Social Media Climbing

It can't be easy being a girl in a social media world

It’s a commonly accepted fact that sometime in the early 2010s, teenage girls’ happiness took a nosedive. The cause is no great mystery. Just from personal experience, when I was most addicted to and dependent on social media (Facebook, circa late 2000s), I know it’s a miserable experience of constantly feeling inadequate and left out, with the famous first line of David Copperfield constantly boring itself into your skull.

I can only imagine how much worse it is for girls, especially nowadays. In the timeless gender wars about dating, a popular question is whether it’s harder to have to make the first move or wait to be approached. The former exposes you to direct rejection and possibly public humiliation, yes. But at least you get to control the when and where, and in pursuing the active option, you may even feel a little bit heroic. The latter can be just as cruel, replacing a single moment of being turned down with a diffused and omnipresent fog of default rejection that can only be dispelled by someone else.

For many girls and women, social media must feel like that diffused and omnipresent rejection. For guys, there is little-to-no expectation that a selfie or some shirtless photo will be widely shared, eagerly complimented, or even launch us into superstardom. In fact, those of us who try may even be derided as a bit gay (even by those who purport to be socially progressive). On the other hand, girls and women are much more led to believe social media is an all-seeing talent scout in search of the next It Girl.

I first heard of Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica in a piece in the print edition of the

Mars Review of Books Extra

. The novel deals with this neurosis from the perspective of a 30-something former Instagram model, Anna, who is seeking to reverse the many cosmetic procedures she’s had done in pursuit of online beauty stardom. The novel’s most interesting relationship is between Anna and her mother, who’s a second-wave feminist type who doesn’t care much for women’s obsession with beauty. But Anna, above all else, wants to be special and a star, and she knows that the girls who matter most in society are the beautiful ones:

It was a source of pride for my mom, to have produce a child to carry on the legacy of her own mom’s bright smile. But she was wrong. I was prettier than my grandmother ever was. I was special, destined to transcend the small lives of the women who came before me; I was deserving of DMs from Instagram scouts, brand offers to “collab.”

Aesthetica does well in refusing to provide a soothing moral justification as to why a girl like Anna would desperately want to be considered beautiful. It easily could’ve, since if feminism is ultimately about empowering women, and women most easily gain power through beauty and sex appeal, then what kind of feminism would it be to deny women that power? There are various strains of social justice activism that does try to reconcile this problem, with one idea being that women dress sexy but absolutely definitely not for men, not even a little bit (the Body Type Substack recently had an interesting piece by

Mikala Jamison

about the reality regarding this topic).

But all that denialism just reminds me of those male posters in the now-closed subreddit, r/whereareallthegoodmen. It was a MGTOW-related subreddit whose name mocks women who allegedly spend their youth irresponsibly, then complain later about how there are no good men with whom to settle down. There, posters would often upload photos of themselves supposedly enjoying solo beer-sampling trips through Croatia with captions about how much fun they were having, now that there were no females around to ruin their days. It was funny to see the constant unprompted insistences that they absolutely definitely were not thinking about women, thus proving the opposite.

What’s the purpose of denying an uncomfortable truth, if not to continue to benefit from older (supposedly disavowed) ways while maintaining a new fantasy image of oneself? The truth is much more interesting than the lie. In an exchange between Anna (in her heyday as an influencer) and an older influencer, the influencer expresses relief that in her new career, she’ll have “no men to show off for.” Anna vehemently denies that her own Instagram career is about appealing to men and even calls the influencer a misogynist for thinking so. Yet to herself, Anna admits “yet it did feel like an accomplishment, to take the attention of other, older women’s men.” Many men would secretly revel in their ability to take another man’s woman. How could it not be the same for women in a vice versa situation?

Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan (which I found through TikTok) goes even further into the territory of uncomfortable truths regarding women, social media, and the pursuit of power. It’s the closest thing to a particular type of novel I’ve been looking for: a messy-young-woman narrative about a socially ambitious straight woman of colour that lays bare the unflattering and often contradictory principles involved when she tries to make that climb. The Protagonist is a young unnamed British (South) Asian woman with an unhealthy social media fixation. In particular, her life revolves around a famous older white male artist whom she refers to as “the man I want to be with” (the Man) and a popular white female influencer whom she refers to as “the woman I am obsessed with” (the Woman). The Man is having an affair with the Woman. The Protagonist manages to wheedle her way into the Man’s life and begins an affair with him as well.

It’s all very Ingrid Goes West, but with a racial layer that Patel admirably does not treat with image-protecting falsity. There is an Unlikable Heroine equivalent of the Adorkable Heroine, in which relatable fake flaws are given to a main character who is, ultimately, meant to be loved as any standard heroine. The Protagonist is not an Unlikable Heroine; she’s simply an unlikable heroine. She is blatantly hypocritical, expecting others above her to treat her with utmost enlightenment and care while scorning those below her.

