The Construction of the Female and Minority Self on Social Media
Who are we as women, with and without our social media feeds?
It’s now been scientifically proven that social media causes depression. You can read about it here, here and anywhere else you want to look.
We all know that research results are much more nuanced and complex than the headlines would have us believe. At first glance however, the evidence seemed to show that people who gave up (or even simply reduced) their use of social media experienced significant benefits:
“Many of those who began the study with moderate clinical depression finished just a few weeks later with very mild symptoms”
In my own case, after skimming those kind of articles when the research started looking definitive, I decided that I had nothing to lose. After the 2016 election, my own mental health had taken a hit, along with the rest of the world. Everyone’s trust in Facebook was eroded, and the idea of curating one’s life for public consumption on any platform was beginning to feel well … gross.
I didn’t deactivate my social media accounts. I just stopped using them. Whenever I felt like scrolling mindlessly, I did something else instead. I looked at my own photos, or read a book on Kindle.
That was in January 2019, after writing this article about social media being so much work, ha! In some ways, it was a relief to give it up. There’s a definite burden that comes with knowing what’s going on every minute of the lives of one’s entire social circle since kindergarten. There is an aspect of ‘emotional labor’ in trying to keep up, to like, love, and make encouraging comments. Plus refusing to scroll means letting go of the FOMO, which the research argues is one of the greatest causes of our discontent.
There was also a sadness for me that came with the disconnect. I wasn’t keeping up with friends, most of whom I don’t see regularly due to demands of work and kids. I lost track of the daily lives of my family overseas. Six months after beginning my experiment, I can honestly say that I feel no marked difference in my mood: no vast improvement in my happiness quotient either for the positive or negative.
The one thing I do notice being off Facebook and Instagram is the lack of documented, coherent and organized narrative of my life (okay, semi-organized). I would argue that in a world focused upon and shaped by social media, this could be a de-centering and de-stabilizing experience for many people that might actually decrease their sense of mental health and well-being.
Social media does something for us that could only previously be achieved by writing (and finding a way to publish, don’t forget) a memoir or other more formal and difficult to access methods. It provides a record of our lives that was once afforded only to the fabulously famous; those who were mostly white males. Not only that, the documentation is in our own voices, according to our own interpretation.
In a society where the voices of women and minorities are over-looked, minimized and even erased, surely it cannot be an entirely bad thing for us to have the opportunity to control and shape the elements of our own life stories? Is it not empowering to be able to present ourselves in the way we wish to be seen, rather than in the way we are represented (or more often discarded) by the white male gaze?
It’s always fascinated me the way that women have kept diaries and journals throughout history (see Anais Nin as a prime example). It was a socially sanctioned means for women to construct the self, but it was limited to the private sphere. There was no opportunity to be witnessed in the public square, which brings with it the peril and potential growth of having our self-concept adjusted or challenged from time to time.
For the first time of any generation, the ‘ordinary’ and non-famous woman can cease to be the ‘gazed upon’ and become the one actively gazing out into the world. She can be ‘subject’ rather than ‘object’, able to self-reflect and select the moments and aspects of her life she wishes to emphasize. She is able to witness history but also to make a public record of what she felt, how she acted in response to it — that is if she feels empowered enough, despite/within the constraints of a patriarchal system.
Before we even had a chance to fully develop under this new medium, the chants decrying our collective narcissism had already begun. Yet, even if our #bestlife posts are a little self-centered at times, we need to consider the fact that women and minorities are often pushed to be ‘human givers’ instead of ‘human beings’ (a concept defined by Amelia & Emily Nagoski in their book ‘Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle’). Isn’t it right for us to push back against that pressure, and demonstrate a strong sense of our own person-hood and agency? I see women doing this on my social media feed all the time — and it looks good on them.
Considering the difficulties women have claiming our voices, isn’t it our prerogative to reclaim some of that narrative power? Of course it feels narcissistic and of course we will be accused of narcissism by some. We know that any man who speaks or writes about himself is just a human being whose experience we should all connect with. (Look at Miller, Hemingway, Kerouac for example.) A woman who dares to speak or write about herself is simply … selfish. Look at the ways Anais Nin was and is still fiercely criticized from every angle.
In my personal experience, I sometimes use social media impulsively to voice a strong feeling or opinion, which is then followed by a emotional backlash; a sense of shame that I’ve been so outspoken (which might make me seem depressed or angry). I’ve taken up people’s valuable time to share inner thoughts that some might consider better kept ‘private’. I end up questioning if this makes me an ‘attention seeker’. This often makes me walk back my posts and hide or delete them from my time-line, effectively erasing myself from the conversation. (Some of Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability helps with differentiating which things to make public or keep private on social media.)
There are other occasions when I feel safer posting negative thoughts instead of celebrating positive and successful experiences for fear that others will think I am ‘perfecting’ and curating my life too carefully.
I’ve been on both sides of the Facebook debate now. I’ve thought (okay over-thought), considered and re-considered the ways in which to use or not use social media. There’s no question that Facebook is a flawed space, used by flawed individuals in a flawed, patriarchal, capitalistic society. We have been undermined and data-mined to death. Nobody has an obligation to post on social media, but the old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” can be replaced by this one:
If a woman lives in a digital world and doesn’t make a single post on social media, does she even have a voice?
Are women and minorities erasing ourselves from the public sphere yet again? If so, why? Is our active absence a truly effective protest against the powers that we can feel pressing down on us heavily in this era of Trumpian contempt?
Are we willing to ‘cede the space’ to those who have tried to colonize our bodies and minds for so long? The ones that delight in seeing us cowed back into subservient, passive, compliant silence?
Or do we attempt to transform the way we think about and use social media? Do we look for new, ever-more creative ways to smash the patriarchy right back, raising and amplifying each other’s voices in unexpectedly powerful, life-affirming, world-changing ways?
