POPIWID
The purpose of the photo is what it does
“‘And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!’”
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
A dark power is offered freely to women: Show your face online, satisfy your most base desires for sexual attention and influence, and all shall love you and despair.
They sense the unrest that exposing themselves on social media has created in their minds, yet they hesitate to remove their photos.
In their hearts, lies are repeated: I do not vie for sexual attention from men, my face is online for good reasons, other reasons. I am the exception: I can use the power and not be turned by it.
Their hands hover. Their lies bring them ever closer to the one ring. Long have they desired it.
The purpose of the photo is what it does
Why do women bare their faces online?
In my experience, they employ many angles when answering this question. Some say they simply see no reason to hide their faces, others spin elaborate, solipsistic narratives about how they’ve had some niche experience which proves they’re the exception to the rule that social media use undermines women’s mental health. Most do not readily admit to posting their pictures to attract the male gaze, but their meticulous use of make-up, filters, flattering angles, and lighting puts the efficient self-deception inherent to this position on obvious display. Some girls post pictures which seem to downplay their attractiveness, and they may even submit this as evidence that they are not competing for male attention. But methinks such ladies doth protest too much. After all, they still do get attention from men, and this is not lost on most of them.
In the interest of encouraging more women, young women especially, to protect their mental health, it seems reasonable to address such claims head-on. This could be done by providing research which demonstrates how toxic social media use is to women; or by explaining that it’s not the desire for the male gaze itself which is on trial, but rather the means of attracting it that should be examined and refined; by discussing the interplay between perception and cognition in the context of the soft competition style of the female sex; or by providing compelling arguments favoring online pseudonymity.
But the temptation is strong. The male gaze is an enticing prospect all by itself, more so if we can profit off of it monetarily. We may have very good insights to contribute to the world of ideas, but perhaps we would draw attention to our blogs, profiles, channels, or products much faster if we made it clear that they were helmed by a pretty woman. Not to mention, the more traffic we generate, the more we reinforce the belief that we have something valuable on offer, whether it’s purely intellectual or overtly sexual is immaterial. So, good reasons for women to conceal their likeness on social media must compete with potent countervailing incentives.
It’s difficult enough to introspect and admit to ourselves when our feminine nature does its bidding through us unnoticed, it’s even harder to change behavior when stagnation is incentivized. The implicit rules of egalitarianism natural to the female social interaction style are no help. They present a further challenge to successful behavior modification because, when it comes to attracting men, you can’t be such an unapologetic show-off that other women begin playing games behind your back, but you must also make sure you stand-out well enough to attract a mass of men from which you may take your pick. It’s a bit of a paradox: You can’t get men by showing-off, but you have to show-off to get men.
The effects of this challenge are reflected in the things women say about why they plaster their images on social media. Much of their defensiveness, and many of their revelations, are centrally rooted in critical reputation management that often happens on a subconscious level. It’s important to maintain plausible deniability against being in competition with other women for the attention and precious resources men can offer, even if that’s exactly what’s going on, or else you’ll get dragged for being a hoe.
Various strategies for handling this are available. You can stubbornly controvert plausible explanations for a given behavior whenever there is a nexus to sexual motivation. You can also leverage post-irony to reference these intentions openly in a fashion that can pass for facetiousness. Any approach that sets you apart from the competition without overstepping in plain view of watchful female competitors is viable. You can turn the dial up a few notches on one element, but you’ll have to pull back on others or risk some unpleasant confrontation. For instance, the more of your body you want to reveal online, the more you might stand to benefit from calling yourself a feminist or talking about how great being single is. The claims you make about how uninterested you are in men serve as an intermediary through which you can launder your dyed-in-the-wool desire to attract the tallest, handsomest, richest man you possibly can. This inadvertently pressures other women in the space to tolerate your presence or else risk being labeled jealous and bitter. Similarly, if you show a little less of yourself, you may leverage humor and sarcasm so as to disarm and disorient other women so they don’t know if or when to take your statements about how much you want a man seriously. Meanwhile, men will be drawn to your wit and intrigued to find out just how serious you are.
