I don't want to link to anything specific for this post.

I just want to observe that stories about young women getting killed are now — almost always, it seems — illustrated by a selfie. You see the smiling-while-pursed lips, the carefully lowered chin, the raised eyebrows, the widened eyes that you know are gazing (judgmentally) into themselves. The attributes of the selfie inspire complex emotions — admiration, mockery, revulsion, desire — even when the person in the photograph is not dead. It's hard even to understand what you feel when the story is that a young person has died and here is that person, represented by a stereotypical selfie.

Before selfies became the stock representation of a young human being, stories of untimely death were illustrated by photographs in which the dead person looks truly young. We saw pictures perhaps from a family's photo album. The girlish toothy smiling seemed to express what parents and friends said about her: She was so happy, so loved. In those old pictures, lips are never arranged into that pursed smile that expresses nothing but an awareness that women who can get their mouth into the position are considered sexually desirable.