I enjoy taking photos of myself sometimes. It’s not a big confession, or a surprising one for anyone who follows me on Instagram, (psst – follow me on Instagram!), but society will try and make me feel bad for it anyway. In May this year, when the results of a ‘selfie study’ conducted by cosmetics company Feel Unique were released, the ever-progressive mainstream media lapped them up gleefully, letting us all know that yet again, us pumpkin-spice drinking, ugg-wearing, twerking millennial women had dared to step out of line. It seems that some of us – the shame of it! – are happy, confident even, in the way we look and will spend a good amount of time looking down a camera lens as a result of this. We were branded self-obsessed. To that I say, so what?

For centuries, misogynistic ideology has determined what women ‘obsess’ over, (looking for men, looking nice for men, marrying men, cooking for men, cleaning for men, birthing the future generation of men, and the women who’ll cater for them), so after that, isn’t it time we afford ourselves a little recognition? When I take a photo of myself and post it online, it is not because I only care about my appearance, or even because I think anybody else will particularly care about my appearance, it is because on that day, at that time, I felt happy with the way I looked.

We’re living in a society where eating disorders and cosmetic surgery rates are forever increasing, so isn’t the fact that young women are becoming confident enough in their aesthetics to take and share so many pictures a good thing? Isn’t it time, after seeing image upon image of men throughout history, from the oil painting to great big phallic sculptures, to high definition photographs, that we begin to even the score? I say, in a world where girls are socialised from birth to find fault with the way they look, thank God for selfie culture.

Now, I’m not saying that selfie-culture is without fault. Australian ‘Instagram star’ Essena O’Neill created international news this year when she deleted a large number of her posts online, changing the captions on remaining photos to reveal how she had manipulated the image to ensure maximum ‘like’ appeal. Her Instagram biography now reads ‘Social Media is NOT real life’. And she has a point. Online, images are easy to manipulate; the right lighting, filters, and version of Photoshop mean anyone can pull a Kim K and break the internet, and that means that on social media platforms, so-called imperfections do not exist. Freckles are erased, thigh gaps are created, lips are plumped, and My God is skin whitened. The link between selfies and social media is an innate one, but one that sees what was an expression of self-love and confidence, become an incessant search for more likes, retweets, reblogs, and followers. You begin to project the anxieties that weren’t present when you took photos, back onto the image, questioning whether the reason you’ve only got eleven likes and your partner’s ex has got three hundred, is because of your awful teeth. The same sexist thoughts that have influenced how we feel about our appearance in the past, creep back up on us, and self-expression becomes a repetition of the same airbrushed stuff that’s always been churned out.

Luckily, there are two solutions in balancing the self-confidence of selfie culture, with the toxicity of social media syndrome. Firstly, let’s all stop lying; love yourself, and love your selfies, but if you’ve spent forty-five minutes trying to find the right angle, lighting, map coordinates, and room temperature, (kudos to you, girl!), please let us know. I don’t care if you hashtag your picture #somanyfilters; we all want to feel confident, so don’t let us feel bad for not being able to replicate a look that’s fake in the first place.

Secondarily, spread the love! For every like you receive on a selfie, you go like somebody else’s – tell them you love their lipstick in this picture, that their eyebrows are on fleek in that picture, that their outfit is banging in another! Spread the self-love and spread the confidence!