An edited version of this essay was originally published by Vogue. Below is the longer, original version.
There is a lot of negative discourse about influencers right now and it has gotten people riled up. None of it is new; for as long as I’ve had this job, people have been trying to come at me by calling me an “influencer” like it’s a derogatory term. (Influencing is part of what I do, not the sum total of who I am.) This contempt, unfortunately, is an all-too-familiar feeling in our daily ritual of scrolling through our social feeds. The other day, I saw news of an influencer couple who dyed a flock of beautiful white doves blue for a gender reveal, only to discard them once the spectacle was over. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more contempt for strangers on the internet.
There are many things about influencer culture that I dislike. Its relationship to overconsumption. The way it typifies and disseminates impossible beauty standards. The undisclosed advertising, conspicuous wealth, manufactured intimacy, and 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 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. There are influencers of all different 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, probably attractive, probably interested in fashion or beauty, probably taking selfies or talking to the camera, probably 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, nor by women alone; the term “attention economy” was coined in 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 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 10 ads in this year’s World Cup. 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 so much angrier than the economic conditions that make their success feel so 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 towards influencers has nothing to do with the amount of 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. 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.
If we are going to have this conversation—and I think we absolutely should—I want us to be more precise about what exactly we are angry at. Criticize influencers. God knows I do. Criticize the industry, the consumption, the conspicuous displays of wealth and consumerism, the commodification of intimacy, the endless fucking boxes of free stuff. But criticize the system that produces all of it too. And when the criticism starts sounding suspiciously like the same things we have been saying about women for centuries, perhaps ask yourself what, exactly, you hate.
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.