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Forthcoming in New Media & Society (accepted 2.1.20 21 ) “Fake” Femininity?: Gendered Authenticity Policing in Influencer Hateblogs Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., Cornell University (US) Kate Miltner, Ph.D., University of Edinburgh (UK) Amanda Wahlstedt, Columbia University (US) Though social media influencers hold a coveted status in the popular imagination, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and—more pointedly—networked hate and harassment. Key repositories of such critique are influencer “hateblogs”-- forums for anti-fandom often dismissed as frivolous gossip or, alternatively, denigrated as conduits for cyberbullying and misogyny. This paper draws upon an analysis of a women-dominated community of anti-fans, Get Off My Internets (GOMI), to show instead how influencer hateblogs are discursive sites of gendered authenticity policing. Findings reveal that GOMI participants wage patterned accusations of duplicity across three domains where women influencers seemingly “have it all”: career, relationships, and appearance. But while hatebloggers’ policing of “fake” femininity may purport to dismantle the artifice of social media self-enterprise, we contend that such expressions fail to advance progressive gender politics, as they target individual-level-- rather than structural--inequities. Introduction In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic began to upend societies, economies, and polities on a global scale, one social media personality was abruptly cast as the “internet’s best example of privilege in the age of Coronavirus”: Instagrammer Arielle Charnas (Pearl, 2020). Charnas—an American fashion influencer with more than 1.3 million followers—had become a target of online ire earlier that month after sharing content on her Instagram feed that made evident she had defied local shelter-in-place orders, fleeing the nation’s viral epicenter for the Hamptons—a known getaway destination for well-heeled New Yorkers. In addition, Charnas leveraged her social connections to secure a then-scarcely available CoVID-19 test, which revealed that she had, in fact, contracted the virus. The critical blowback Charnas received was staggering, with expressions
of vitriol ranging from mockery to death threats to the pronouncement she had been--to invoke a faddish term-- cancelled (Griffith, 2020). Casting aside moral judgements about Charnas’s behavior, we wish to instead call attention to the nature and character of such outrage and, specifically, the recurrent accusations of artifice and fakery waged at women in the digital public sphere. Influencers—cultural tastemakers who generate profit by integrating sponsored products and services into mediated depictions of their aspirational, albeit “real lives”--have emerged as especially prominent targets of gendered authenticity policing.^1 Not only did critics allege that Charnas “faked” her test results (Stern, 2020), but she—like the wider community of social media personalities--has been subjected to continuous scrutiny for self-presentations deemed inauthentic, fraudulent , and/or phony. Accordingly, a Vanity Fair feature on the uncertain fate of influencers framed the controversy over Charnas as a contestation over “realness” and “authenticity” (Bryant, 2020). Several months later, online pop culture site Refinery29 detailed the swift rise of “internet-personality watchdogs'' who “[make] a hobby of dismantling influencer culture” (Munro, 2020). These so-called “callout” accounts spotlight individuals or activities deemed “shady”—be it excessive photo-manipulation or, more concerningly, the defiance of coronavirus-related public health mandates. As the anonymous creator of Influencers Truth justified, “I think that everyone is tired of these influencers presenting a version of life that just isn’t reality ” (ibid, para. 5, italics added). To be sure, critiques of this ilk are by no means unique to a moment wrought by the pandemic; rather, they emerged in tandem with the cult of personality that propels social media (Marwick, 2013) and gained momentum vis-à-vis buzzy pop culture outlets (i.e., Buzzfeed, Bored Panda ); dedicated Instagram accounts (i.e., Influencers in the Wild, Celeb Face, Diet Prada); well- orchestrated efforts to “cancel” public figures like Charnas; and—above all--influencer
