By Annika Inampudi ’21, Arts and Entertainment Staff Writer

If I weren’t so accustomed to it, the word “influencer” would sound almost dystopian, like a creeping shadow, silently pulling at the strings of our minds, pulling us along like puppets. It is simultaneously scary and empowering to think about this new wave of marketing that’s sweeping the internet. Officially, an influencer is someone who has established credibility in a specific industry and uses their knowledge to persuade their following to buy items on their advice. It’s an industry built from and for social media. Anyone can do it– all they need is a phone and a working camera. 

Influencing is also a lucrative career. With around 2.5 billion social media users worldwide, brands are discovering that influencers are powerful marketing forces, bringing in $6.50 for every dollar spent. Brands invest hundreds of millions of dollars in influencers, and becoming a “verified account” opens many doors, from book deals to all-expenses-paid vacations.

This 21st-century phenomenon is primarily female-driven. 77% of all influencers are women, and in the lifestyle industry, that number rises to 88%. Women are also the primary consumers of influencer-driven content. Across social media platforms, women are consistently the most active demographic. Navigating social media as a woman, consequently, involves being bombarded by images carefully curated to grab your attention. The effect of the epidemic of Facetune (a popular selfie-editing app that allows users to re-shape their bodies) and the portrayal of unhealthy and unattainable standards by influencers has long been debated, but I’d like to examine the group on the other side– the female influencers themselves. This is a group of women who profit off of false portrayals and corporate sponsorships, who take heavily edited pictures of themselves on the beach and sell an impossible lifestyle to young women. 

Recently, an exposé of a popular Instagram influencer named Caroline Calloway was published on The Cut. Her best friend, Natalie Beach, the author of the article, writes about the rise and fall of her relationship with Calloway, which develops from puppy-like obsession to betrayal. The big twist in the middle of the story was that Calloway had lied her way to Instagram success. She posted ads that looked like posts to get more likes and bought tens of thousands of followers. Calloway was an art history major trying to get a book deal without a fanbase. She had no choice. She was a self-made woman, and as she says, “women spend too much time apologizing for promoting their work.” Instagram influencing was a way for female writers to break through the male-dominated publishing industry. As Beach writes in her article, “Instagram is memoir in real time. It’s memoir without the act of remembering. It’s collapsing the distance between writer and reader and critic, which is why it’s true feminist storytelling.” In a female-dominated industry that still has a pay gap, the only way to get ahead, for many women, is to cheat the system. 

While Beach argues that influencing is feminist, the career has gender expectations and consequences that are inherently anti-feminist. We are left with a reckoning of the beast that modern feminism has become. Where does the corporate woman fall? Is the Kardashian-like influencer reclaiming their body or promoting the objectification of the female form? As women in a world that has finally found its footing with the internet, it’s important to be aware of the systems with which we interact. Caroline Calloway is a fraud, yes, but she’s also a woman grappling with a system that doesn’t take women’s voices seriously. Achieving success on the corporate side of the internet requires us to sell false dreams to other, poorer women, to pull them down so that we can climb to the top. The question still remains: are we okay with that?