It is rare, in our culture of airbrushed magazine covers and acutely calculated advertising, to come across an image so brutally honest it implores us to take a good look at ourselves. On Friday, just such a thing occurred. Suddenly and without warning, we were presented with a visual distillation of obsessive smartphone culture, a succinct comment on online addiction and brand idolatry which was at once gruesome and profound. Or maybe somebody just dropped a phone.
The image in question – as you can see – is of a 16-year-old girl firmly wedged in a roadside drain, her blonde hair falling in perfect ringlets down to the tarmac she's resting her elbows on. It's difficult to imagine a more enjoyable end of the week news story; a grinning VIZ cartoon come to life, which gets funnier as you find out more about it.
We learn that the girl, now named as Ella Birchenough, is laughing as two firemen struggle to hoist her out of the tiny rectangular drain; and that it was her mum who took and uploaded the picture; and, most brilliantly, that it was trying to reach her dropped iPhone with her toes that got her wedged in there in the first place.
How apt that such a remarkable effort to retrieve her connection to Twitter, Facebook and all the viral stories she simply couldn't afford to miss out on landed Ella belly-deep in her very own meme.
This sheer determination to reclaim her lost device and change her status to "online" once again saw her haul up a 3st drain cover in order to slither her body below ground. It's at once utterly stupid, impressively tenacious and, let's be honest, all too understandable for those of us who can't go five minutes without refreshing our emails because the automatic check every 15 minutes just isn't frequent enough.
A compulsion to engage constantly with new information affects more than just the Snapchatting 16-year-olds of the world. I'm in my mid-20s and I'm absolutely guilty of scrolling thoughtlessly through streams of Instagram, Twitter and image-sharing sites such as Imgur just to make sure I'm "up to date". Being disconnected from our online routines and communities is something an increasing number of people would find incredibly difficult.
"What could possibly possess a person to lodge themselves into a drain for an iPhone?" the world guffaws, as we all unconsciously click "share" and send the picture to everyone we know. So many of us are in thrall to the little screens in our pockets, obsessed with the idea that we might miss out on some Very Important Global Joke. So what happens at the prospect of losing our grip on it all? Well, common sense is the first thing to hoist itself gently down the drain, followed closely by Ella Birchenough. Then it's our turn.
End the clamour for 'glamour'
Last week, the publisher of Nuts magazine announced that it was on its last legs, though legs have never been the chief attraction. After a decade of providing the nation's nipple-hungry with middle-shelf nudity, it seems that lads' mags in general are on their way out. I'm not sure how many will miss Nuts or have even read it in the last five years since the internet (and HBO, and advertising and, well, everything) made female nudity freely accessible and relieved the viewer of the fear of bumping into their mother in the newsagents.
But with the decline of the lads' mag comes another, perhaps more interesting problem: how on earth are sections of the media going to demean young women? I'm not talking about the graphic, photoshopped imagery. I'm talking about this country's love of easily categorising teenage girls: there's an oft-quoted statistic, perhaps never an entirely credible one, released at the height of the careers of Jordan, Jodie and Abi in 2005, which claimed that 63% of 15- to 19-year-old girls in this country would rather be a glamour model than a doctor.
"What a wonderfully damning portrait of the youth of this country," was the cackle from some quarters, complete with headlines about teenagers aspiring to little more than baby oil, thongs and a Premier League footballer. I was 15 at the time and somehow wholly uninterested in glamour modelling. It felt strange and actually quite embarrassing to learn of the hidden 63% of me apparently desperate to shake my body at strangers.
While "glamour" modelling now feels like some relic of the quaint, pre-internet age of titilation, there remains a definite stigma against young sexualised women. If you wear hair extensions and fake eyelashes and, God forbid, a padded bra, chances are some people are going to assume you're desperate to show them your breasts.
So, with the passing of this glam platform, how else can we condemn the preened, young (mostly working-class) women of this country? Perhaps some more dubious stats about girls wanting to be, say, porn stars when they grow up? Or here's another idea: how about stopping the scaremongering entirely? As glamour modelling dies a quiet, modest death, so, too, perhaps will this stigma against our young women.
