Trigger warning for disordered eating.

The art of the ‘thirst-trap’ photo is learnt almost entirely by trial and error. Figuring out the ways in which you feel sexy is something that makes many people uncomfortable. Thirst traps are an ever-evolving photography category and cannot be defined as one thing. Whether it’s a full-frontal nude in one of those 70s circular mirrors or an office photo-shoot in your favourite power suit, a thirst trap is what you define it to be.

The bodies and sexualities of marginalised genders have for so long been the site of a power struggle between the patriarchy/the male gaze/ableism/racism/fatphobia/homophobia and white feminism. Great power lies with us taking control of our sexuality and expressing it: enter the thirst trap. Now, if you want to go for a traditional thirst trap, here are some tips and tricks:

Be alone

Do it in a space where you’re not nervous that someone will walk in on you. Somewhere you feel safe and secure.

Put some sexy music on

I know it’s a photo shoot, so they won't know if you’re playing music. But playing music that makes you feel sexy or even relaxed will help you be more comfortable.

Lighting lighting lighting

Warm, dim lighting is a classic. And for a good reason – it's sexy lighting. Maybe this relates to our caveman brains thinking back to when it was safe to have sex (at night in a cave with a fire). If you don’t have the colour-changing lights that all of Gen Z have, this kind of lighting can be achieved by taking pics at dusk/dawn or candlelight.

Wear something that feels sexy

Anything can be sexy, just move around and do what feels good. It doesn’t have to be revealing; it just has to be something you feel sexy in. If you feel sexy in a sundress, try sitting back while kneeling and pulling a part of the hem of your dress up a little. If you’re wearing jeans, try putting your phone at a low angle, putting one leg back and looking over your shoulder.

Do a burst capture or a video

While moving and trying different poses, set your phone to video or a burst capture, then go through and find poses that make you feel sexy, and recreate those.

So you wanna be naked?

First of all – AMAZING, GO YOU!! Nude thirst traps are all about the angle and movements of your body. I think there’s nothing sexier than the curves and twists of a human body, so don’t just stand straight up and down – move, twist, turn. The best way to figure out what you like is to experiment.

Try sitting while kneeling facing away from the mirror and then turning the top half of your body towards the mirror for a mirror selfie.

Try lying down on your stomach, bringing one leg across your body with your knee bent, and then twisting your top half the opposite way to your leg to take a pic with your butt in the foreground.

If you set the timer on your camera, move away so your body is in the frame, turn away from the camera and run your hand through your hair.

Sitting down cross-legged with your side profile facing the camera, move the leg closest to the camera up to form a triangle with your leg and the floor, lay your arm across your leg and relax your hand slightly.

Reflect

Now that you’ve taken the thirst trap, take some time to sit with it and reflect on how the experience and the picture itself makes you feel. What parts did you enjoy? What felt empowering? What felt intimidating? How do you feel about the end result? Remember that this is all about your autonomy over your own body and its story, so tell it however you want. – AM

Faith Wilson

I took these photos and posted them on my personal Instagram account a few weeks ago. As much as I am an attention seeker in pretty much most aspects of my life, I’m a little shy when it comes to showing my body. Or maybe shy isn’t quite the word for it… it’s probably more akin to most-times-I-see-photos-of-my-body-I-want-to-cry-because-I-feel-so-shit-about-myself. Like many women I know, I’ve struggled with body image teko since I was a wee lass, and suffered through a gnarly eating disorder for about a decade. Although I’ve stopped the eating-disorder behaviours for a good while now, the ghouls of self-hatred and body dysmorphia have hung about like the last desperate frothers at a party.

Over the past year or so I’ve been trying to change the way I speak to myself – that inner voice is a cruel bitch – and employing all the corny but beautiful mantras about being kinder to myself, not berating myself for responding to my body’s natural desire to just eat, allowing my body to simply exist. I took these photos on a day where I wouldn’t say I was feeling super sexy, but I felt okay with myself. Baggy undies, beachy hair, soft puku. I’ll work on sexy. For now I’m happy with accepting my body for the things it does, treating it with the respect it deserves, and whispering sweet nothings to my belly rolls, knock knees and cellulite.

