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Deceptive Vulnerability: Caroline Calloway and the “Unlikeable Woman”

photograph of framed polaroid of Caroline Calloway

In early September of 2019, an online magazine called The Cut published an essay by Natalie Beach that instantly went viral, spawning a plethora of opinion pieces and Twitter threads commenting on Beach’s story. In the essay, Beach explains that for years she has been ghostwriting and editing Instagram posts for her former best friend, controversial “influencer” Caroline Calloway.

Calloway, a 27-year Cambridge graduate with a degree in art history, rose to popularity on Instagram in 2013, eventually amassing over 800,000 followers. She doesn’t peddle dietary supplements or offer makeup tips; the only content she produces are the captions on her photos. Beneath each image of fireworks over the Cambridge skyline or her arm-in-arm with a boyfriend, she describes her personal life with the introspective and inviting language of a young adult novel.

This approach to social media, coupled with her brutal honesty about troubled relationships and drug addiction, might even have revolutionized Instagram. In an article on Calloway for Vox, Constance Grady notes that in 2013, “the idea of writing a blog post in an Instagram caption was new and fresh. It made her appear almost uniquely vulnerable: She was just a girl, she seemed to be telling her followers, trying to make it through her life in the beautiful, dangerous world.”

However, the illusion of down-to-earth relatability couldn’t last forever. Her Instagram posts eventually caught the eye of Flatiron, a major publishing house, which offered her a book deal for roughly half a million dollars. The deal fell through under mysterious circumstances, but it seems Calloway backed out of her contract without writing anything after spending the exorbitant advance from the publishers. She was heaped with even more criticism for her disastrous series of “creativity workshops.” The workshops would ostensibly teach attendees, who paid $165 each to participate, the ins and outs of brand-building and the artistic process. Many sessions were cancelled without refunds for ticket-buyers. Those who were able to attend claimed it was a glorified meet-and-greet at best, and a scam at worst, with one journalist dubbing it a one-woman Fyre festival.

While Calloway received negative attention from the media for these incidents, Beach’s essay has transformed her into a viral sensation. The article catalogues nearly a decade of hurt and deception, from Calloway’s struggle with addiction to Beach’s silent role in Calloway’s rise to fame. Now the media focus is on their fractured friendship, which in Beach’s essay reads like an Elena Ferrante novel transplanted from mid-20th century Naples to the virtual landscape of Instagram. But most remarkable about the story is Calloway’s continued commitment to telling all. Her Instagram feed is littered with screenshots of articles condemning her, with captions like “I cannot believe this is my life right now. I feel like I’m about to wake up at any moment.” She consistently emphasizes the unreality of the situation, her shock and hurt at how events have unfolded, and part of what keeps drawing people to her page is her willingness to comment on the drama rather than hide or stop posting.

Her response to this situation is exemplified by a trademark artsy-photo-with-lengthy-caption post about her relationship with Natalie. In the photo, Calloway stands before a large nude sculpture of a woman without arms. Like the statue, she has stripped herself bare before the court of public opinion, made herself vulnerable to fans and detractors alike.

This front of honesty, however, is more strategic than genuine. She hasn’t stopped creating an online persona, she’s just creating a different one. As Washington Post editorialist Molly Roberts astutely points out, “Calloway is still selling us something. She built her brand from the start, at least in part, by pointing out the deceptiveness of brand-building, blending Instagram’s typical aspirational posts with just enough vulnerability to make her look, well, genuine.” Vulnerability is the main weapon in Calloway’s arsenal, though she’s shifted from being vulnerable about boyfriends and addiction to being vulnerable about the scandal with Beach. She posts extensively about their friendship, pulling the curtain back on old stories, or as Roberts puts it, making herself look even more genuine by “contrasting [her new story] with the unreality she was selling everyone before.”

