This feels reminiscent of the trend a few years back of wearing makeup "for oneself" in order to claim freedom from the male gaze, despite the fact that the status felt by wearing makeup is primarily downstream of its attractiveness to men. The obvious action to actually claim freedom is wearing none at all, but this would come at the cost of status and so is rarely taken. Whether rebelling or conforming the action is the same: buy makeup and look good
(btw this is not criticizing people who make such choices, it's just unfortunate that it is often paired with self-deception)
"OK" is such a brilliantly meaningless word - almost self-referentially so. Not all of this particular artist's works (or our society's commentaries) use the letters OK, but it was oll korrect of you to use them yourself.
It might be overly cynical, but I imagine this is a case purely of giving the audience what they want. The nature of social media makes success and popularity especially bottom-up in nature, any successful account is fulfilling the desires of their specific demographic, but I don't think we can say that Lainey Molnar, nor probably any Relatable/Positivity accounts, have real substance to offer. Accounts like these are reliant entirely on fulfilling base emotional desire.
So she rises to the top because she assuages fears and insecurities and enables, well, maybe not vices necessarily. She enables actions and habits that her audience were already inclined towards. I'm not certain I could say in this instance whether that's shopping as an activity, playing status games, or some hybrid, but I do think she's an organic mirror.
This feels reminiscent of the trend a few years back of wearing makeup "for oneself" in order to claim freedom from the male gaze, despite the fact that the status felt by wearing makeup is primarily downstream of its attractiveness to men. The obvious action to actually claim freedom is wearing none at all, but this would come at the cost of status and so is rarely taken. Whether rebelling or conforming the action is the same: buy makeup and look good
(btw this is not criticizing people who make such choices, it's just unfortunate that it is often paired with self-deception)
"OK" is such a brilliantly meaningless word - almost self-referentially so. Not all of this particular artist's works (or our society's commentaries) use the letters OK, but it was oll korrect of you to use them yourself.
If everything is OK, nothing is.
It might be overly cynical, but I imagine this is a case purely of giving the audience what they want. The nature of social media makes success and popularity especially bottom-up in nature, any successful account is fulfilling the desires of their specific demographic, but I don't think we can say that Lainey Molnar, nor probably any Relatable/Positivity accounts, have real substance to offer. Accounts like these are reliant entirely on fulfilling base emotional desire.
So she rises to the top because she assuages fears and insecurities and enables, well, maybe not vices necessarily. She enables actions and habits that her audience were already inclined towards. I'm not certain I could say in this instance whether that's shopping as an activity, playing status games, or some hybrid, but I do think she's an organic mirror.