I am a contract writer for a media company, and almost every day they post assignments on their bulletin board that are for the taking. They are mainly clickbait type of material, articles that are not based on solid facts, but just clickable stories (things like the benefits of coconut oil, the biggest celebrity houses, the worst celebrity haircuts to date). I don’t really care. I guess there is a part of my that does not like perpetuating nonsense, cluttering the internet with semi true to false to completely unimportant articles, but I have to get paid somehow, because so far, poetry and even my other serious writing hasn’t paid much of the bills.
Instagram: sexygirls.xo
Yesterday, there was a higher paying article available about yoga pants. Well, it wasn’t really about yoga pants so much as making an image-based list of girls looking hot in yoga pants. Normally, this is not the type of article I pick up, but it seemed easy enough. And it was. The hardest part was accurately crediting where the pics came from, because often times Instagram pics tagged something like hotyogaass are from an alternate source, not the original chica that posted it, and if I can find the original source, I must.
Actually, I’m going to take that back. The hardest part was writing 50 word blurbs for each picture. I don’t want to sound elitist or above anything, but I have never had to dumb down my writing (and thus my mind while writing it) as much as I had to for this article. How many different ways can a person say something about how hot a girl with a poppin’ booty looks in her yoga pants? There was some creativity involved in looking for various ways to essentially say the same thing, or looking for something new to say in a photo that is void of anything but hot yoga ass, but pretty much, afterward, I felt like my mind was a jiggling slab of jello, nothing like any of the asses I was seeing, that's for sure.
Instagram: sommerray
Instagram: alexastancofit
What does that mean for me exactly? Are some people better at dumbing down their mind and their writing for the masses? For instance, take someone like Margaret Atwood, in my opinion a brilliant literary writer whose novels are masterpieces. Then take Dan Brown. I’m sure everyone knows who he is, but in my opinion, his writing is not good. His stories are good, but the writing and the ideas are not philosophical in any way, and they don’t cause a person to see the world in a new and interesting way. His books are entirely plot-based, with little to no character development. They’re like watching a shallow action movie. There is obviously a place in the world for this, and the fact that these types of books are easy to read does not make them bad simply for the easiness. I guess what I am saying is that I wonder if Dan Brown is actually a literary writer at heart who changed his methods in order to make money, and if so, did he stop writing his real stuff because it just takes up all his time and energy to write the other stuff and the rest of the time he just wants to chill? These are the questions I ask myself when I write the clickbait articles, making sure not to use words that are too big or phrasing that is not ridiculously simple.
It also occurred to me to be bothered by the fact that mindlessly scrolling through photos of girls in yoga pants, as the title promised, could get a person through the day, but I try not to judge. There is some artful aesthetic in the female form, after all, and it isn’t for me to say that the people looking at the photos will be objectifying the women so much as admiring their lovely shape and the way it makes them feel. Still, I wondered, and am still wondering, why were my 50 word blurbs after each photo necessary? Is anyone actually going to read them? That’s not really the point, is it? It would have been another matter if the job was to critically analyze the composition of the photos, or even comment on their artful craftsmanship both by model and photographer, but that wasn’t the game I was playing either.
I will say that in scrolling through Instagram looking for the perfect booties in yoga pants, I saw a whole lot of excellent yoga Instagram accounts. Still, many of the best yogis out there don’t have the kind of ass this website was looking for. This one did, but this was the only one I really found:
Instagram: yogainspiration
The majority of yogis I saw (at least the ones posting) tended to have tight but tiny butts. For instance:
Instagram: maritjolien
I was also pleasantly surprised by the amount of overweight women posting their yoga routines. I hate that the media makes fat people feel bad about their bodies so much that they are ashamed to post their lives just like everyone else, so it was positive for me to see that that might be changing, at least a little bit.
Instagram: queencurvyelyse
In the end, writing these kind of clickbait articles for a living, it really just has to be the way it is for now. I need the money, and a temporary jello state of mind is ok, because my normal writer’s brain kicks back in eventually. At least this time, I got some cool yoga art to look at in the process :)