with a productive outlet for their legitimate frustrations (Hunter, 2016). To critics, meanwhile, hateblogs are venues for those with “crazy obsession[s]” (Grose & Chen, 2012) to wage online abuse and engage in cyber-bullying. These perspectives are not only polarizing, they also fail to fully account for the role of gender-coded norms in the functioning of sites like GOMI. A key aim of this paper, then, is to offer an alternative analysis of influencer hateblogs that takes seriously the gender politics of the discourses that populate them. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of GOMI, we spotlight the recurrent nature of hatebloggers’ critiques of influencers, namely accusations of duplicity or “fakery'' across three traditionally feminized areas: career, relationships, and personal appearance. Together, such critiques cast influencers as deceitful and avaricious charlatans who unfairly profit from ersatz performances of womanly perfection. But while these criticisms are deployed in discussions of individual influencers and their specific performances of feminine ideals, they are ostensibly rooted in broader sociocultural critiques connected to gendered constructions of authenticity, labor, and privilege. In other words, the targeted influencers serve as individual scapegoats for the hatebloggers’ ire at the existence and reproduction of problematic, narrowly defined ideals of femininity, domestic life, and the possibility of “having it all.” In this way, the GOMI community functions as a moral text (Gray, 2005) aimed at dismantling the tropes of entrepreneurial femininity that circulate on social media (Duffy & Hund, 2015). More broadly, we argue that hatebloggers’ patterned critiques may be understood as a form of displaced rage. Amid a wider surge in representational identity politics and feminist activism, prominent scholars and thinkers have highlighted various instances and expressions of women’s anger and outrage in recent years (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Kay & Banet-Weiser, 2019; Chemaly, 2018; Cooper, 2018). That women today are, in Traister’s (2018) words, “Good and Mad” marks
a significant response to “the many inequities to which women and those around them have been exposed” (page xxiii). However, both the expression and reception of anger are gender-coded, particularly for women. As Chemaly (2018) notes to this end, “Gender-role expectations, often overlapping with racial-role expectations, dictate the degree to which we can use anger effectively in personal contexts and to participate in civic and political life” (p. 15). Women are not “supposed” to get angry; consequently, women’s anger is often suppressed-- both by women themselves as well as by external forces. Moreover, because women are denied the opportunity to openly express their anger, it can be “[rechanneled] in inappropriate directions” (Traister, 2018, p. 442). Crucially, the re-directing of women’s anger has a history that well predates the churn of digital activism. More than twenty-five years ago, Elaine Duffy (1995) suggested that when structurally oppressed groups--such as women--perceive themselves as powerless to effect change within a particular context, they engage in horizontal violence, a type of aggressive behavior directed laterally within the oppressed group instead of at larger structural concerns (p. 5). Moreover, even when the group acknowledges the problematic nature of such violence, it is justified as a response to victims’ individualistic personality traits or specific behaviors (ibid). It is precisely in this vein that the hateblogging activities exemplified by GOMI can be considered a form of digital horizontal violence-- enacted by women antifans, and directed toward feminine- coded influencers. Through this framework, the gendered authenticity policing that structures the community represents an expression of collective anger about the norms of capitalist patriarchy; importantly, such anger is directed at individuals (in this case, paragons of entrepreneurial femininity) instead of at the larger systems perpetuate these norms. As part of this displacement, influencers who possess certain traits (e.g., the privilege of hiring childcare) or engage in particular
assumptions about this sub-culture--from their devalued status and caricatured frivolity to their championing of consumer culture--are unabashedly feminine (e.g., Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017; Lawson, 2020). Duffy and Hund (2015), for instance, note how blogger-Instagrammers showcase patterned tropes of entrepreneurial femininity, which express a socially mediated version of “having it all.” Having it all is, of course, an ideal that has animated discourses of post-feminism since at least the 1980s (Gill, in Banet-Weiser, Gill, & Rottenberg, 2019) by circulating the seductive promise that women can seamlessly meld the personal and the professional, and feminism and femininity. As Campo (2005) summarizes of this broader mythos: 'Having it all' was the promise that women could take on the role of 'career woman' (never