With her rough edges and insistence on openness, Calloway almost seems to have stepped out of the growing mass of Millennial literature about “unlikeable women,” which is perhaps why the media is so perversely attracted to Calloway’s story. In her essay “The Making of a Millenial Woman,” Rebecca Liu explores the moral implications of our obsessive interest with this kind of character. The classic example of this narrative follows “an archetypical Young Millennial Woman – pretty, white, cisgender, and tortured enough to be interesting but not enough to be repulsive. Often described as ‘relatable,’ she is, in actuality, not.” Rather, she is “more beautiful, more intelligent, and more infuriatingly precocious than we are in real life. But her charm lies in how she is still self-hating enough to be attainable: she’s an aspirational identifier.” Liu’s emphasis on “aspirational” is especially relevant to influencer culture, which relies on our dissatisfaction with ourselves and aspirations for “self-improvement” to reel us in.

Calloway’s employed vulnerability bears a particular resemblance to one of the unlikeable millenial women Liu touches on in her essay, the unnamed protagonist of the hit show Fleabag. The format of the show seems designed for an easy comparison to social media; the main character, played by the show’s creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is constantly addressing the audience with shocking honesty about everything from her sex life to her relationship with her family. It’s part of what makes the show funny, but her honesty functions on another level. By the end of the first series, we learn that Fleabag doesn’t tell us nearly as much as we think. In an interview with Paste Magazine, Waller-Bridge describes how her character is “using a certain type of honesty as a weapon of distraction. She talk very openly and honestly about sex so you feel like she’s being open with you when, actually, she’s completely hiding by doing that.”

This is exactly the approach taken by Calloway, using a “certain type of honesty” to create the illusion of genuineness. One might say that Calloway, unlike unlikeable women in fiction, is receiving condemnation for her actions rather than praise. However, our obsessive interest with her story, illustrated by a new Buzzfeed quiz titled “Are You a Caroline Calloway or a Natalie Beach?” smacks more of celebrity worship, of celebrating messiness and drama, than anything else. Our response to her is a kind of celebration, and as Liu points out,

“For every celebration of a rich white woman as carelessly destructive with her life as her privileged male counterparts, we should ask what it is that gives her the ability to be so brazen, and who is sidelined as collateral. Neurosis, often framed as a sign of powerlessness, can also be a sign of the opposite. To demand someone enter into and entertain your anxious mind-palace and reckon with your complicated and endlessly fascinating individuality can be an act of power. But who gets to be an individual to the Western public? Who gets to be complex?”

“To demand someone enter into and entertain your anxious mind-palace and reckon with your complicated and endlessly fascinating individuality can be an act of power” — this is exactly what Calloway’s Instagram posts ask us to do. Even when she is apologetic, even when she purports to be at her weakest, she holds power over her audience in a way that profits her in the end.

Part of the problem is the impetus to appear “relatable” (just messy enough to be interesting while still remaining palatable) online. Liu critiques this idea when she says that “Relatability as a critical tool leads only to dead ends, endlessly wielding a ‘we’ without asking who ‘we’ really are, or why ‘we’ are drawn to some stories more than others.” She asks, “What does it tell us that ‘we’ are meant to be drawn to women who live in elite social worlds, whose lifestyles many cannot afford, and whose rebellions against the world are always a little doomed and not that unconventional, even if we’re meant to think otherwise?”

Real personal growth cannot be achieved without vulnerability, but when influencers like Calloway substitute relatability with vulnerability, we end up consuming the same tired narratives without questioning who gets our attention and why.

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Should Instagram Remove Its Like System?

photograph of cappuccino with heart made with foam

We live in an era where we are at the mercy of the internet. Social media gives users the power to share their life with the world. And in exchange for sharing their life, users are rewarded with likes. The act of liking something on social media, double tapping a photo or thumbs-upping a status, is a way for users to connect and interact with one another. When someone’s content is liked, it gives them digital agency. Multiple likes, those that allow users to go viral, indicate both digital agency and status. But what about the users who don’t get that many likes? In the social media realm, does their lack of likes devalue the life that they share online? Instagram is addressing this dilemma by considering removing likes from posts and videos. The photo sharing app ran a test in Canada last week and could consider making the change for the entire app. Should Instagram go forward with removing the like system…or leave things as they were?

