god forbid I'm a pretty girl online

on influencerdom and its inescapability, self-surveillance culture, and the fear of being nothing if you are not first beautiful.

there are few worse curses than being a pretty girl online (and i say this genuinely and i say this with all the irony i can muster). all that privilege and all those horrors trapped between my teeth. if i lived in brooklyn all of you would hate me. i am from an island two thousand miles away from california and live in a big midwestern city, so you might be able to forgive me for all this narcissism. i manage my mediocrity so it doesn’t offend you and i make sure i never look too pretty in the wrong places. i keep one earbud out to thank strangers on the streets for their compliments and i delete pictures of myself where i don’t look good. my conceit is visible and brash and you don’t mind. i have spent most of my adulthood secure enough that there is nothing on my body that i want to change. my pores are dirty and my nose was once photoshopped by a friend who wasn’t really a friend. i hope you look at me and think that i’m greedier than i am. 

i take a video of a version of myself that doesn’t look like me. my face is prettier than that, i decide. there’s a pimple on my chin that looks more prominent in camera than in the reflection of my window. i take the video again, and again, and again, until i give up and decide i’m not ready to be a pretty girl online. i photograph my after-work walk and edit it to increase the saturation and the graininess, so that you might think i’m cooler than i am. i look at myself in the smudged window of the subway and decide i look like a god today. 

you can no longer really be a writer without being an influencer - and though substack is a welcome platform for building communities of readers, self publishing our work, and potentially winning coveted brand deals, i’ll never forgive it for permanently solidifying writing as an influencer’s profession. you can no longer be a woman online without being pretty - why would anyone listen to what you have to say, look at your art, or covet your life if you were not first beautiful? i don’t want you to covet my life, i just want it to mean something to you. i don’t want it to look pretty or interesting, i just want it to be good writing. i don’t want to read all the right books, wear all the right clothes, know all the right angles, and be just cool enough and just exclusive enough and just loving enough for you to want to be me. does it matter that i haven’t gotten a haircut in six years? does it make me a worse writer? i call my uber alone back from the bars (no, it doesn’t, as long as i am still desired, i decide, in the section of lakeshore drive where i have no cell service and i am for once in my waking hours really, truly alone). 

the worst part about being a pretty girl online is everything and nothing, but it mostly is the pervasive assumption that you are after fame. i posted a photograph of myself celebrating my literary journal acceptance, received while out on a lakefront walk, and i could not escape the discourse that i had staged the photograph. god forbid i look good, and god forbid i have my notifications on once in awhile to document it. your presence in online spaces is assumed to be performance in the way that a man’s is assumed to be benign interest. this is nothing new - women have been the sculptors of digital culture and its heralds since the advent of social media. why would we be here if not to play a part in this meaning-making and culture clay-making. the immediate assumption is that i am here to be loved, not just to write and for you to read my writing. you’re probably correct in your bitter assumption. 

and this isn’t to say that we are not all tempted (to say that you are not is to play at moral superiority and lie to yourself). there is nothing as gratifying and nothing as hollow as validation online - and those who have experienced it, coveted it, and rejected it know this. this isn’t just a digital problem - for all of our feminist progress and all our brave new worlds, we still are taught to feel like we are nothing if we aren’t seen as pretty.

i’ve never met a man who cared what he looked like receiving his graduate diploma, but all of my friends knew better: you can be everything, as long as you’re also beautiful. have i covered up my breakouts well enough for you to appreciate my thesis? have i worn the right dress for you to know that i am both very serious and very cool? have i done my hair in a way that makes you think i could be a “real” academic? am i pretty enough for you to recognize my success? 

i too used to write a fairly popular Marvel fanfiction saga, so i too knew that attention is never personal and always intimate. for years after its inevitable abandonment circa 2016, i received comments after comments begging me to update. i didn’t care about the story, but i did care about the attention. it was intoxicating - god forbid i had written something that people really, really liked! god forbid i might be a good writer! god forbid that strangers almost, maybe, could care about what i did!

so it must follow for influencers: more so than the money or the products, the addiction of knowing that strangers think you’re pretty, that strangers think you live an interesting life, and that strangers want to be you. a far more personal attachment than even the best writers could dream of - i don’t love your writing as much as i love your life. there is no jealousy without aesthetics, and why else do we follow influencers if not for jealousy, if not to grasp towards the life they design online, if not for wanting to look like and be like them? 

none of my friends are influencers and that’s exactly how i like it. i’ve erased the temptation towards self-surveillance from my life as much as i can as a vaguely pretty girl online. i spend my money on dimly lit dinners and tiny bikinis and i don’t get anything from it. i have separated my worth from my appearance perhaps as much as i can as a young woman online. i have unlearned our innate obsession with what our lives look like to strangers as much as i can stomach. and i still don’t know how to escape. and despite all the thinkpieces, i still don’t think the solution is deleting all social media, because our temptation towards aesthetics will linger. 

i worry about the little girls that are dreaming of being famous online. baby girl, do you really want to sell your life for that cheap? i am old enough to know better, to know that there is no sum worth sacrificing my privacy for. my apartment, my outfits, my relationships, my fears, my joys, are all my own. i am practiced in the art of documentation and curation, but it is less so you will love me and more so i have something to remember. i am not good at sharing. and i am still nothing if i am not first pretty - not factually so, but perceptively so, to the outside observer, to the cashier at the grocery store, to strangers at the beach, to bouncers at the club, to pretty girls on the train. 

we’ve been socialized to think that our life only has value if it can be commodified, and socialization does not disappear with reducing our screen time (and certainly not by deleting all social media but substack and pinterest, two platforms relentlessly built on aesthetics and commodification of our lives). our brutalistic pursuit of monetizing our hobbies, maximizing our personal productivity, and improving ourselves towards some lofty, undefined goal is so normalized that we don’t know how to step out of our bodies and see how strange our behavior really is. 

if everything else, why not too our love? why not our knowledge? our candlelit dinners? our airplane rides? all of our lives? what is the point of living, after all, if we aren’t sprinting after a lofty goal of letting none of it go to waste? what’s the point of doing anything if it doesn’t pay for a fancier designer bag and an even fancier designer bag, get us two competing job offers, or at the very least earn us another thousand followers? transforming ourselves into ubiquitous, totalizing influencers is then the ultimate accomplishment: there is no more life let to go to waste when all of it is fed to a machine and returned as social capital, brand deals, and new paychecks. 

what meaning does your life have if it has been squeezed out for its money-making value? what is still personal, sacred, or private? i take a pretty picture of the view from my patio table and i post it online. it gets seven story likes on instagram and i am on top of the world, because friends and acquaintances have decided that i took a very good picture of a very good moment. i throw my phone across the room and go outside, disgusted at myself. 

what would my life look like if it was lived fully for myself? what would my life look like if i was unaware of the surveillance of people i once knew? what would my life look like if i lived it only for the people i love? do you go outside for yourself, or for your invisible audience? i don’t think we were ever supposed to care about so many people. we’ve been fed a convenient delusion that everyone is watching us and everyone is judging us, but i think the harsh and relieving reality is that no one really cares. this is not your judgement day, this is logging into social media.