just 'worker') without having to sacrifice either their femininity (they could still wear a skirt to the office and still be taken seriously) or their desire to have children (who could be fitted in between promotions and cared for by other 'child carers’ — never by their father). The idea was that women, no longer confined to domesticity, could simply take on the new roles opened up to them by feminism without relinquishing their old ones, and by working hard and organising well, women could have the ultimate trifecta of career, children and marriage, [while] retain[ing] their femininity (p. 64, italics added). While such ideals have been heavily critiqued (e.g., Faludi, 1991; Slaughter, 2012)--especially in the wake of the gender inequity wrought by the COVID 19 crisis (e.g., Dickson, 2020)—the dream of the “ultimate trifecta” is alive and well on Instagram, where fashion/lifestyle bloggers, “momfluencers” and other women-identifying influencers profit heartily from curated personae and feeds chock full of aspirational content. Accordingly, visibility, or--perhaps more aptly--the widely touted social media directive to “be visible” is another theme that cuts across the literature on influencers (Abidin, 2016; Bishop, 2019; Banet-Weiser, 2018; Cotter, 2018; Duffy & Hund, 2019; Khamis et al., 2017; Bishop, 2019). Hearn and Schoenhoff (2016), for instance, note the similar capitalist logics that drive users to emulate celebrity practice, describing how metric-driven platforms “[invite] users to work to
achieve visibility and attention and to take part in a life of consuming without cost” (emphasis added, p. 206). Of course, as Banet-Weiser (2018) points out, despite the cultural logics that compel social media users to “put themselves out there,” visibility is a profoundly fraught ideal for women, with the benefits of accruing online visibility almost always coming with a cost. Influencers’ requisite career visibility has thus opened them up to intensified public scrutiny and, in some cases, networked hate and harassment--all of which are exacerbated for women, communities of color, and the LGBTQIA community (Duffy & Hund, 2019; Lawson, 2020). Moreover, critiques of influencers often take on a moralistic tone; as Marwick (2013) noted of participants in a hateblog targeting at proto-influencer Julia Allison, members were seemingly roused by a sense of “moral and ethical anger” directed at Allison (p. 154). More recently, amid the spate of digitally networked critiques detailed above, media reports (e.g., Grossbart, 2020; Griffith, 2020) have speculated on the “influencer backlash ,” thus invoking a term deeply imbricated in gender politics (Faludi, 1991). Anti-fandom in Context: Morality, Gossip, Cybermisogyny The concerted critiques waged at influencers evince a larger culture of “anti-fandom,” wherein communities exhibit intense feelings of dislike and hatred toward a media object or personality (Click, 2019; Gray, 2005; Harman & Jones, 2013; McRae, 2017; Miltner, 2016). As Gray (2005) explains, antagonism can operate just as powerfully as admiration, producing “just as much activity, identification, meaning, and ‘effects’” and uniting and sustaining a community or subculture equally as powerfully as fandoms (p. 841). Gray suggests that although “outright moral posturing may be considered decidedly uncool” within most anti-fandom communities, the crux of anti-fandom is decidedly moralistic (p. 849). What unites members is thus their interest in--and
Weiser & Miltner, 2015; Phillips, 2014; Reagle, 2015). Not only have platforms neglected to adequately protect users from such expressions, but the algorithms that govern them often promote and reward this kind of content (e.g., Massanari, 2015; Matamoros-Fernández, 2017; Noble, 2017). Consequently, the intersections of digital platforms and celebrity culture have “become spaces for ideological battles over race, sexuality, and gender” (Lawson, 2018, p. 819). Among the ways these battles manifest in influencer culture is through intensified public scrutiny and criticism from various social factions: advertisers, the media, the platforms themselves, and of course, audiences (Duffy & Hund, 2019; Marwick, 2013; Miltner, 2017; Lawson, 2020). Polarizing Perspectives on Social Media Influencer Hateblogs Given the audience-oriented nature of anti-fandom studies, it is perhaps not surprising that analyses of influencer/social media creator hateblogs have largely focused on their community- building aspects. Hunter’s (2016) study of GOMI members’ critical appraisal of mommy bloggers underscores this community-building function--as well as the gender-coded nature of participants and their targets. McRae (2017) offers a similar perspective in her research on the travel section of the GOMI community. Noting how participants target images and posts that defy norms of authenticity, namely “all things staged, insincere, unethical, and exaggerated” (p. 14), McRae explains that many GOMI participants “feel that bloggers’ attempts to pass off their lifestyle as achievable are dishonest” (p. 24). A premise guiding both of these studies is that social media’s demands for “realness” and candor hold internet personalities to different (and arguably more stringent) standards, making them more susceptible to critique than traditional celebrities and other public figures understood as products of the industrial publicity apparatus (Marwick, 2013). As