They say that something shouldn’t be fixed if its not broken. And technically, nothing is wrong with the Instagram app itself. People connect on the app by sharing photos and their lives. They possess the freedom of expressing themselves.  People can travel the world just by logging in to the app. The issue that is being addressed is the digital currency that has been imbued in the like system and its effects on Instagram users. Instagram has been associated with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and bullying. Why is this? Perhaps it’s because what some people post–be it social media celebrities, other famous people, or even those in someone’s friend group. Users might feel low self-esteem when their friends post their new car that they got for college graduation or record every moment of that international spring break trip. Users who don’t have that new car or can’t go on the trip might feel inferior and feel FOMO (the fear of missing out), especially if their own posts are getting only 10 to 20 likes. But this idea could be the whole reason to why Instagram is considering removing the likes system. Some users seem to be treating Instagram like a competition–seeing who has the most likes; who has more social status. Treating Instagram in such a manner takes away from its core mission–to connect and to allow people to express themselves freely and creatively. If so many people are focused on likes and you remove all of that, all should be right with the world…right?

Removing the liking system from Instagram would affect users in others ways in addition to addressing issues of self-esteem and anxiety. Influencer marketing has had a big impact on Instagram. By 2020, it is on pace to become an $8 billion dollar industry. Per Lexie Carbon, a staff writer for Later.com, Instagram is the best performing platform for influencer partnerships with brands, for there is an average 3.21% engagement rate compared to the 1.5% engagement rate on other social media platforms. In addition, entire businesses are created on Instagram–clothing brands, photography companies, etc. For some influencers and companies on Instagram, the likes–the digital currency–translate into actual money. The success of brands is often based on likes because how many people engage with a brand indicates its status and therefore, it’s quality and success. If there is no liking system, how can brands and companies communicate to potential clients that they can do something for them that their competition cannot? Some people have based their entire paycheck and livelihood in Instagram. Without a like system, how would they make a living?

At the same time, removing a liking system might give an opportunity for smaller brands and smaller influencers to gain more exposure after being overshadowed by the pages with hundreds of thousands of followers. The same applies for users who feel depression because of other posts on Instagram. A non-liking system could give their page more exposure. But the users could also unfollow the pages that make them feel low self-esteem and the liking system could stay in place. So, should Instagram incorporate a system without likes? The pros and cons seem to meet at a stalemate. But the thing about the internet is that it’s always changing the status quo. There are constant updates and improvements. Bug fixes and concept changes. Instagram could test a system without likes and see the responses from users. If positive, the app could keep it and if not, they could change it. Either way, it’s an opportunity to alter how people interact, and at its core, that’s what social media is about.

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Self-Care in the Late Capitalist Era

Photo of a lowlit room with candles and a mirror and a bed

As the time for New Year’s resolutions rolls around once more, the term “self-care” is more prevalent than usual. But what really is a “care of the self”?  

For decades, self-care has been associated with women’s empowerment.  In the context of women’s traditional roles as unpaid caregivers, self-care is a radical action: by prioritizing her own needs, a woman affirms that she exists for herself and not merely for others.  Audre Lorde also saw its political potential for individuals marginalized by their race and sexual orientation: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” For people who are typically erased from public life, loving and caring for oneself when society does not is a subversive practice.

The meaning of self-care has gradually come to be associated with enjoying small pleasures in the midst of a busy life, marketed especially to women who still overwhelmingly bear the heavy dual burden of being primary caregivers and workforce labourers. But what happens when late capitalism has permeated the notion of “self-care”, encouraging consumption itself as part of a holistic spiritual practice? Or when a “care of the self” becomes an Instagram label, used to showcase the results of a lip-plumping kit, manicure, or an Insta-filtered and staged $10 macchiato? What philosophy is at stake when magazines and periodicals tout this particular set of soy candles or bespeak aromatherapy or that $2500 per diem psychotherapy and spa program as the self-care du jour?  

