Slaves to Vanity
It’s a fine line between Instagram and pornography.
In December 2019, essayist Jia Tolentino published a piece in The New Yorker that went nearly as viral as its subject matter: “The Age of Instagram Face.” In it, Tolentino explores “the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face.” Popularized by Kim Kardashian and the Instagram influencers who multiplied in her likeness, the look is that of a Bratz doll on ketamine.
Tolentino describes how that particular brand of face—poreless skin, pillowy cheekbones, baby-like nose, and cat-like eyes—was memed into reality over the previous decade. Beginning in 2010, Instagram algorithmically optimized for high contrast, low-noise imagery, resulting in a familiar, generic sameness in popular posts and posters. Facetune, which arrived in 2013, allowed users to modify pictures of themselves using blurring, blending, and reshaping functions, in order to eliminate such distractions as blemishes and asymmetry.
The combination of these technologies, their addictive quality, and the algorithmic drive for singularity created the meme that became the beauty standard of the 2010s: Instagram Face. The virtual world planted the seed, and plastic surgeons’ offices continue to reap the reward. Since the publication of Tolentino’s essay, plastic surgeons have seen unprecedented growth in demand for cosmetic procedures. More than three-quarters of offices surveyed by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in 2022 reported seeing increased demand compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Tolentino avoids explicitly moral questions, instead concluding morosely that Instagram Face is just the latest iteration of “ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation.” For Tolentino, Instagram Face is only different insofar as online technologies create more opportunities to leverage personal appearance for profit, and the democratization of plastic surgery draws more women into the pursuit.
But her basic explanation of ‘porelessness plus profit’ fails to account for another, unmistakably sexual component of how young women have begun to present themselves online. Instagram Face, however airbrushed, conveys an unmistakable expression. It is recognizably seductive but with a certain deadness behind the eyes. Alluring but empty. You know it when you see it.
Rather than representing our society’s discomfort with a naked female face, as Tolentino suggests, this new brand of femininity more likely indicates a desensitized attitude toward a particular kind of naked female body and the type of face that’s usually attached to one.
If we concede that memes originate in high-traffic internet spaces designed for maximum visual stimulation, it stands to reason that the most high-traffic, most intensely visually stimulating internet spaces play some role in manufacturing the meme of the hot girl. While Instagram may be the platform one can more easily mention in polite company, no matter how ubiquitous it may be, its daily usage rates pale in comparison to the well over 90 billion videos viewed daily by more than 64 million visitors to PornHub. Tolentino was strictly correct in her analysis of the Instagram-to-beauty-industry pipeline. She missed what was upstream.
Instagram may be where certain postures are made marketable, but it is not where they originate. The most popular social media influencers (Olivia Dunne, Kylie Jenner, Alix Earle) have mastered the art of posing for maximum engagement. These girls, all in their twenties, frequently post pictures of themselves with their rear end in the foreground, kneeling, legs splayed, back arched, in bikinis or other articles of clothing that leave nothing to the imagination. Savvy girls know to take off just enough clothes to catch eyes but not enough to tarnish their career prospects. They understand that the internet is forever and OnlyFans is, on the whole, a losing proposition. Aping the porn star but just short of porn: This is the sweet spot of the Instagram influencer.
Attention pays. According to the influencer management platform Traackr, in 2018, 72 percent of major brands began dedicating a sizable portion of their marketing budgets to influencers. A micro-influencer, one with 10,000 to 50,000 followers, can demand from brands a minimum of a few thousands dollars per post. Influencers with up to 1 million followers can get $10,000 per post, depending on the platform. For those with more, $100,000 per post is not unusual. The system thus incentivizes a very old vice for women: not lust per se but vanity, the desire to acquire the lustful attention of the uncountable swarm.
Of course, men are the main consumers of pornography and the typical focal point for criticism when it comes to that topic. Social conservatives such as Senator Josh Hawley are quick to point out the ironically anhedonic consequences of the vice for men, including political, personal, and physical impotence. This much is true. Multiple studies indicate that pornography use among men correlates linearly with severe levels of depression, anxiety, and stress.
But we should not let women off the hook. Generally speaking, women’s relationship to pornography differs from men’s. Relatively few are direct consumers of the stuff. PornHub says its audience is 75 percent men and 25 percent women. Other estimates of the Internet porn audience suggest a ratio closer to 90 percent male, 10 percent female. However, most women know that most men do consume pornography. However upsetting it might be, they have a keen awareness that these surgically enhanced and chemically sedated porn actresses are the objects of routine sexual attention for 90 percent of American men and thus a clear path to attaining male validation for oneself.
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Men’s role in the normalization of pornography is embarrassingly obvious; women’s is more oblique but no less socially destructive. Women who take social cues from Instagram influencers, who take social cues from cam girls, play another kind of role in the sexual degradation of society. Perhaps even more insidious than either consuming or openly starring in smut, inching toward the pornographic ideal in all matters of dress and behavior dulls the senses of viewer and viewed alike.
Several recent studies indicate that Instagram and its sister platform, TikTok, where hot girl influencers dominate the algorithms, present mental health risks for teenage girls. This sad reality is cited by Abigail Shrier in Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters as a reason many teen girls, having viewed social media for any prolonged period, “flee womanhood like a house on fire.”
The race to the bottom led by the ladies of Instagram leads inexorably to a world where distinctions between what is and is not sexually appropriate cease to matter. Whatever power women stand to gain by indulging and leveraging “the male gaze,” it will be violently lost once those boundaries are gone for good.
