Welcome to the Freak Show
Social media, pornography, and the contemporary exploitation of mental disorders
Freak shows used to be those exhibitions where you could find ‘biological rarities,’ meaning individuals who had unusual physical characteristics that often came as a consequence of diseases and conditions. At some point, tattooed and pierced people also became an attraction in freak shows (especially in modern-day sideshow acts), but these were more related to performing an act (such as fire eating or sword swallowing) than simply being one of a kind.
More recently, people started choosing to ‘become freaks’ by modifying their bodies or hosting outstanding performances. Still, consequently, the word ‘freak’ itself became more of a slur than an entertainer specialty. Nowadays, you can enroll in a school in California to learn how to become a sideshow performer. But back in the day, as early as in the medieval period, it was the display of disability and deformity that reunited crowds. An early modern example was the exhibitions held in the 17th century at the court of King Charles I, which featured two conjoined brothers.
Several medical conditions were seen as attractions in freak shows, such as dwarfism, microcephaly, hypertrichosis, obesity, intersex, etc. Most of these examples wouldn't fall under an ‘oddity’ category these days, and increasingly more activist movements such as body positivity (and ultimately body neutrality) have been pushing an agenda of equality and normalization of body diversity. The same goes for laws and acts that cover these people (e.g., the American Disability Act in the United States or the ADA).
In "Before the ADA, there was the freak show", Kim Kelly addresses how this act, passed thirty years ago, has changed the lives of people with disabilities, especially when it comes to labor and discrimination:
The law had a massive impact on disabled workers’ ability to enter the workforce, something that had been previously denied to many of them due to social stigma and a widespread lack of accessibility. (…) It took decades of tireless organizing from disability rights activists to get the law passed and finally see their basic human rights legally acknowledged. Lest we forget, that legislation only came after centuries of exclusion. It has taken us a long time to be recognized as human at all.
Though the struggle continues even three decades later, as pointed out by Kelly, enabling more people to join the workforce meant, under a capitalist society, that more people would be seen as worthy of exploitation. Otherwise, these ‘unproductive’ people would carry on being "shut out, stigmatized, sterilized, tortured, incarcerated, and institutionalized," or they could join a freak show.
Back in the day, Kelly says she could have been a candidate for a freak show as someone who has ectrodactyly (also known as ‘lobster claw syndrome’). In fact, she shares in her essay that she was even due to start performing at the Coney Island Sideshow before COVID-19 hit, but up until the 1940s and especially during the Victorian era, the freak shows were "one of the only sources of gainful employment available to people like [Kelly] who had unusual or extreme physical or cognitive disabilities." While some were able to have ‘normal’ jobs, many only had the option of relying on charity, living in poverty, or being institutionalized.
Kelly follows by adding that hundreds of people found in the freak show a "viable and hypervisible career path," as well as a loyal community to be part of and find love. At the same time, these shows also became a big business: over 100 independent sideshows were rolling through the US in the 1940s. Magazines advertised them, locals met to watch the show, and even people who couldn't star in performances would be able to find jobs supporting the acts.
Some performers have indeed become rich and famous, either by amassing fortunes or by holding court with kings and presidents, as Kelly states. Others decided to live quiet lives and retire in small towns. But, sadly, some of these people were mistreated and exploited both in life and in death, as their body parts were featured in exhibitions until as late as 2002.
Kelly writes that some people were sold into these shows as children by their parents or ‘discovered’ by agents. In the case of Joice Heth, an elderly black-blind woman who helped launch P. T. Barnum's showman career, she was sold to him by a promoter. In the face of that, Kelly says:
There is no way to discuss the sideshow (and the history of freak shows more generally) without bringing up the exploitation, racism, and ableism that characterized so much of its existence, as well as the ethics of exhibiting disabled people’s bodies for other peoples’ amusement and titillation. It’s complicated, to say the least, and unsurprising that the disability rights movement has an uncomfortable relationship with this part of its history.
More specifically, when Kelly interviewed Maria Town, the president of the American Association of People with Disabilities in 2019, she argued that “sideshows set the stage for modern conceptions of disability—identifying people with disabilities as objects of scorn and pity, as inherently ‘other’ from mainstream society."
However, as exploitative as sideshows could have been, she argues that freak shows still "began to assert [people with disabilities'] worth and curate how individuals looked at them." And so, with the exposition and the proliferation of these shows, Town says, they became "important sites for the development and proliferation of disability culture."
From the mid-20th century on, Kelly writes, public attitudes began to change, and medical advancements gave more opportunities for people with disabilities. "Scientific racism fell out of vogue, appetites for live entertainment shifted, and laws were passed targeting the exhibition of human beings." But despite the decline that followed in that period, sideshows are still a thing (though much smaller), or they have ‘evolved’ to another sphere: social media and pornography.
