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I Want Your Skull, I Need Your Skull
It's the general rule that every year in modern human history is remembered for something - a fad, a fashion movement, a musical genre, inevitably viewed as an embarrassment in the immediate future, and then embraced with a vehement nostalgia for all things retro ten or twenty years later. Nineteen sixty-nine was the summer of love; seventy-seven was, at least in the eyes of NME readers, the year that punk was born; twenty-ten, however, might best be remembered as the summer of stripping down to our sequined leotards, rolling around in our own shit and screaming “Look at me, I'm mad I am!” at the top of our rubberised, auto-tuned lungs.
In an age when the Western world's foremost pop star sports crip-drag crutches and a neck-brace as a means of publicising her banal, proto-Spears dance tracks about wanting to take a ride on your disco stick - whatever the cock that means - it's clear that the offbeat and uncanny is the new black in 2010. Particularly if, in the case of the image-sharing website Tumblr, you’re talking about the precise and stomach-churning shade of black last seen on a corpse that’s been charred in a house fire.
Recently, while researching a photographic project about the Enfield poltergeist case, I found myself tumbling down the darkest of internet rabbit holes, slamming up against imagery that would tax even the strongest constitutions time and time again like the proverbial brick wall. Prolapsed anuses in lurid close-up, the decapitated bodies of children, massive phalluses skewered like greying kebab meat and women eating their own vomit are de rigeur in these weirdly fashionable enclaves of the internet, and every time I clicked from one site to another I was confronted with more of the same. Simply from looking at the websites of a dozen or so disaffected hipsters, with names like Ketamine Rules! and Fuck My Glittery Arsehole, or something equally erudite and thought-provoking, I ended up being exposed to the kind of images which I would have hoped to go to my grave without seeing; I'm unsure, for instance, if I'll ever be able to close my eyes again without seeing an inverted image of a woman pushing a large plastic doll out of her vagina, detailed down to every stretched and purplish pore, swimming in front of my retinas. To put it bluntly; sure, sex sells, but sex with cripples, corpses and dominatrixes, sex with hookers in latex gimp masks and quadraplegics and non-consensual sex with attractive, barely-legal tit-monsters is a growing subsection of the internet's most valuable currency, and now, thanks to photo-sharing websites like tumblr, we're all fucking loaded! Wahey!
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this kind of imagery on Tumblr is the fact that, for the most part, it’s images of violence against young women being distributed by young women, many of them demonstrating a lack of human empathy as astounding as it is depressing. It’s possible that a select few of these individuals are working through issues of their own with these photographs – the majority, however, seem to be using these images as a means of trying on a persona, in the same way that The Craft launched a thousand pre-teen Wiccan ships in the nineties, bedecked in blue hair extensions and black panstick lipstick.
As pop acts like Rhianna and Lady Gaga adopt the mantle of eccentric outsider, or vinyl-clad fetish freak, Crowleyite gothic gloom is no longer pushing the boundaries far enough for the alienated, suburban teen, and the void needs to be filled with something else; where once a dog collar and a bottle of black Stargazer were enough to mark out a freakazoid from their more conventional peers, they’re now barely enough to mark them out from Katy Perry. And God knows, no-one wants to be mistaken for Katy Perry – even Katy Perry, one senses, is at least a little ashamed.
I couldn’t tell you why this has happened, but if I were a Daily Mail reader, or – God forbid – a shrill, middle-aged Tory, I might be tempted to say that it was the result of ultraviolent videogames, torture-porn films, the objectification of women in advertising, cinema and magazines, homosexual marriages, reality television, Lindsay Lohan, and illegal immigrants. Or maybe, if we’re to examine it rationally, there’s always been a market for disgusting shit amongst the under 20s, and the internet is simply helping it along, turning the whole world wide web into an enormous circle jerk of filth and gore, where everyone can easily trade the kind of pictures you’d have to swap for a couple of fags round the back of classroom 6B. Courtney Love’s ‘kinderwhore’ style, designed to make her look “like a fourteen-year-old battered rape victim”, as she told Vanity Fair in 1992, was hardly wholesome, and might have spawned a bigger fashion movement, if only she’d had the technology to back it up. Come to think of it, fifteen years ago, we probably would all have just blamed Marilyn Manson.
It was a simpler time.
Philippa Snow