No, your selfie won’t change the world

A WEEK is a long time on Instagram. Could it have been only last weekend my feed was suddenly overrun by attractive black and white selfies of women accompanied by #challengeaccepted, a list of other women’s names and usually some kind of female empowerment message? Now the backlash has begun.

I couldn’t work out what on earth was going on until I read a post explaining how this challenge was in support of a young Turkish woman, Pinar Gultekin, allegedly murdered by her boyfriend.

Her friends had used this hashtag chain to raise awareness of the country’s appalling rate of femicide. But that message quickly got lost and hardly any of the women posting last week had the slightest inkling of this tragedy, illustrating the vapidity and confusion of Instagram movements.

Nowadays the social pressure to take part is tremendous, even for a tough broad like me.

Should I risk offending the women who nominate me by not joining in? Am I dissing the sisterhood?

Likewise when the black square took over Instagram in support of Black Lives Matter, was I going to be called out as racist if I didn’t follow suit?

In the event, and apologies to those who invited me, I decided to hold off #challengeaccepted because, really, is posting a picture I like of myself the best way I can help tackle violent domestic abuse?

Shouldn’t there have been at least a link to donate to women’s refuges? And when posting the black square back in May (which I did), was I really making an intelligent contribution to fighting racism – or sheepishly succumbing to gesture politics?