But the novel doesn’t make its points in obvious ways. A friend and I discussed whether the novel was meant to be self-critical. We both ended up agreeing it was, but the fact that such a discussion was warranted was a testament to how well the story was presented. A prime example is how often the Protagonist uses “white” as a pejorative. Considering how commonly such invectives are earnestly used online in social justice contexts, it’s not immediately apparent whether readers are meant to wholly side with the Protagonist. But as we progress further into the novel, the sheer repetitiveness of these inner tirades starts to have a comical effect that nevertheless doesn’t devolve into bad anti-woke satire. The Protagonist’s ire in this regard is most raised when she thinks of the Woman, such as when she’s envying the Woman’s “endless stream of white people fawn[ing] in the comments under posts,” or the Woman hawking “handwoven baskets made by white women weavers to replicate the ones she once saw in a market in Oaxaca,” or the Woman’s “prized white body,” or the Woman doing her “rich white girl thing of arranging rather than actually getting her hands dirty and cooking.” The sight of the Woman being interviewed on Youtube by another white woman causes the Protagonist to think of how racist women like them have “pillaged this burning, now volatile planet.”

In contrast, while she is also resentful of the Man’s whiteness, she is more forgivingly covetous of it because through a romantic relationship with him, she can get a taste of the power she desperately seeks. 

OK but fr fr, what if all it is, is I am intoxicated with [the Man’s] money, the ease his money could provide any children I bring into the world. He is breathing access to the type of social mobility I want and can provide instant generational wealth. I could be threaded firmly into the backbone of Britain.

This access is something the Woman cannot give her and, in fact, stands as an obstacle in the way of the Protagonist. So, whereas the Protagonist’s anger at the Woman’s whiteness is total, her anger at the Man’s whiteness is conditional upon his willingness to include her in his life. To her, his racism and misogyny are tied to his ability to break her—and other women’s—hearts with impunity. On a woman-led panel about war, the Man fluently discusses patriarchal oppression and respectfully defers to the female panelists. But this only makes the Protagonist madder as she watches him “dreaming of utopian futures with these women” while “sometimes saying he wants children with [the Protagonist] and then forgetting it a minute later.” She acknowledges the Man’s “profound empathy for the hungry, for immigrants, for those wronged and having suffered injustice,” but she is embittered that this does not extend to “her asking to be loved.”

There is a nakedly selfish interest in the Protagonist measuring a man’s feminism based on if he is willing to give her the kind of relationship she wants. But even if we were to agree with her stance, her own behavior towards her boyfriend shows her to be a hypocrite. The Boyfriend, by her own account, is near-perfect: he cooks for her, always encourages her, gets along with her parents, etc. But whereas the Man is a famous artist, the Boyfriend is directionless and happy to be a future stay-at-home-dad. For this, she frequently demeans him in public—including his sexual performance—even in front of their friends, so much so that they have to tell her to stop. 

If the Protagonist helplessly wonders why the Man won’t use his upper hand in their relationship to be kind to her, she only needs to look at her own behavior to find the answer. Deep down, she already knows this:

Even though he is cheating on his wife and I am cheating on my boyfriend and that means neither of us is trustworthy, he is already in love with someone outside of this equilibrium of entanglements and feels no loyalty to me, which then also reveals I expect special treatment from him of some kind, a selflessness no one in this web is giving anyone else.

Hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness aren’t bugs of human nature, but features. It isn’t weird that the Protagonist’s stridently idealism—often when it benefits her—are punctuated by moments of forlorn clarity, which are subsequently quickly forgotten. And on the cycle goes. This simply makes the Protagonist all too real. Oddly enough, precisely because the Protagonist was written in a way that refused to morally justify her, she is much more sympathetic than she would’ve been otherwise. With people like her, fictional or otherwise, it’s not their desire to rise above their birth station that I find contemptible. Rather, it’s their demand to portray that desire as somehow virtuous.

The Protagonist also accurately embodies a particular second-generation type’s lust for post-material status as she is keenly aware of how cultural influence is a power reserved for the most elite. Her problem is that while she wants to be an artist, she has no intrinsic artistic drive. Instead, she is obsessed with the status it would bring:

I want power and connections and money and status and access and influence I want to turn down invitations to events so elite they are called Cultural Moments—you just had to be there, darling. . . . I want a hungry press, hungry for me, rather than jumping for scraps of attention like some rabid dog scrabbling around in the pit of my stomach desperate for someone to listen to what I have to say.

The very title of the novel is the Protagonist’s resigned admission that she is merely a fan, not a main character, and is therefore expendable. It speaks to a relatable existential fear, that of dying a living death in our society in which we are all morphed into narcissists. She recognizes that unlike her immigrant parents, she is second-generation, giving her the gift of self-actualization. But she touches on an idea that I’ve thought about often as well, on whether the second-generation is a lost generation. She labels her belonging to an “unchosen generation,” one that can aspire for higher things than its parents, but not achieve them. At least, not unless someone like the Man (or the Woman) chooses them out of all the others. This sense of vicious competition explains much of the intra-racial gender wars among minority groups, whether in the UK, the US, or other similar countries. It is not stated whether the Boyfriend is also South Asian like the Protagonist. It would be deliciously explosive if he was, especially since in one scene, the Protagonist’s mother expresses regret at her own loveless marriage and encourages her daughter to pursue things with the Man. Perhaps material for Patel’s second novel? I hope so.