The Airportline: Observations

These are narcissistic times. Or so people say. It's all about 'me' and this trend is supposedly magnified by the existence of self-affirming communicative tools such as Facebook and Twitter where everything one person does is documented in various tedious updates. Fashion blogs are mushrooming left and right while people are taking pictures of themselves and putting online with 'today's outfit.' Whatever the reasons are, this 'trend' which several 'trendspotters' and 'columnists' have written about 'in the media' the last couple of years is always framed as something new. As if people in the past were unconcerned with the 'self' and only focused on, oh I don't know, gardening? In these narcissistic times it is comforting to know that this focus on the 'bodily self' (as Joyce Carol Oates puts it) is nothing new. In an entry dated November 20th, 1976 Joyce Carol Oates reads two psychology magazines and notes that:
'I came away fascinated by the emphasis placed now on the self, not the "self" in personality so much as in terms of the body. Narcissism: Giving people instructions in self-love, as if they really need it rather than instructions in the love of others/.../What does it matter if the world is disintegrating, if people are starving to death, so long as industrious young women with subscriptions to Ms. learn how to induce physical spasms in their bodies... and declare their gleeful independence of men. (The Journal Of Joyce Carol Oates 1973 - 1982 p. 149)

Narcissism and the independence of women. It's like 1976 never left!