There’s an art to this. Some are naturals at it, others not so much. Some are acutely aware of what they’re doing, others are totally clueless. In any case, developing this skill for the purpose of online interaction can be very costly. You are almost guaranteed to be burdened by some level of internal conflict if you decide to use these strategies on the internet. This is especially true if you are naive to the many pitfalls of the digital world, sharing personal information of any kind being only one of many. Go too far in the direction of getting praised for lauding the single life, and you might just find yourself living one for good. Lean too heavily into mixing metafiction with your own identity for likes and views and you might just wind up in a surreal state of depersonalization. To boot, you can bet your last loaf of lembas bread that, as a woman, all of this will be compounded by the derangement that follows the inevitable comparisons made between your own ability to attract male attention, and the ability of other women to do so.
If you’re not convinced that women and girls are driven by their sexual instincts to share media of themselves online, I ask you to consider the hesitation they feel about removing their pictures even after they accept that having a revealing social media presence is negatively impacting their mood. Similarly, why might the girls who report being mentally stable despite such social media use (assuming they’re not downplaying their true feelings) hesitate to switch to a non-identifying avatar in solidarity with the girls who are struggling? Could it be that they are driven more so by their instincts to compete with these girls than they are by their duty to encourage sensible behavior modification?
This hesitation is what’s called…a clue.
None of this means that women who post their images online are necessarily vicious, even if they are fully aware they’re seeking male attention, and even if they feel shy to admit it. The vast majority of the time, this just means that they have intact feminine nature — a perfectly normal thing in the wild, but something that requires new cultural adaptations to be effective online.
It just so happens that social media is to the female psychology what frost is to dahlias — a promise of atrophy. It tempts us to trade our mental stability for the chance of praise, fame, and a false sense of importance, yet it delivers nothing but torment.
The longer women stay in this state of torment, the more familiar it becomes, and thus the harder it is to sever themselves from it. Now it’s not only scrolling through feeds that’s addictive, but the vexation they often feel while doing it. They are habituating depression and anxiety with every click, reinforcing their dependence on a particular strain of sadness with every obsessive glance at their follower count, every look at their like tally, and, yes, every time they measure themselves against the beauty of another woman. They are frequently let down, but they linger in the space because they are so used to it, and because there remains the offering of an ego boost. Soon, they are only happy when it rains, when they are inside that desperate moment in which the pull of the darkness has taken on a life all its own, immobilizing them, locking their once sweet and lively eyes behind a flat and ligneous overlay.
Ultimately, none of the counterpoints offered to young women who are struggling to embrace pseudonymity, or Digital Purdah if you like, will resonate until they understand that the purpose of their photos is what their photos do. Not what they think they do, not what they tell themselves they do, and not what they tell others they do, but what they actually do.
If a young woman is depressed by some impression she has that she is not the prettiest girl on Instagram, then that is the purpose of posting there. The purpose is to depress herself.
If a married woman uses her face as the avatar for her blog bearing compliments about her appearance from men, then the purpose of her picture is to farm extramarital flattery.
If a college girl is anxious because someone called her a slut for sharing videos of herself on TikTok, then the purpose of her videos is to have anxiety about being slut shamed.
The simple truth is that, unless you have the face and figure only a blind mother could love, you will draw the male gaze. Maybe not from the men you think you deserve, and maybe not in swarms as other profiles do, but it doesn’t matter. The male gaze will come. Whether you are aware of your desire for it or not, and whether you are being promiscuous or not is of no relevance.
And so, I must ask some questions of all women and girls who think the purpose of the photos they post online is anything other than to intentionally depress themselves, to get attention from men, or to lead themselves and others further from a higher order Purpose:
Are you hideous? Is that what makes you exceptional?
Or else, could it be that you possess no element of Beauty or character so unique that it is worth safeguarding?
Have you no Lothlórien in your mind?
Have you no power at all? Nothing to contribute to this fight for Freedom? No incomparable loveliness, no strength of spirit, no ring of adamant on your finger? Is that why you share your images, videos, and various details about your life so indiscriminately?
Are you as common as all the rest? Are you perhaps someone who chides normies only to behave exactly like them?