Duffy and Hund (2019) contend to this end, women influencers confront a double bind of sorts, given expectations that content on Instagram should be neither “too real” or “not real enough.” While this literature helpfully illuminates the motivations of hateblog participants, it fails to account for the impact these activities have on their almost exclusively women targets. However, both media reports and personal anecdotes have highlighted the damaging consequences for individual creators. A feature in the Guardian , for instance, detailed cruel, incessant critiques waged at creators, who describe it as a “toxic” space that has harmed them professionally and psychologically (van Syckle, 2016). Jane (201 5 ), moreover, suggests that women who are the focus of online “hate” are often blamed for the campaigns against them, with the implication that they brought this activity on themselves due to the publicness of their behavior (e.g., Razer, 2017; see also, Duffy & Hund, 2019). The typical suggested remedy for targets of online antagonism is either to grow a thicker skin or retreat from online life. The latter solution, Jane explains, not only penalizes women “by advising them to withdraw from a domain that is widely acknowledged as being an integral – and essential – part of contemporary life and citizenship” (2015, n.p.), but also amounts to workplace harassment and economic vandalism for those whose careers situate them in the public eye. Together, such accounts offer important insight into the culture of hateblog participants and their targets; however, the totalizing nature of these perspectives position hateblogs on opposite ends of a spectrum: as either a woman-centered community-building activity or a misogynist form of hate speech. This paper seeks to offer a more nuanced analysis that incorporates both perspectives. We suggest that hateblogs offer their audiences a venue to push back against the excesses of influencer culture and the unrealistic, gendered expectations of “having it all,” but that the manner and focus of this critique simultaneously reinscribes a pernicious gender politics.
minimize the risk of re-identification of both the commenters as well as the targets, we have engaged in the practice of fabrication (Markham, 2012), where we have converted direct quotes into “representational interactions” that reproduce the essential meaning and style of the materials while changing specific wording to prevent the quotes from being searchable. “Fakes” and “Phon[ies]”: Policing Influencers’ Depictions of “Having it All” While the critiques issued by individual participants in these anti-fan communities were wide- ranging, they collectively revealed participants’ preoccupation with fraught ideals of realness, truth, and sincerity. Indeed, gendered authenticity policing was among the core activities of the GOMI community and ostensibly helped to sustain members’ active engagement with the texts as well as with each other. Here, it seems worth noting the various markers of “community” visible on GOMI and made legible throughout our analysis. Participation, for one, was staggering, with one of the most popular forums (dedicated to a single fashion blogger/Instagrammer) ratcheting up 50,000 snarks and more than 200,000 views (as of January 2021). Although there is a disparity between comments and pageviews, active commenting is at the core of the community’s functioning; “lurking” (i.e., reading without commenting) is expressly discouraged through the caution that the accounts of those who don’t contribute will be “removed from our servers” (GOMIBLOG, 2021). Community members, moreover, deploy various in-group referents that are likely indecipherable to outsiders. For example, the community uses a variety of cat-oriented references--“meows” are posts, and community status tiers include: “Cat,” “Baroness of Ham,” “Count de Meowmy,” and “Feline Porklord.” Together, these references reinforce the feminized nature of the site (i.e., “cattiness” is considered a gender-coded euphemism for spite).