Another version of a “care of the self” focuses primarily on bodily wellness. There are positive trends here. The combination of the body acceptance movement with girl power results in a new focus on #strongwomen rather than the thinness ideal long associated with the fashion industry. But some have argued that the #strongnotskinny ideal and its own genre of #fitspo is just as demanding of an ideal for women in its own way as the former, emaciated heroin-chic ideal, despite being a healthier and more rewarding overall goal.  

Even in bodily fitness, consumerist and late-capitalist signifiers of fitness tend to be emphasized over internal measures of physical well-being. Workout clothing has long shifted from repurposed tank tops and sweatpants from the back of one’s closet to a 9.6 billion dollar industry of its own. And the quintessentially American obsession with fitness has led to a series of performative fads, from expensive and restrictive diets that advertise one’s enlightened eating habits to pricey workouts.

But if late capitalism and performing membership of a leisured life have all but subsumed a “care of the self”, what might be an authentic or original version of the concept?  

Michel Foucault explored the Socratic notion of self-care as interlinked with another duty: self-knowledge. The project of self-care for the ancient Greeks, particularly through Socrates, demanded commitment to an ongoing cognitive process – a critical sounding of one’s ideas of oneself and the world. It is only through a relationship to truth-telling via rigorous ”dialectic” (literally, talking or thinking through something) that a person lives up to their own human potential. Socratic dialectic is a pre-modern mode of thought that is not wholly reducible to the scientific mode which relies on an opposition between subject and object to come to “objective” assessments of reality. It falls more under the notion of a “practice” or “techne” in Hellenistic culture.

This cognitive emphasis on self-care is radical for several reasons. It might be tempting, in the context of a biomedical view of the body, to focus on the physical and emotional benefits of learning and of cognitive behavioral therapy. While such effects exist, we could easily become locked in a therapeutic vision that envisions human flourishing and excellence primarily in terms of physiological and emotional factors. Once the parameters of flourishing are so reduced, it is possible to commodify them: the complex of factors constituting physical wellness can be subsumed into ”fitspo” and the richness of emotional lability can be swapped for positivity injunctions of #gratitude, #hygge, and #blessed.  

Instead, ancient notions of self-care invite us to fundamentally revisit our ideas of what constitutes human flourishing. Honest, self-reflective thought is difficult to commodify. As a consequence, a commitment to a discipline of critical thinking that engages oneself and one’s place in the world might represent the most promising subversion of capitalism to date.

This has direct political consequences. Plato would see Socrates’ own death as an exemplary instance of “parrhesia” – speaking one’s truth even when it is costly.  Such disciplined candour is an unavoidably political act in view of the fact that human beings are irreducibly political animals. Audre Lorde’s self-care may be much more appealing to the contemporary reader than Socrates’ — perhaps because self-preservation is a core feature of her version of self-care.  

Some of us today are fortunate enough to live in a society where self-examination and challenging of belief systems do not come at such a high price as that paid by Socrates.  However, late capitalist societies present their own peculiar challenges to self-knowledge where visions of self-fulfillment are daily bought and sold, promised and pursued. This New Year, we might put this meta-resolution at the top of our list: to see how a relentless commitment to truth-seeking can transform our lives and our world.

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How Much Should We Really Use Social Media?

Photograph of a person holding a smartphone with Instagram showing on the screen

Today, we live in a digital era. Modern technology has drastically changed how we go about our everyday lives. It has changed how we learn, for we can retrieve almost any information instantaneously. Even teachers can engage with students through the internet. Money is exchanged digitally. Technology has also changed how we are entertained, for we watch what we want on our phones. But perhaps one of the most popular and equally controversial changes that modern technology has brought to society is how we communicate. Social media. We live in an era where likes and retweets reign supreme. People document their every thought using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. They share every aspect of their lives through platforms like Instagram. Social media acts as way to connect people who never would have connected without it, but the effects of social media can also be negative. Based on all the controversy that surrounds social media, should we be using it as often as we do?

