By Mr. Newman
THE SLANG:
“Thirst Trap”
THE STORY:
Last week, I shared a New Yorker magazine story with my newspaper class titled, “The Best Thirst Traps Money Can Buy.” The subheader read: “David Suh’s high-end photo shoots are like a modern-day Sears Portrait Studio, except a session costs eight thousand dollars.”
Before we actually went through the story, I asked the class if they knew what thirst traps were. I don’t use any social media, so when the students all laughed knowingly, I felt the way I always do when a social media trend makes its way to me via a New Yorker or New York Times article: old.
Beza Kifle and Keya Nijhawan were my main instructors. They said a thirst trap was a video or picture that “overexaggerates someone’s attractiveness, in order to boost their ego.” They gave an example of a “dude with red LED lights…his camera is held out below him and he is looking up in order to emphasize his jawline.” Olivia Janis demonstrated, leaning dramatically with one arm against the wall. As for the girl version of this? Olivia said she is probably “touching her hair a lot and posing.”
It’s perhaps unfair to blame someone for wanting to show the best version of themselves on social media, or even just in the family photo album, but I get the sense that it’s the desperation of thirst traps–the try-hard nature of them–that disturbs my students, who seem to feel a mixture of embarrassment, pity, and disdain for those who post them. The article about the photographer David Suh cites a post he made on Instagram that said, “Do you ever want to post a thirst trap but don’t want it to be too thirst trappy?”
With all of the effort going into these acts of self-promotion, I wondered if it was possible that some people’s thirst traps were intended to be ironic. Were the people setting the traps aware of their own vanity driving them to do it? “Sometimes,” my students agreed. Olivia said a girl might caption a TikTok: “Felt cute, might delete later.” She paused, then added, “But they never delete it.”
THE RESEARCH:
According to Merriam-Webster, a thirst trap is “a photograph (such as a selfie) or video shared for the purpose of attracting attention or desire.” In a 2018 NPR story titled, “‘Thirst Trap’ Enters The Lexicon,” Peter Sokolowski, an editor at Merriam-Webster, points out that the word thirsty has long connoted desire, especially in a religious sense–”you know, thirsty for salvation, thirsty for knowledge of God.” He says, “Thirst is physical. It’s elemental. It’s among the most basic of human needs.” He notes that thirst traps started popping up on Twitter and Urban Dictionary in 2011, just as Instagram, Snapchat and dating apps like Tinder were becoming more popular and capitalizing on that basic human need.
If the first definition of thirst trap is a photographic or video representation of something intended to attract, the second definition in the dictionary is “someone or something that attracts attention or desire.” Who wouldn’t want to be someone who attracts attention or desire by simply existing and walking around in the world? But what about the people who, consciously or not, believe they aren’t worthy of attention or desire? Those red-LEDs and “felt cute” messages might be cringey and self-serving, but perhaps there is also a poignancy to people putting in a little (or a lot of) extra work to be seen in a world where likes and follows are the volatile, often elusive currency of desire.
As always, your usage may vary.