Members also use mocking pseudonymous account names that both reference particular influencer tropes and play with codes of gender and social media presentation (i.e. “Botox for Life,” “Curating Fiascos, “Hot Pink Nail Polish” “Nip Slip McGee”). Such self-referentiality about influencer culture suggests that members likely consider themselves as “apart from the rest of the audience” (Andrejevic, 2008, p. 40; see also Gray, 2005). More expressly, they dismissed other influencer followers as “stupid fans” and “idiot fangirls.” But, of course, GOMI members continue to consume influencers’ content alongside these reader-followers. As noted above, a key reason mommy bloggers’ turned to GOMI to critique perceived performativity and commercialism is because they felt a sense of betrayal upon discovering that the “authenticity” that drew them to the genre was ultimately a farce (Hunter, 2016). The critiques in our sample were rooted in expressly gendered moral discourses decrying the perpetuation of unrealistic feminized norms through artificial means, with a particular focus on self-authored projections of success (and, perhaps fleetingly, challenges) in the domains of career, relationships/parenting, and aesthetics/looks. In other words, anti-fans’ critiques centered on the use of “fakery” to curate idealized portrayals of what Campo (2005) described as the “ultimate trifecta” of postfeminist discourses of having it all : possessing a successful career, marriage and children in a way that “balanced” feminism and femininity.^4 At the core of these critiques is the idea that by resorting to dissimulative means to project unachievable and regressive projections of “having it all”, influencers are unethically profiting off of the perpetuation of unrealistic expectations for women. Fake Careers: Acts of Avarice and Self-Aggrandizement
GOMI member agreed that the accused influencers’ “avarice is limitless” They added, “[She’ll] do anything for cold, hard cash.” A related critique was that the targeted social media personalities’ career success was unmerited--a product of luck or privilege rather than earnest talent. In response to an influencers’ sponsored Instagram post, a GOMI member concluded, “I can’t believe she is getting these opportunities. She’s totally clueless, how is she a promotional partner?” In contrast to the earlier- mentioned denigrations of crass commercialism, this comment suggests that the influencer is doing a disservice to the brand she’s representing by failing to promote it according to proper standards. Another GOMI member, meanwhile, critiqued an influencer’s ineptitude at contributing creative content with the rhetorical question, “Can she not come up with at least one original thought!??” As this comment suggests, perceived career failings were a persistent refrain on GOMI. After a mommy blogger announced that she would be traveling with her family, GOMI members mocked her inability to successfully mine her personal life for content—implying that she was unable to sustain her career. As one wrote: “Just watch, she won’t even post anything about the trip-- I bet we’ll get no vlogs or blogs, and maybe one boring family photo weeks after it would have been relevant.” Such comments indicate how anti-fans seemed to invoke a double-standard when evaluating the promotional subjectivities: both too much and too little personal content was a source of relentless critique. GOMI members were also critical of influencers they deemed insincere or inauthentic, most especially in their showcasing of what Instagrammers’ routinely describe as a “highlight reel” (a phrase commonly used to signal excessively performative or staged content that contrasts with one’s “real life”). In an explicit critique of an influencers’ curated social media persona, a GOMI member noted that the target “projects this image of a woman with this kind of path-less-taken life
and a unique, fascinating personality, but the truth is that she’s the human equivalent of Starbucks.” Other GOMI members deployed the language of “hypocrisy” to describe how a religious influencer’s “saintly” image belied her Instagram feed, where she’s “nearly naked” and “pretends to be oblivious to the fact that she’s showing way too much side boob.” To be deemed “hypocritical” was in defiance of the much-hyped social media ideal of authenticity (e.g., Banet- Weiser, 201 2 ; Duffy & Hund, 2015; 2019; Marwick, 2013; McRae, 2017; Schoenhoff & Hearn, 2017). As the preceding comment attests, exploiting one’s sexuality in the service of careerist self- promotion was treated as a moral affront. After an influencer posted an image of herself in a bikini, a GOMI member declared that she was posting “pathetic thirst traps.”^5 Members responded to a similar Instagram shot with: “thirst traps like that sunbathing photo? She needs to turn down the wannabe-sexpot dial.” Ostensibly, the act of showcasing one’s body in the highly public realm of social media was perceived as a violation of gender-coded norms for professional decorum and respectability. Other GOMI participants critiqued a “itty bitty teeny weeny” swimsuit that was described by another member as “nipple pasties tied together with dental floss.” As they concluded, “The amount of skin she’s showing is disgraceful.” Taken together, these examples reveal antifans’ disapprobation with influencers’ efforts to profit from their femininity and sexuality in purportedly regressive ways. Despite the considerable labor required to create monetizable personae (Duffy & Hund, 2015), influencers’ careers did not meet the GOMI community’s standards for “real”, or legitimate, work. Through these critiques, GOMI members constructed a boundary between appropriate career choices and the model of social media success peddled by influencers.