While many creators have been using platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to spread awareness and break away from stereotypes and prejudice, there is always a darker side to that. I’m not going to delve much into the topic of disability pornography as this has been widely covered by more competent people than me, but I would like to propose this thought exercise: are we making mental disorders a freak show-like attraction on social media and financially supporting the exposition of vulnerable individuals?
As mentioned before, mental disorders were also an attraction on freak shows, but I would guess they weren't as entertaining or profitable if they didn't come with a physical deformity. Still, mental disorders can also be disabling in some cases, to the point that they are categorized as psychiatric disabilities in some countries.
According to the ADA, psychiatric disability and mental illness are words that are often used interchangeably. However, mental illness would lie under a medical context "to refer to a wide range of conditions related to emotional and mental health," whereas psychiatric disability is more commonly used in a legal or policy context "to refer to impairments covered under the ADA." And, according to the ADA, psychiatric disability means a "physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities." This would include anxiety disorder, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
About 18% of workers in the U.S. report having a mental health condition in any given month. This means that psychiatric disability is one of the most common types of disability covered under the ADA. (ADA fact sheet)
Two of the main rights granted by the ADA to people with psychiatric disabilities are privacy and the right to accommodation. But these would cover people who work for an American company, regulated jobs, not content creators, and other people who are platform workers. While there is the intention to create a labor movement and rights for these categories, it's still in its infancy. In the US and the UK, for instance, there are already conversations about child labor, pay transparency, pensions, and health benefits, among other things, when it comes to platform workers.
In the meantime, people from everywhere in the world are joining social media platforms and finding ways to monetize anything: get-ready-with-me videos, dance videos, pet videos, and photos; writing on Medium with a paywall; selling nudes; streaming games; streaming yourself sleeping; shitposting; and the list only grows. Though it’s already more or less common sense that not everyone will be like PewDiePie when joining YouTube or Cardi B when joining OnlyFans, the appeal to make money out of everything and anything is indeed tempting.
But let's not digress too much on that. Or rather, let's change the focus from the content creator to the content consumers, a much bigger portion of an already gigantic amount of people. That is because, when you are playing the game of making as much money as you can, whatever is more profitable is the way to go—even if that means doing NPC streaming.
Theoretically, for a type of content to be profitable, you must have people consume it. Of course, marketing plays a big role in this, and you can always go back to the classic idea that sometimes we don't even know we need something, and then we are hooked. When it comes to influence marketing, though, it’s an overpowering hybrid that uses social media tools and digital technology to take us to a point where content creators, or, say, their creations, are profoundly affecting our lives and our economy.
All that to say, even though you can always think that a problem may disappear when you turn your eyes away from the screen, we are increasingly less capable or even allowed to be offline. The expression ‘chronically online’ says much about our situation and how we are exposing ourselves and being exposed to certain things that should have been kept private.
Keep in mind that this observation doesn’t have to do with moralism about what should or shouldn’t be shared. First, every platform has its rules (some of them being created after someone pushed the limits), every country has its laws, and then there's the individual's decision (although sometimes this goes through the evaluation of a supporting team too). So the question is: are we all in ideal conditions to make these choices consciously and responsibly? And when I say that, I say it to the point of how mentally stable and well we are to ponder what is best for us.
Of course, this is something that permeates all spheres of our lives, and not to go too deep into the philosophical questions of free will or who one truly is, but how conscious are we about the dimensions that something can take these days, in an era of social media and 24/7 multiplatform connection to the internet?
I will give two particular examples that were somewhat confined to the Brazilian context, but there are plenty of similar cases internationally. The first one happened last year, in 2022 when a woman in a manic episode thought that a homeless man was Jesus and had intercourse with him in her car. Her husband caught them in the act, and his response was to knock the man down.
This arrived in the news, or more particularly, in Twitter feeds. It took a while until people learned that the woman was ill and in a manic episode, but until then (and even after that), many jokes were being told and retweeted. The homeless man, in the end, became an episodic internet celebrity, even taking part in podcasts and ads while the woman was hospitalized.
There were plenty of discussions on whether the man hadn't committed a crime, such as rape, since the victim wasn't fit to make decisions at that moment. And it turns out that the man had already been in prison for eight years for crimes such as kidnapping and extortion. But... he also became the face of a cryptocurrency trade company (how meta!), and he's no longer homeless. The woman? She shared on a TV show that she was devastated by the episode—psychologically and also in terms of reputation.
The other example is Andressa Urach, a Brazilian reality TV celebrity who has a dark history of abuse in childhood, prostitution, and borderline personality disorder. After almost dying due to a cosmetic procedure, she became an evangelist and decided to change her lifestyle. Andressa donated huge amounts of money to the church, which led her to face poverty once again.
