11 Theses on Instagram and the Modern Woman
Of all the major social media apps of the last 20 years, Instagram is the most distinctly feminine. Compared to its peers, IG is a beautiful app. It feels. It has a humane and relational texture that other apps, especially Twitter and Facebook, lack. Several things about IG create this, chief among them the app’s reliance on images of people as its main form of communication.
This humane aesthetic to IG gives it a stronger culture than many other apps. Every social media app has some kind of culture, but few other apps have an interface as human-oriented as IG has.
The culture of IG can best be described in three ways: Aspirational, maternalistic, and introspective.
IG culture is aspirational. It is primarily about showing one’s life, and the best way to do this is to have a life worth showing. IG culture creates an ambition toward having an Instagrammable life, a life that looks good on the app and wins the approval of followers. Thus, a lot of content on IG actively coaches the user on how to have this Instagrammable life (beauty tips, fitness tricks, life hacks, parenting secrets, etc.).
IG culture is maternalistic. People talk on Instagram the way mothers talk to children. They use soft-spoken language (“I just want me/you to feel like this”) . They substitute urgency for confrontation (“This is absolutely terrible and you have to stop doing this”). A lot of IG parenting content, for example, assumes the point-of-view of an experienced parent giving a non-experienced parent hard-won wisdom, even if the content creator is herself a young parent. IG is not a culture of arguments or analysis, but of advice.
IG culture is introspective. Its content tends to probe inward, toward the thoughts and emotions, rather than outward. When people log on to IG, they are not primarily looking for information about the world, or even information about other people. They are looking for ways to feel: excited, helped, curious, saddened, aroused, etc. This is why, even though IG is an aspirational culture, users will nonetheless post video of themselves crying, or long posts about things that are depressing or difficult in their lives. Some of this is authentic, some of it probably not, but the point is that IG is a place for people to feel, and ask others to feel with them.
In our current American society, aspirational, maternalistic, and introspective cultures tend to intersect closely with post-Christian ideas and attitudes. Expressive individualism, the life of the totally free and liberated person, is deeply aspirational. Progressivism, the pursuit of absolute equality and inclusion at any expense, has maternalistic aspects. And therapy culture, with its emphasis on feeling good about oneself no matter what, and being reassured that “you are OK,” often goes hand-in-hand with heavily introspective lifestyles and habits.
There’s a synchronicity on IG between certain secular and left-wing attitudes and the app itself. The user experience of the app creates a plausibility structure, for example, for the feeling that one’s marriage should be an endless source of satisfaction, and if it isn’t, something needs to give (a strained or cold marriage is not Instagrammable). It creates a plausibility structure for the idea that a child’s expressing negative emotion toward a parent is always a sign that the parent must change (we should never be OK with our children’s negative emotions).
These plausibility structures exist beyond simple religious or political binaries. Even “tradwife” content participates in the aspirational/maternalistic/introspective culture, and thus gives the impression that if women who are unsatisfied with pop culture simply homestead, they’ll finally be happy (and other people will see how happy they are).
To understand the religious and political divergence between men and women today, Christians must understand the power that social technologies wield in our society. In this case, Instagram is an example of a social media that cultivates, simply by virtue of what it is, thoughts and habits that bend the user toward a preoccupation with the self and with sensations of happiness. This preoccupation finds its most natural fulfillment in socially liberal politics and lifestyles.
Deleting IG may be necessary for some, but removing apps does not remove their broader social impact. Instead, what’s necessary is a conscious deconstruction of these effects and an effort to put social technologies in their place, so that they serve our values, rather than becoming our values.
These are very thoughtful theses, and all are reasons I am glad I never got on IG. I wonder if some therapists are appalled by therapy culture. Therapy itself can be helpful, if one has a wise and discerning therapist. But, therapy culture has wreaked a lot of havoc. A particular example is that when a wife encounters her husband's sin, she has the right to divorce him. And her friends and family (sometimes even the church) rally around her to approve. Instead of accountability and discipleship which kindly leads the wife to consider her own sin and need for Jesus so that they, as a couple, can go to the cross together, too often the "easy way out" is taken. A family is destroyed, and everyone is more miserable. I would love to see Christian counselors be more courageous. I know it's part of the great spiritual battle that we are in.
It's interesting as well to note how much of this is true of women's YouTube feeds in general, and untrue of men's in general