I don’t believe that any of this is true. I cannot. But when you reveal yourself so carelessly in the face of sensible alternatives, it really doesn’t matter what I think about the quality of your beauty, character, intellect, or behavior. Nor is it important to the point at hand what you think about these things. The purpose of your photos remains: It is to be careless.
When you post your photos online, you are admitting that you can be easily compared to other women for one simple reason: That’s what such content does. It lowers your caliber to the level of ordinary appeal, rather than raising it to the level of treasured exceptionalism where it belongs.
The purpose of your photos is to depress you; to make you look less attractive by comparison to other women, even women who don’t even exist or who look completely different in real life, some of them like clowns.
The purpose of your pictures is to make you question whether people support you for your intellectual merits alone or because you managed to feign novelty by saying something
already said, and better. Of course it’s possible for people to approve of both your beauty and intellect — to admire your ability to hone the feminine spirit in the interest of absolute Freedom rather than safetyism, but that’s not the point. And of course it’s possible that your merits will be questioned even if you are faceless on the internet no matter your sex. That’s not the point, either. The point is that the purpose of your photos is to make you second guess your success more often than not, to hand ammunition over freely to your enemies, and to shroud the ring-bearer in darkness rather than offering him clarifying Light.We are at war. Social media is a combat zone. Think: What is the purpose of your pictures in this context if you are a woman, especially if you are a young, single woman?
The answer is for your spirit to be corrupted by the digital demiurge, to be turned into a low-level puppet master of the young men and women you deter from Purpose, wittingly or not. It is to automate the work of those pulling your strings, to have your once pretty face become synonymous with the malignant propaganda so characteristic of this moment in time. Soon, no one will see you at all, only the warped version of yourself that you have become. No filter will be strong enough to hide the blemish of what you now represent.
The purpose of your photos is to help Sauron find his ring, to let him do his bidding through you, twisting your heart and mind to the darkness with notions of being more beautiful and terrible than the morning and the night. Why else would the establishment be so fond of the term “empowerment?”
But Sauron’s influence on you is not always so obvious as to render you the owner of an eating disorder or an emotionally incontinent disposition prone to public outbursts. Sometimes the effect isn’t extreme enough to notice until you try something different, much like adopting a fitness routine puts into clear focus how much worse you felt beforehand. But it twists you nonetheless. It disrupts the seeds of precious intimacy in your private life every time you doubt the compliments your admiring boyfriend gives you in earnest because of the women you’ve seen online. It causes friction in your life every time you berate men for ogling women online — the very thing you enable and are tormented by, too. Worse, it tries to keep you from talking to men in real life at all. It does this unless and until you lift your hand from where it hovers above the symbol of the pool of destruction into which your own spirit is being lured.
Always, the purpose of the pictures is the same: it is for all who look upon them to love you…and despair!
“Galadriel lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark... Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad. 'I pass the test', she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.’”
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Embracing pseudonymity and removing your pictures from social media can feel like diminishment, especially because the potential for power offered by the alternative is so alluring. And it is. A part of you does lessen. But if the purpose of plastering your life online is to tempt you to a lower version of yourself, a depressed and lonely version, then it is this part of you that diminishes when you resist the temptation to continue on in this way, not your higher self.
There are several arguments which challenge the proposal that young women keep their faces offline.
There is the position that the reason our young women are struggling so much with derangement secondary to unconstrained social media use is that they are made of weaker stuff than their purportedly more emotionally stable counterparts. Some blame bad parenting for this, others blame the women who are struggling more directly. Regardless, this line of reasoning seems to lead to the idea that girls shouldn’t have to rely on faceless avatars or limited social media use to feel better about themselves. Fundamentally, there is truth in this position. But time and energy are precious resources. Just how much of their time and energy should young girls devote to overcoming depression and anxiety stemming from a habit they could modify or altogether quit with less effort and less personal cost? How much time and energy should they devote to feeling better about competing for attention online when they should be competing for it in person?
This argument has the appearance of wisdom. After all, honing an internal locus of control is vital to one’s ability to thrive spiritually and to self-regulate when externalities cannot be modified. But therein lies the thread which unravels the tapestry of this argument when pulled: Keeping your photos online is an externality you can control. And, so, if putting your pictures online is upsetting you or otherwise deterring you from your higher Purpose, then it is your responsibility to change this behavior for the simple reason that you can.
