I dislike many things about influencer culture: its relationship to overconsumption; how it typifies and disseminates impossible beauty standards; undisclosed advertising, conspicuous wealth, manufactured intimacy, and the increasingly blurry line between sharing a life and selling one—to name a few. And I say all that as someone who, by many definitions, is an influencer myself.
Yet the recent swirl of negative discourse around influencer culture has felt different, in part because hating influencers is no longer just a snarky internet pastime. Increasingly, it seems like a culturally sanctioned position, from Nantucket’s “No influencers” sign to the backlash to the social-media-fueled crowds descending on the Dolomites to podcasters—very much influencers themselves—declaring influencers are ruining everything.
Of course, the influencers have fired back. One particular take—“I think hating influencers has become a socially acceptable way to hate women”—has sparked a viral debate, with many of my friends and peers in the industry liking the video and commenting in support. My own immediate reaction was, Fuck yeah. But then I felt weird about it. Let’s get something out of the way: Influencers are not an oppressed or marginalized class.
Influencers come in all races, ages, socioeconomic
Influencers come in all races, ages, socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, genders, and occupations. Still, the archetypal influencer in our cultural imagination is not a man reviewing watches on YouTube or hosting a podcast from his studio in Austin. It’s a woman—probably young, attractive, interested in fashion or beauty, taking selfies or talking to the camera, selling you something.
And the characteristics we find so intolerable about her are also remarkably familiar. She is vain. She is materialistic. But above all she is embarrassingly convinced that she deserves to be looked at. None of these ideas were invented by Instagram or by women alone; the concept of the attention economy dates to the early 1970s, and the notion that no press is bad press has existed since the 19th century.
The only difference now is that social media has made it so easy for virtually anyone to turn their own life into a small business. As a result, once again, all kinds of influencers exist: middle-aged mothers, outdoorsmen, children, farmers. I’m pretty sure there is an influencer in every industry, every field, every niche out there. What is also relatively new is that these platforms have allowed women to turn the very things they have historically been mocked for caring about or forced to perform—clothes, beauty, decorating, cooking, relationships, motherhood—into extraordinarily lucrative businesses without waiting for some institution to decide they are worthy of an audience.
That doesn’t make those businesses virtuous, but I
That doesn’t make those businesses virtuous, but I do think it complicates our disgust toward the women who have figured out how to profit from them. Because if the objection were simply to wealth, consumerism, vanity, or profiting from attention, our contempt would be distributed much more evenly. George Clooney has been the face of Nespresso for roughly two decades. David Beckham appeared in 11 World Cup ads this year.
Joe Rogan and I have both done ads for the same powdered electrolyte company. Celebrity has always been commercial, and famous people have always converted attention into money. And yet we rarely treat a male actor, athlete, or podcaster’s willingness to sell us something as evidence that his entire existence is frivolous. So it’s worth asking why women visibly profiting from this economy seem to make people angrier than the economic conditions that make their success feel offensive in the first place.
There is a lot of money to be made in the influencing industry. It would be disingenuous to pretend that the growing resentment toward influencers has nothing to do with how much money many are making at a moment when life is becoming increasingly precarious for everyone else. The more unattainable ordinary markers of stability become, the more obscene it can feel to watch someone make in a single sponsored post what another person earns in a month—or a year.
While it’s hard to focus one’s anger
And while it’s hard to focus one’s anger on the diffuse economic and political forces that have made rent unaffordable, wages inadequate, and wealth increasingly concentrated among the few, a woman filming her insane PR haul? She’s a sitting duck. Still, as an industry, we need to acknowledge that the labor and consumption that make the most visible and successful influencers’ lifestyles possible often depend upon women with considerably less power—many of them women of color, migrant workers, or workers in the Global South: garment workers producing the clothes they promote, domestic workers maintaining the homes that become their backdrops, childcare workers enabling the performance of effortless motherhood, warehouse workers packing the endless stream of products arriving at their doors.
So what is decidedly anti-feminist is not necessarily to participate in these systems—the reality is that we all do to varying degrees—but opting not to acknowledge the inequalities that sustain them until you personally become the target of criticism. There is something deeply hypocritical about discovering and using the language of women’s liberation only when your own status, reputation, or income is at stake.
If misogyny matters when it is directed at a wealthy woman with hundreds of thousands of followers, then surely the exploitation of the women sewing her clothes, caring for her children, cleaning her home, packing her products, or otherwise subsidizing the frictionless lifestyle she sells should matter too. Feminism cannot simply mean defending women when we identify with them, aspire to be them, or see ourselves reflected in their grievances.
A politics of women’s liberation has to extend downward as readily as it extends sideways and upward. Otherwise, what we are defending is not feminism—which is collective advocacy—but individual advancement. I don’t think hating influencers is inherently misogynistic; the reasons for people’s anger are varied and rooted in the social and economic turmoil of our times. But I do think misogyny has found a very comfortable place to hide inside the hatred, as it so often does.
Source: www.vogue.com
