Facebook bikini pics

A female Vietnamese friend recently returned from the beach.

I know this because she has posted several pictures of herself on Facebook. In the vast majority she is posing, for the want of a better word “provocatively”, in a bikini. These are not pics where she’s been snapped taking a swim, they’re reclining pouty shots.

A respectable lady in her mid twenties. She’s well educated and has a good job. I am guessing that many of the people she is friends with on Facebook are, like me, work associates.

More interested in the why of it, than the subject matter, I sent the link to a mutual female friend who has worked here a while.

I thought she’d give me a forthright view.

She didn’t disappoint:

Where I work every employee has a photo of themselves as their background.

Have you ever been on holiday with a big group of Vietnamese? All they do is take photos of themselves. Even really shy, normal balanced ones start bending over like Readers’ Wives Do Cao Bang every time they see a new rock, tree or piece of ground.

But why?

A little discussion later and we agreed that this wasn’t to impress people of the opposite sex. It wasn’t a proud-of-your-body/girl power thing either.

This, we decided, was just what young Vietnamese women do when they see a camera. They don’t take pictures because they are at the beach. They go to the beach because they want to take pictures.

Taking photos is an obsession further fuelled by the growth of social media and mobile phone cameras. Also by Vietnam’s so-called internet “hot girls” and the media’s endless obsession with beauty pageants.

It’s also a culture where, by sheer weight of numbers, the young have more power to shape societal norms than virtually anywhere else in the world.

It’s yet another factor to chuck into the mix when absolutely failing to come up with any precitions as to just what Vietnam will turn into.

This country moves just too fast to pin down.