Nuanzhi Zheng

For a myriad of predictable and frankly dull reasons, posting thirst traps hasn’t been on my agenda and I’m fucked off about it! Time in my hot years has been wasted on proving I’m ‘not like other girls’, when I could’ve just been looking hot and not giving a fuck! If the slut-shaming adage is anything to go by, I hope my future children see this and go DAMN mommy was giving!

I write with respect: Of course, of course I’m still working towards body neutrality. I’m reminded of body neutrality every time I watch myself in the bathroom mirror after a poorly timed coffee. Yes, my body is a flesh doughnut, a sentient tube that masticates, masturbates, and can’t handle a humble bean. Body positivity is a high that is difficult to reach when your Mercury is in Virgo and you just aren’t feeling it.

But sometimes, fuck it! When the sun hits just right and your skin is clear and you’re hydrated, why not feel a little good? Why not feel good as a treat?

I spend some time seeing myself from the outside, through an imagined voyeur. Is the way I’m eating fruit sexy? Is this nosebleed gushing? My past thirst traps have been stealthy, never sexy. I am reading, I am at a thing, I am having the best time and you WISH you were here! I am engaging in your interests without you and I am begging you to see my story, cross-posted on the Metaverse for your convenience. The assimilation narrative (that bores me to talk about, and bores me to experience it) has, in the past, turned attempts at sexiness into feeling like an objectified hot-dog bun. My wretched personality was the only good thing I thought I could offer, and that still wasn’t enough. How could I be content when I’d convinced myself I was completely unworthy of beauty? And now, I hate that I have to disclaim I have felt bad about myself for most of my life to make it okay that I feel good.

Anyway, I’m exiting my Sally Rooney era. I’m sleeping eight hours a night, eating three meals a day, taking slutty thirst traps whenever.

Ataria Sharman

When I was younger I freely posted photos of myself on social media. I made money from promotional work and used my looks to sell brands and products. This in turn paid for more beauty products, clothing and makeup – a self-deprecating cycle. I did it to be like the girls in the magazines, to impress ex-boyfriends. I did it to be cool. At that time in my life, the fear of being uncool was greater than the fear of sharing myself online. Now that I no longer fear being uncool, I fear taking photos of myself.

A traumatic moment for me was in high school. I’ve always been quite small, with large breasts that come from the Māori side of my whakapapa. My aunties, cousins and sisters, we’re short, relatively slight, and have big boobs. We didn’t ask for it, it’s just in our genetics and a part of who we are. I found out one day at school that the boys had started calling me ‘Titties’ instead of Ataria. It felt like my breasts had been cut off from my body, I was no longer a whole human being.

Since then, I’ve covered up my breasts – I feel whakamā about them. When I wear a singlet top I get stared at by men (not my face!). I wish I could say that I don’t care, but I do, it makes me angry that wearing a certain type of top attracts unwanted attention. I wish I was more like the group of young women who sat behind me on a beach in Biàrritz in France, topless and totally unworried about it. I wish I could be carefree in front of a camera and not care what others think of my looks and body. I feel grief that sometimes breastfeeding women are verbally abused in our cafés. So here I am, in solidarity with breasts everywhere.

Ana McAllister

For centuries we have been portrayed as looking vaguely off into the distance, or with our back turned, or our head not included at all. Our gaze never allowed to meet with yours. But enough is enough. I know you’re looking at me and I want you to know, I am looking right back at you.

There are certain power dynamics at play in these kinds of interactions. If I’m not looking at you, then you have more power than me, I am at the whim of your gaze and desires. You hold power over me and my body. This is a power I hand over to few people. It’s an honour to hold this power, it may be one of the greatest honours of your life.

For everyone else, I look directly into your eyes. I see you watching me, but really this encounter is more a reflection of your wants and desires than mine. Your eyes will naturally trace the curves and lines of my body, but always return to my eyes. And there’s a power in that which I hold so dear against my chest, a power that stands secure in my whakapapa of sexuality.

So when taking thirst traps, I always stare directly down the barrel of the camera.

Feature image: Nuanzhi Zheng 郑暖之。