a fashion blogger was ostracized for sharing what was considered an inauthentic depiction of adoption—one that neglected the difficult realities of the process. As the GOMI member critiqued: “I worry that her fawning fanclub will assume that adoption is a rocky start for a short while and then ta-daaaa! Instant family, just add kid and stir. Showing adoption like this is unrealistic and problematic for everyone involved.” Much like the critiques waged by mommy blogger anti-fans (Hunter, 2016), those in our sample denigrated depictions of parenting that doubled as commercial appeals. In one post, a GOMI member suggested an influencer was so preoccupied with sponsorships that she neglected her children’s hindered speech development: “She’s so obsessed with making the most money that she can out of her kids that she hasn’t even noticed that her precious little bundles are six months behind normal communication skills.” Another poster, relatedly, took issue with the decision to feature one influencer’s recently adopted child in a sponsored [paid] post. As the commenter queried, “…is anyone else feeling uncomfortable about the fact that she’s trotting out the kid as a shill after less than a month? Major yikes.” A more pernicious critique was that a blogger’s family- planning decisions were entirely wrought by business directives. As the GOMI member noted, “If she wants to keep her engagement numbers up and continue getting sponsorships at the rate she’s getting them, she’s gonna have to get knocked up ASAP.” The implication here is that a desire to attract sponsorships supersedes any “real” interest in growing one’s family. Accusations of exploiting one’s children for profit were not dissimilar to anti-fans’ dubious treatment of social media friendships. Addressing a query about what happened between two Instagrammers who formerly appeared in each other’s social media feeds (“they were besties last winter”), a GOMI member speculated, “I’m sure their cross-promotional agreement was up so they could stop shoving each other down their audiences’ throats.” Another participant surmised
that an American influencer’s decision to invite “a very popular British influencer to be a bridesmaid in her wedding” would “be the ultimate synergistic branding move.” These comments testify to an assumption that friendships in the social media sphere are purely instrumental and based upon logics of reciprocity and engagement boosting—rather than more sincere forms of intimacy. Similarly, a GOMI participant suggested that a fashion influencer had “cast” another woman in her photoshoot because of her hair color. Invocations of casting suggest relationships that are manufactured—much like media productions—and hence devoid of the deep affective bonds that structure “real” relationships. A separate albeit related critique took aim at marital/partner relationships considered excessively normative or traditional. After accusing an influencer of excessive drinking, a commenter suggested the social media star’s husband policed her behavior; the GOMI member concluded, “They both seem to adhere to the maxim ‘hubby knows best.’” In other instances, commenters questioned whether a particular influencer was upholding her status as a “Stepford wife” and mocked another influencer’s purported obedience to a partner who “doesn’t permit her to post things on Instagram.” Such critiques seemed to deconstruct influencers’ idealized marriages by suggesting they lacked the agency and equity of “real” partnerships. Fake Appearance: Artificial Beauty and Photoshop Lies Concerns about the moral character of someone who allegedly “fakes” her physicality well predate the rise of social media, with the specter of Victorian era “painted women” (Peiss, 1998) lingering in gendered ideals of authenticity (Duffy & Hund, 2019). Accordingly, the GOMI community focused intensely on the bodies and aesthetic practices of their targets, with members exhibiting a particular preoccupation with the policing of artificial depictions of beauty.
