Gay Stuff : Instahunks

Millennials often get told that they are a self-centered generation, and sometimes one is tempted to think that maybe they are just that.

Instagram, after all, enjoys a whopping 300 million users, and has spawned the Instahunks — attractive young men who have parlayed their good looks and social media notoriety into stepping stones into the more mainstream sections of the entertainment and fashion industry.

Take, for instance, gay Instagram stars Kyle Krieger and Max Emerson. The pair have successfully leveraged having more than a million Instagram followers between the two of them to a nascent multi-platform career. Both Krieger and Emerson have Youtube channels whose subscribers collectively amount to more than a hundred thousand, with guest appearances by celebrities like Olympian Gus Kenworthy, actor Nico Tortorella, and Rupaul’s Drag Race alums Willam Belli and Bianca del Rio.

Beyond the online sphere, Krieger has given a TED Talk on addiction and growing up gay, while Emerson has successfully crowdfunded a movie about homeless LGBT youth called “Hooked”. Emerson has even had appearances on TV shows like Glee and Violet.

With such arguably successful careers outside of social media, it’s no wonder that millennials are turning to these apps to jumpstart a career, with no small amount of validation on the side as well. With these facts on hand, it seems like a rhetorical question to ask if social media has turned us all to narcissists. But as it turns out, there has been a quantifiable increase in narcissistic personality traits “from the 1980s to the present.”

As Zoe Williams writes in The Guardian, quoting a study conducted by American academics and “The Narcissism Epidemic” authors Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, “narcissistic traits afflict almost 10% of people in their 20s, compared with 3% of people in their 60s.”

While Twenge and Campbell say that a case can’t be made to point at social media as the cause of the rise in narcissistic personality traits, they do point out that social media does attract people who already exhibit those traits: “We can’t make the case definitively that social media causes narcissism, although it does certainly call for a certain type of attention-seeking. If you look at Twitter, and the quest for followers, that has a narcissistic ring to it.”

However, there are those who argue the opposite. Jia Tolentino’s article on The New Yorker dissects Kristin Dombek’s “The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism”. Tolentino points out that Dombek’s tracing of the history of the narcissism diagnosis “have shifted, and will continue to shift, ‘according to who’s got the power of diagnosis.’” In short, by the time today’s millennials reach middle age, they’ll probably be calling whatever follows after them as self-absorbed narcissists.

Where do you stand on narcissism in today’s generation? Do you think social media has played a hand in its rise? Share your thoughts in the comments section below, and don’t forget to follow me on Instagram at @DavLesage and also A4A Instagram account, @adam4adam_official as well!