Mail, a publication which exists solely to shit on women, to support her point.
What Mollard fails to realise is that for a lot of young people, myself included, Instagram is a platform where we can be free to express ourselves on our own terms. Whether you post dumb videos of your father blowing up a condom on his head, or a sexy belfie, it’s your choice. There’s nothing subservient about that.
While I do agree that the current trend of pouty selfies is probably a phase we’ll be embarrassed by in 2026 in the same way the angular digital camera selfies of Myspace are now tragic, they’re not the end to modern feminism Mollard’s making them out to be.
“Porn face is not empowering. It doesn’t say “I own my life”. Rather, it’s the miserable manifestation of a world obsessed with what it looks like rather than a world intent on living.”
Dunno about you but I have a sneaking suspicion the Kardashians aren’t sitting in a room somewhere violently sobbing about the $122 million they collectively banked this year with thanks to their fire selfies.
Mollard concludes her hot take with a call to action:
“It’s time we brought back the smile.”
For who? What exactly is empowering about ‘cracking a smile’ for the sake of appeasing others? Sounds a little like an imposition on women; the kind of imposition the columnist is fervently against.
Finally, there’s a big, throbbing question I have been aching to ask from the moment I read the headline of the piece.
Angela Mollard, have you ever watched porn? ‘Cause in my experience an orgasm face usually looks a little more like this:
Photo: @haileybaldwin / Instagram.
Source: News.com.au.
