Algorithms, Archetypes and Aesthetics: How Your Online Lifestyle is Denying You Desire
By Selena Kuikahi
My Twitter drafts are full of almost-tweets like ‘my posthumous novel will be an NYT bestseller in 4 to 8 years’ or a carefully posed mirror pic of me cradling a pack of camel crushes and a bottle of coffee Soylent. I craft these when I’m teething for attention or grasping for some semblance of identity.
Many things have happened to me in my life. When everything was just getting too overwhelming, popular solutions were to manifest, develop a thirteen-part skincare routine and get back to it! Happy girls eat raw algae and have a crystal water craft on their bedside table. Honestly, though, I looked to the internet for other women who had found solutions to these feelings.
Algorithms sell community through products and sound bites. At its outset, productive Girl Boss feminism appeared to be the answer to life’s harshities. ‘Top 5 most efficient ways to fix yourself so you can contribute again!’ This call for contribution did not ask you to show up for yourself, your family, friends, or community. Don’t bother peeling back the layers of personal and structural trauma. In this case, contribution = consumption.
I took a road that I thought was less travelled, along with my other SSRI endorsing, scene-phased, shitposting manic pixie dream comrades. We’re nothing like the consumptive, claw-clipped, toxically positive Girl Bosses. The mascots of dissociative feminism joke about how painfully aware they are.
From girlhood, women are taught to adopt personas for survival. When we see a certain type-girl surviving – safely existing or even benefitting from the world and receiving praise – the adoption of the archetype is subconscious. It’s rebranding.
As a woman, boiling down your baggage to a marketable package is simple. Sanding down the corners of your trauma, illnesses, and disorders is second nature. As Rayne Fisher-Quann explains, ‘[C]hildhood trauma becomes daddy issues, suicidal depression becomes mystique. Selling your pain is easier than living with it.’
What all the online type-girls have in common is that their likeness, the exact struggles that their personas are birthed from, is resold to them. Burnt out from working fifty hours a week? Here’s a shirt/tote/phone case that says ‘tired girl’. Depression getting in the way of basic hygiene? Same, I’m just a stinky little rat girl. Don’t want to succumb to fast-paced fashion trend cycles? Your aesthetic is thrift-grunge-retro-upcycled-garbage core now.
It’s easier to bend to a trope and define ourselves through media because we’ve already seen how the content has been received. In a performative sense, both the glass ceiling breaker and the post-wounded mad woman are pandering to audiences for a sense of recognition.
The overarching issue is consumption. I’m not picking at the pouts or early morning routines. My argument is that if you want things to be better – and I mean actually change for the greater, tangible good – you have to disconnect from your online ‘aesthetic’. It’s not the photos or the videos independently but the not-so-subtle promotion of lifestyles that are not actually feasible.
In the early 2000s, no one believed starlets when they lied about only eating wings and never exercising. Everyone knew that tabloid-adorning bodies were a result of intense calorie restriction and exhaustive fitness routines. Even then, considering the horrible truths behind the physiques, bodies were still human.
In EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL AND NO ONE IS HORNY, RS Benedict explains how the increase of surgically enhanced, dietician-guided, GMO’d famous bodies has created this phenomenon of desirable people that no longer feel desire.
We have an endlessly scrollable feed of filtered, sponsored, scripted ‘influencers’ that convince us we’re not so different from them. We too can generate the same views, likes, ‘me af’ comments, acceptance and adoration if we do what they do. More specifically, buy what they buy and look how they look. The rate of eating disorders rises every year. Surprise, none of these type-girls are fat.
On one end of the archetype spectrum, there is the corporate macro-counter that completes two hot yoga classes before clocking into their 9 to 5. On the other end is the manic depressive, Juul-for-lunch nihilist that jokingly tweets about their eating disorder. The thousands of TikToks about inhabiting these very particular desirable type-girl moulds are endless.
A quintessential element of the female experience is your desires being secondary to your being desired. Being the right kind of girl who consumes the right kind of media takes priority. And, as Benedict highlighted, this is just another way that the patriarchy has robbed women of pleasure and desire.
There is no moral trophy awarded for inhabiting a certain type of body or seamlessly aligning with all of the ‘right kinds’ of media. No matter how you frame calorie restriction, you won’t have the energy or physical desire to have sex. But you will fit into the cultural understanding of what sexually desirable is – what matters is how desirable you are, not how much desire you experience.
It’s hard enough to feel safe, let alone accepted and appreciated, in real life. The internet is a gruelling place with a short attention span and a vast receipt bank. I would like if my solution were a little more poetic than ‘log off occasionally’, but that might be the ticket if you find yourself irony poisoned and self-diagnosing BPD.