If you were to walk down the street, or go wait in line at a restaurant, or go to a sporting event, or go anywhere, you’d most likely see people on their phones. They’re scrolling through various social media platforms or sharing the most recent funny dog video. And this phenomenon is happening everywhere and all the time. Per Jessica Brown, a staff writer for BBC, three billion people, which is around 40 percent of the world’s population, use social media. Brown went on to explain that we spend an average of two hours per day on social media, which translates to half a million pieces of content shared every minute. How does this constant engagement with social media affect us?

According to Amanda Macmillan of Time Magazine, in a survey that aimed to gauge the effect that social media platforms had on mental health, results showed that Instagram performed the worst. Per Macmillan, the social media platform was associated with high levels of anxiety, depression, bullying, and other negative symptoms. Other social media platforms, but Instagram especially, can cause FOMO, or the “fear of missing out.” Users will scroll through their feed and see their friends having fun that they cannot experience. For women users, there is the pressure of an unrealistic body images. Based on the survey that ranked social media platforms and their effect on users, one participant explained that Instagram makes girls and women feel that their bodies aren’t good enough because other users add filters and alter their pictures to look “perfect,” or the ideal image of beauty. The manipulation of images on Instagram can cause users to feel low self-esteem, anxiety, and feel insecure about themselves overall. The negativity that users feel because of what others post can create a toxic environment. Would the same effects be happening if people spent less time on social media? If so, maybe users need to take a hard look at how much time they are spending. Or social media platforms could monitor the content that is being posted more to prevent some of the mental effects that some users are getting from social media usage.

Although Instagram can cause have adverse effects on mental health, it can create a positive environment for self-identity and self expression. It can be a place of community building support as well. However, such positive outcomes from social media must be a result of all users cooperating and working to make the digital space a positive environment. Based on the survey of social media platforms, though, this does not seem to be the case and currently, the pros of social media platforms like Instagram seem to be far outweighed by the cons.

Although Facebook and Twitter were ranked higher than Instagram in terms of negatively affecting the mental health of users, they can still have adverse effects as well. In a survey of 1,800 people, women were found to be more stressed than men and a large factor to their stress was Twitter. However, it was also found that the more women used Twitter, the less stressed they became. It’s likely that Twitter acting as both a stressor and a coping mechanism comes from the type of content that women were interacting with. In another survey, researchers found that participants reported lower moods after using Facebook for twenty minutes compared to those who just browsed the internet. But the weather that was occurring that day (i.e rainy, sunny) could have also been a factor in the user’s mood.

Although social media seems to only have adverse effects on the mental health of its users, social media is a great way to connect with others. It can act as a cultural bridge, bringing people from all across the globe together. It’s way to share content that can be positive and unite people with similar beliefs. With the positives and negatives in mind, should we change how much we are using social media? Or at least try to regulate? People could take it upon themselves to simply try and stay off social media sites, although with the digital age that we live in, that might be a hard feat to pull off. After all, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, as demonstrated from the surveys on social media. But perhaps we should be looking at the way that we are using social media rather than the time we spend on it. If users share positive content and strive to create a positive online presence and community, other users might not deal with the mental health issues that arise after usage of social media. But then again, people should be free to post whatever content they want. At the end of the day, users have their own agenda for how they manage their social media. So perhaps it’s dependent on every individual to look at their own health and their social media usage, and regulate it based on what they see in themselves.

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When Memories 404

The Internet is forever. Think before you post. Once something is uploaded, it can’t be taken back. These prophetic warnings, parroted in technology literacy PSAs and middle school lectures all over the country, remind us to think about our online presence, to consider what will come up when we Google our name fifteen years from now.

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