She shared in an interview that she was really scared that she would need to go back to prostitution, but in the meantime, she was also creating pornographic content for digital platforms — some of them being recorded by her 18-year-old son, who, supposedly, suggested that she should have gone back to the adult content industry. Andressa has another younger son, of whom she doesn’t have custody.
For years, her photographs, videos, and public persona have populated Brazilian Twitter as a meme, as a reaction comment. But unlike the woman from the first example, Andressa doesn't seem to have the same privilege to choose privacy and disappear from the public sphere. Instead, her abuse is being constantly monetized and supported by people who buy her pornographic content or the exposition of her private life.
Then, again, if these kinds of content weren't so profitable, would people still ‘choose’ to join the market? That reminds me of Sayak Valencia's take on drug dealing in Mexico, a topic that she addresses in her book Capitalismo Gore. Here is an excerpt from my interview with her:
In other words, Valencia argues that we live in hyperconsumerist feedback loop: in order to be someone in capitalism, one needs to have money and status, two assets that may be achieved through crime, politics, or entrepreneurship.
It's an assumption that is pretty much similar to that made by Kelly in regards to people with disabilities finding in freak shows a way to earn money and thus status or value in society. However, I would expand Valencia's notion of entrepreneurship to include pornography and influence marketing, though the latter is becoming more and more questionable to Brazilian audiences after a 22-year-old woman recently committed suicide due to the fake news spread by gossip profiles managed by the same influence marketing agency.
Curiously enough, a few weeks before, a singer managed by this agency released a documentary on Netflix in which we can see the suffering and mental toll that her fame and exposure to the media have caused. We can watch her excessive use of Rivotril and her mental breakdowns. But when it's about celebrities who have a platform and an actual enterprise supporting their career, their emotional downfall almost feels glamorous—think about Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, and the whole 27 Club.
The problem is that now we are creating on the internet the same kind of exposure and exploitation that was once reserved only for a few. We thought we were using this technology to create a global community, but we’re often just reproducing the mechanics of capitalism with the false feeling that we’re in control. Social media and the platform economy create the illusion that you’re your own boss and that you can always quit when you want, but it’s not that simple when you are not well in terms of mental and financial health.
Though memes and virals come and go at an increasingly faster pace, some have irreparable impacts on people—take this 22-year-old woman who took her own life, for instance. And so we create this online, global version of a freak show as we go to Twitter, TikTok, OnlyFans, or whatever platform to watch and pay for people's exposition of their mental illness. We’re financially supporting depression and anxiety as we watch and appreciate streamers playing video games for 48 hours non-stop; we’re financially supporting narcissism and histrionics when we demand more selfies, more nudes, and more porn.
So, again, the question is: how many of these creators are truly fit to decide whether they are doing what they do because they want and choose to do it? How many of them are truly aware of the dimension of their exposition—both in terms of reach and impact on their lives and well-being? How many of their followers, supporters, and subscribers are there only for the freak show?
Still… In a world where your value is measured by fame and money, it doesn't matter what you do, provided that you are profiting from it. In fact, if you aren’t monetizing it, then you're already wrong and in disarray. When you can stream yourself sleeping or eating and make money out of it, not making a life while you have your breakfast is already making you lag behind.
Maybe you burn out from so much exposition, but at least you can cry in a Ferrari if you don't end up killing yourself (try searching on Google ‘influencer suicide’ to get an idea). You can also burn out by working a white-collar job, but you probably won't ever make enough money to buy an expensive car where you can cry. And, at the end of the day, isn't work exploitation anyway? So maybe it's better to do something that pays more. Aren't we all going to die in the end? So maybe it's better to live fast and die young while wearing Gucci and diamond veneers. It's all about necropolitics and gore capitalism, so why bother?
Even though it makes sense from the creator's perspective to be where the money is, my suggestion is for us as consumers to think about what we’re buying. In Sweden, for example, prostitution is illegal, but only those who buy the service are punished. While this strategy may have its pros and cons, it's an interesting approach to problems such as sex trafficking and prostitution as a resource for financial aid.
And though we may still buy consumer goods from ethically and criminally ambiguous companies for whatever reason or need, here we are talking about people, single individuals who are turning their bodies, lives, minds, and image assets.
We would likely be concerned if we saw someone stripping in the middle of a town square—not just because it may be a crime, but because what led that person to do that? On the internet, though, we pay for that; we hit the like button, we share the content, we follow the person, and we subscribe to platforms that agency them, so it's easier to find squares where distressed people strip themselves.
Is the regulation of social media the way to go? Maybe. But while that doesn't come, it's a good idea to think twice before getting a ticket to an online freak show.
