Carnival of Consumption
International Women’s Day arrives, and China’s online shopping platforms burst into bloom. Discounts, curated product recommendations, advertisements made specifically for the occasion, and promotional copy come one after another. The day is called “Goddess Day” and “Queen’s Day” on e-commerce platforms — women, revered as goddesses and queens, appear to have been granted supreme power. Amid the extravagance and spectacle of social media, words and images discharging emotional satisfaction fly like a flock of crows, dazzling and disorienting. But these crows, for all their gleaming plumage, are feeding on the rotting flesh of women’s disciplined consumer psychology.
Social media functions as a display window. On it, people present themselves as objects: fragmented and partitioned, they are no longer whole individuals but discontinuous, thing-like. It is precisely this discontinuity that allows women’s bodies to be consumed again and again on social media; it is this ideology that thickens the base of patriarchal society, letting its power spread and infiltrate until it recedes from view — unnoticed, yet disciplining people at every moment — passing the old ideas of patriarchal society on to a new generation living inside the online world. In a capitalist society, beauty becomes a religious imperative for women (Baudrillard, 2014, p. 124).
The female body has been “ostensibly” liberated, held up as a sign of women’s emancipation. But the squalor behind that sign is hidden by the rhetoric of “bodily liberation.” The surface progress that people generally perceive in the modern female condition — that women can now dress as they choose, compared to the Victorian corset or Chinese foot-binding — conceals murkier waters of capital’s abuse. Beauty has become such an absolute imperative only because it is a form of capital (Baudrillard, 2014, p. 124). The body must be “liberated, set free” so that it can be rationally exploited for productive ends (Baudrillard, 2014, p. 127). The socio-cultural stereotype of women as naturally and willingly enthusiastic consumers is reinforced on social media by capital-driven consumption trends, bringing women nothing but scorn, verbal abuse, and the venom of competitive hostility. The digital spectacle of social media presents people’s exchange value in the form of data; narcissism and the self-affirmation of power are satisfied through so-called “likes.”
“You Look like a Girl”
Gender stereotypes are a central pillar of patriarchal society, and some self-media channels are now harvesting traffic by broadcasting the traditional thinking of older generations. The most typical example is the backlash against the perceived loss of “masculine vigor”: as “fresh meat” male celebrities have grown more prominent, some have argued that men have lost their masculinity and become “soft like women.” This is nothing more than a gender stereotype. Recent years of gender studies consistently show that there is essentially no biological difference between men and women at the level of cognition (Weigard, Loviska & Beltz, 2021). Who says boys must play with robots and girls with Barbies? Who says men get to be carefree while women must be careful about everything? And further — who says men must be breadwinners while women must be housewives? When “like a woman” has become a slur frequently deployed on social media, there is clearly something deeply wrong with this society.
As social media has spread, fan behavior has become increasingly visible in the media. Countless self-media outlets have condemned it as harmful to social values, calling for the regulation of so-called “fandom disorder” and the celebrities involved. Since the majority of fans are women, women have naturally become the target. In an interview in China, Henry Jenkins noted that what fans do makes sense to them, even if it appears irrational from the outside (Jenkins, 2021). Worshipping an idol and worshipping a sports star are the same kind of behavior — neither is inherently superior — yet how much of today’s social criticism is aimed at female fans, while the source of the problem stays hidden? The fan circle has indeed been regulated, but women became the scapegoats: incomprehensible to a patriarchal society, they were forced to yield, and that yielding is also a retreat for society itself.
Digital Smoke that Disseminate for Thousands of Miles
Even when communication carries ideas of gender equality, the distortion of information through media and the near-impossibility of accountability on the internet lead countless people to misunderstand gender equality and inflame gender antagonism.
Social media is a battlefield where the masses display their emotions at will. Upon receiving information, people filter out the arguments and fire back with equally unthought-through, purely emotional messages. The prevailing dynamic is the occupation of a moral high ground from which to bombard those below — a process that invariably stirs up gender antagonism. This illustrates that China’s social media opinion sphere has entered the post-truth era: audiences care less about whether information is true than about the emotional charge behind the claims. Once they have expressed and vented what they wanted to say, they leave the opinion square without following the subsequent development of events (Hu, 2018). At the same time, drawing on Joshua Meyrowitz’s media situation theory, electronic media has merged previously distinct social scenes, blurring the line between private and public behavior and severing the link between physical and social location (Qiang & Dai, 2016). As a result, personal accounts on social media — accessible to anyone — tend to contain a great deal of personal information. When verbal conflict escalates into personal attack, doxxing appears, and relatively private content (selfies, past statements) becomes ammunition. “Whereas these old forms of capturing moments also transcend time, we argue that the documenting practices typical of social media sometimes do more: They collapse time, muddling the distinction between the current version of a life narrative and previous versions.” This collapsed temporal order and jumbled life narrative is laid before internet users, who treat it as a single whole and use it as the basis for personal assault. Through all the various means by which the focus of discussion is displaced away from the actual issue, conversations about gender on social media frequently dissolve into murky water — and the conversation itself dies in the process.
For Chinese netizens lacking proper gender awareness, misogyny is pervasive. With the rise of self-media and the explosive growth of livestreaming, channels with “entertainment value” have expanded rapidly and dominated traffic. The memes and jokes in wide circulation contain no shortage of language that objectifies and discriminates against women. Anyone who tries to moderate the hostility is labeled a “white knight” (used derisively); refusing to join the crowd in discriminating against women is treated as proof of being “behind the times.” Misandry has since emerged online as a mirror image of misogyny — a backlash. This gender polarization waxes and wanes but has never disappeared from the media’s attention, never faded from public view.
Serious discussion is rare on social media, and its speed and constant churn make it harder still for users to think deeply about anything — as Baudrillard put it, “communication excludes culture and knowledge” (Baudrillard, 2014, p. 91). In this environment, the peripheral route of persuasion can only produce a vicious cycle of gender antagonism; the central route of persuasion needs to step in. By directly articulating the gender inequality at work in a specific case and advocating respect and acceptance, the relatively rational users of social media become more likely to reflect seriously on gender equality — and even to revise their existing values. It is worth noting that the underlying cause of gender attacks on social media is the power imbalance between men and women, while the lack of accountability that comes with the nature of the internet may be the actual trigger for the conflict. The media then arrives, scattering digital smoke in all directions and sparking a more violent and more irrational war of words.
References
The Consumer Society, Jean Baudrillard, pp. 91, 124, 127
Alexander Weigard, Amy M. Loviska & Adriene M. Beltz: “Little evidence for sex or ovarian hormone influences on affective variability” states that men’s emotions fluctuate to the same extent as women’s, although likely for different reasons.
Chen, L. (2021, September 26). Interview with Henry Jenkins: Who made the “crazy” fans. Baijiahao. Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1710154649607859625&wfr=baike.
When we say fans are ‘crazy’ and ‘irrational,’ it means we don’t understand why fans behave the way they do. But that doesn’t mean fans don’t understand their own choices: fan culture is about creating meaning and sharing feelings with others, and it is governed by its own subcultural rules and conventions, norms and conventions that may not be fully understood outside of their own communities, but what they do makes sense to them.
Hu. (2018, March 24). Hot Knowledge for Journalism and Communication Exam. Zhihu. Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/34904745
Frontiers of Journalism and Communication Theory: In the Perspective of Media Convergence, Ying Qiang and Lina Dai
Brandtzaeg, P. B., & Lüders, M. (2018). Time collapse in social media: extending the context collapse. Social Media + Society, 4