Maintaining an internal locus of control is a skill. It comes easier to us when we cultivate our environments to suit our preferences and values. Internet facelessness does not imply a lack of self-governance, but the automation of it — a choice which reinforces good habits and mental durability. When given the choice, women are wise to tend the grounds of their minds within a sanctuary of their own design, rather than on a stage in front of a tough crowd.
There is also the argument that the reason social media is so toxic to women is because of other women. This position glosses over why female toxicity exists in the first place. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens because the male gaze is everywhere. When women are being toxic, it is never in total isolation of seeking attention from men. The masculine and feminine natures are inextricably linked to one another. Toxicity from one is always driven by some motivation related to the other.
When it comes to social media and the world of ideas specifically, there is the contention that women should be able to compete just as men do, that a person’s sex should not be factored into evaluations made on the quality of their arguments, so pseudonymity isn’t really necessary. I’m not so sure about this. For one thing, there is the obvious point that women, especially young single women, do not tend to tolerate the pressures of social media nearly as well as men. This immediately calls into question the claim that they can or should compete in the world of ideas through social platforms exactly as men do. We want women to be effective in the fight, not just present for it. For this, they need to organize according to their strengths. The more preoccupied they are with whether anyone cares that they’re female, the less effective they’ll be.
Besides, we need men to lead the charge for Freedom. For the most part, they are the ones strategizing for resource acquisition and political influence. Since putting their likeness online is a strategy some of them have identified, and has little to no bearing on their overall psychological health, they can enjoy more flexibility in how they present online.
We can join the ranks of men in support of Freedom if honest self-assessment reveals that this is likely within our capacity to do effectively, but we very much need the merciless and direct competition in which men are specialized in order to have a serious impact on rival males. Women can be a hindrance to this sort of communication despite having good intentions. The young and inexperienced may want to help, but, if they’re not careful, they might wind up wandering into the center of an arena right in the middle of a jousting match. They might not get hit, but only because the knights will have to swerve around them, and the game won’t be as exciting as a result. Similarly, younger women (and some older women, unfortunately) are far more likely to confuse a sparring match between men for a full-scale attack on reputation or the interests of some group. It’s just a byproduct of having a different competition style, nothing to get worked up over. But it is good to recognize this possibility and to be vigilant for it so that we may avoid becoming a liability to the soldiers leading in the fight for Freedom.
Ultimately, we all have to decide how we are going to be most effective in this fight. Encouraging women to embrace online modesty to this end seems totally reasonable to me. As you’ve probably noticed, I do this myself, and I really do think I’m happier and more effective because of it.
Simply put, a digital force field can help women and girls think clearly and optimize their use of the internet in connection with their psychological health. It can promote higher quality communication through status illegibility. It can diminish the appeal of the online world to young, single women just enough that they begin integrating their competition style with their tangible environment as a natural extension of eliminating poor incentives from their approach to finding love. It can lessen the friction on their path of individuation from the poisonous lake of social media. It can help them form genuine bonds with other women, and call-out the malignant behavior of attention whores without necessarily having to say anything. But it can also embolden young girls to communicate to this end more directly without fear of reprisal in the form of having their appearance ridiculed. It serves as a wordless acknowledgement that we know that young women who say they’re not posting their photos for attention are lying, that they know we know they are lying, that they keep lying, and that we are done pretending to believe they’re not lying because it’s not their nature we want to encourage them to change, it’s their behavior. It preserves the mental stability we nurse offline. It thus enables mental agility, too. It can restore a sense of agency to the lives of women who feel overwhelmed and reinforce patterns of thought that will make them stronger in the face of internet detritus whenever they do encounter it.
Most importantly, it can help them smile more than they cry. It can help them find and remain their true selves in a world that tempts them to do the exact opposite. That is its purpose.
Thanks for rucking with me. Please enjoy the music as you exit.
Women log off!
@Mary Harrington @zinnia @Megha Lillywhite @Helen Dale
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