Selfie Takers Are More Likely To Be Male, And It’s Really Not That Close

The selfie rose to prominence on the backs of Facebook and higher quality phone cameras, but for the longest time, I just assumed it was a woman thing.

Why the sexist assumption?

Two words: the duckface selfie. I couldn’t separate the two after years of online dating and seeing one of these monstrosities pop up on the Facebook feed of every girl I went out with through my twenties.

I failed to realize there are all types of selfies, and that men do it more than women — a lot more, according to a new study.

Salon reports that men are twice as likely to stop for some selfies than women are, and that’s in spite of the “fact” that the “most well-known selfie-taker in the world” is actually Kim Kardashian.

The results come by way of HTC, one of the companies in the smartphone manufacturing and branding game. HTC took a sample of 2,000 people in the U.K., ages 18 to 30, and discovered that a quarter of men polled “share selfies to make current or previous partners jealous, and one in ten did it to make themselves more desirable to potential partners,” the Telegraph notes.

Worse yet for men is the finding that half the amount of women take selfies to make exes or partners jealous (just 13 percent), and only one in 15 (7 percent) take pictures to make themselves more desirable to potential partners.

“The main reason women take selfies is to share what they’re doing with friends (35 percent) and to record memories (26 percent). But men and women are equally as likely to share selfies to show off (19 percent). As well as taking more selfies, men are far more likely to show off their bodies than women – three quarters (76 percent) of male selfies are shots of their body, compared to less than half of womens’ (45 percent).”

Still not depressed to be a guy at this point? Well, here’s another factoid you might find interesting. Men on average post five or more selfies per week.

Salon editor Jenny Kutner found the differences in reasons for posting a selfie particularly fascinating.

“While the practice of taking selfies is often judged for its inherent vanity, it seems that that isn’t so much what drives women to post their images online — but it’s a key motivator for their male counterparts. The findings also make one (OK, me) wonder why women are less likely to post images of their bodies — might it be because they’re much more likely to face some sort of slut-shaming?”

Who knows, Jenny? One thing is for sure, though. Selfies have inspired more plastic surgery — an unlikely detail the Inquisitr reported on in November, 2014.

That’s something everyone can be proud of.

[Image via Flickr Creative Commons]