It was 2015 and I – a Masters student in my mid-20s – had a blog. By day I waded through the rigidity of academic writing, paralysed by perfectionism, crafting and re-crafting the same sentences for hours on end. By night I sat with my sister and we wrote eagerly about the culture we were marinating in: about ‘bikini body’ influencers and the Kardashians, about The Bachelor and Taylor Swift’s girl squad, about the same-sex marriage ‘debate’ and the absurdity of Donald Trump becoming a presidential candidate.
There was something profoundly liberating about writing on the internet. For the first time, I had permission to play with humour and images and structure and format – to feel like I could interrogate complex ideas in an accessible way.
My Masters research was about the clinical overlap between eating disorders and obesity, and my sister and I wrote recaps of The Biggest Loser with that context in mind. I wanted to bridge the gap between the academic world and mainstream media, to apply critical thought and rigour to popular culture.
Selfishly, too, I preferred to write online. The deadlines and the immediacy suited me. The ability to react in real-time.
I never finished my Masters. When I was offered a job in media, I handed my research over and withdrew, imagining that perhaps I’d return later. But I’d found something I loved. The kind of writing that felt joyous instead of debilitating. And so I fell head-first into the crowded, fast-paced, rapidly evolving world of online publishing, determined to succeed.
It was a steep learning curve for someone who hadn’t studied journalism or media. I hadn’t known about the advertising model, or the importance of traffic, or that – for example – the reason the media seems obsessed with the Kardashians is because people click on headlines about them. For a long time I pitched stories that were unilaterally rejected, because, in hindsight, they were horrifically boring. Over months and then years I came to understand the way attention works online, how to make people read what you write, what audiences engage with and what they don’t.
So, like most other writers navigating the internet at the same time social media algorithms were taking over, I entered a familiar trap. I only entered it very briefly, in a relatively mild way, and I’m eternally grateful for the editors who saved me from myself, but it’s shameful nonetheless: I called people out.
In order to drive traffic, to have my writing matter, it seemed like the only way to engage with an idea (capitalism is broken! Beauty standards are oppressive! The planet is burning!) was through the prism of an actual human person. More specifically, the only way to interrogate feminism was via a living, breathing woman.
And this was particularly dangerous.
I started to see every woman in the media – actors and musicians and influencers and comedians and writers – as an ideological symbol. Was she beautiful? Was she married? Was she wealthy? How did she dress? Was she thin? What had she said about her own body? What did she do and what did she stand for and was she making the world a better place?
It never even crossed my mind to interrogate male media personalities in the same way.
I remember writing about a female celebrity on a red carpet who was very, very thin. In a soundbite, she flippantly referred to her “curves,” and that was it – I filed 1200 words about how dangerous she was, how she was fuelling eating disorders, how she was irresponsible and callous and harming other women.
…Was she?
I cringe now, thinking back to how I really believed I was doing a good thing. The academic research is definitive: media exposure to very thin bodies does increase body dissatisfaction, negative mood, and eating disorder symptoms. But the solution isn’t to blame one individual woman for it. To hold her culpable for a suffocating, inescapable social phenomenon. The irony, too, is that in being so passionate about advocating for women’s mental health, I was attacking a woman who may very well have been experiencing an eating disorder. Where was my empathy for her?
I was shaken out of this phase when I came face-to-face with a woman I’d once criticised online. I’d observed her from a distance and decided she was greedy, exploitative, cold. She represented all the problems with capitalism and privilege and in attacking her character, I thought I was fighting for some kind of broader social change.
When I met her, only for a few minutes, she was kind. She was funny. She was self-deprecating. She treated me respectfully, and I was ashamed.
I try to allow grace for my 24-year-old self, who was naive and learning and failing in public. And, again, I owe an inordinate amount to my colleagues and editors who gently pointed my energy in another direction. I remember one brilliant editor sitting beside me and going through one of my (very angry) articles about an Australian political figure line by line, explaining how there was nothing in this piece of writing that was going to change anyone’s mind. “Isn’t that what you want?” she asked.
It is what I wanted.
It was why I’d gone into this career in the first place.
Right now, at this specific moment, outrage is everywhere. We love to point a finger at a person, and, to be perfectly honest, that finger-pointing often gets more traction if it’s directed at a woman. Social media platforms make it particularly easy to turn actual people into symbols, and then their algorithms reward large-scale pile-ons. News sites are at the mercy of the same algorithmic rules, and they know the faces and the names and the inflammatory language that drive traffic and engagement. They know anger converts into clicks.
It can really feel like we’re doing something productive by dissecting an individual woman – like we’re prosecuting crucial moral questions by annihilating her character. But I fear the entire spectacle is ultimately destructive – not only to the human being on the receiving end, but to us, too. We shouldn’t take pride in the erosion of our empathy.
The internet has the potential to be creatively liberating, to offer a place for expression. But we need to beware of the consequences of disinhibition, of responding in real-time, of forgetting that we’re all just people, who, for the most part, are doing our best with what we know. When we’re really tackling complex ideas, building consensus, and working towards a shared future, we speak slowly, and carefully, and remain curious.
I no longer call people out, and haven’t for a long time. Often, if I’m incensed by a person I see online, I imagine what it might be like to sit opposite them. What we might talk about, what we might have in common. I’ve known and loved enough people who are radically different from me to imagine that I would probably quite like the internet stranger, if I gave them a chance. It’s also likely that if the anger and vitriol left the room, and was replaced by mutual respect, we’d learn something else: that speaking to each other, rather than at each other, is the only way anything changes.
Feature image: Clare Stephens. Credit: Luke Latty Photography.