Social media is not playing a positive role in shaping public views about gender equality. Instead, it's a mirror that reflects a range of gender inequality issues embedded in today's society. As the breeding ground of misogyny and the male gaze, social media, unintendedly perhaps, contributes to reinforcing gender stereotypes and fails to efficiently spread and promote the idea of gender equality. The call for gender equality easily gets drowned out by the vitriol and hatefulness leashed online through the shield of anonymity.
Despite differences between cultures and countries, there is an almost striking consistency in the aesthetic standard of a female's physical attractiveness - slender, pale, and delicate. As female individuals that "perfectly" meet this aesthetic standard are gaining attention on social media, most girls are just looking at those bikini-clad social media stars with skinny bodies and confident smiles on Instagram or TikTok and standing in front of the mirrors, complaining about their own ordinariness. By setting up features like "like", "comment", and "follow", social media creates a seemingly straightforward and clear-cut mechanism to indicate popularity. As contemporary life and the internet have become increasingly inextricable, the indicator of the popularity of social media gradually became a measure of real-life likability. Women always spend more time, energy, and money on striving to change themselves and therefore get closer to this single, demanding aesthetic standard. Conditioned by the mental wiring of social animals, humans, women included, tend to spend time and energy, even money, to confirm, to act in accordance with the norms, even the quite flimsy ones constructed by the mirage of social media. What's worse, the pressure coming from the pursuit of "becoming one of those impeccable girls on social media" often triggers a series of mental health issues, like social appearance anxiety, eating disorders, and body dysmorphic disorder. Such pressure could translate into a hefty financial burden, nudging its victims into the trap of hyper-consumerism.
The exorbitant profits of the cosmetics and skincare industries, where costs are often less than five percent of the selling prices, are good examples of how women are being held hostage financially.
When people criticize these industries for peddling fear and anxieties about age and appearance to women, social media, as a vital agency for spreading these anxieties, is often overlooked by critical voices. Social media, by its nature, is the rapid iteration of trends, yet those trends are often just different manifestations of a single aesthetic standard. It's clear that women, when purposely targeted by misguided and malicious cultural cues delivered ever more precisely through algorism, tend to fall prey to these trends. Social media has thus become a tool to solidify gender stereotypes, and the scale of gender equality has already tipped.
If one could easily argue that intrasexual competition is nothing new and gender stereotypes don't only exist on social media, then now it's the time to take a closer look at why the situations that men encounter on social media are drastically different from women's. From my personal experience of using social media like YouTube, when watching a male Tech Youtuber reviewing a new product, I noticed that viewers hardly care how he looks and dresses. However, in the comment sections of almost any type of female YouTubers, comments about their looks, bodies, and clothing styles can be found easily. My perceptions are by no means an exception——an article on gendered visibility on social media argued that individuals experience digital visibility in profoundly uneven ways. For women, in particular, the public nature of online communication is fraught with risk, packed with all sorts of ridicule, hate, and harassment1. While the way women dress and look affects how people perceive them, the same rule simply does not apply to men. In the context of social media, women and men are exposed to different levels of potential expectations, and women share a much higher level of vulnerability due to a higher chance of encountering personal attacks. This plight is not only shared by active female content generators on social media, like influencers or YouTubers, but by every female user. Because when I saw a female influencer that I followed being commented: "Your arms are too thick for a slip dress," I understood that this is a comment I would probably receive in real life too. These critiques, sometimes initiated by men and sometimes by women themselves, have led to a misogynistic environment of online social networking. Since men are in a position where they can convey their opinions with much less likelihood of having their appearance judged, the male gaze may be present in today's social media in an imperceptible but pervasive way.
When social media reinforces gender stereotypes and is rife with misogyny and the male gaze, it also fails to widely spread and promote the idea of gender equality to the masses. Last summer, when I talked to one of the leaders of the MeToo movement in China, she told me that Weibo and WeChat, the two largest social media platforms in China, have not been as effective as expected in promoting and facilitating social movements like the MeToo movement. One of the key reasons is that the algorithm behind social media makes sure that individual users receive information that is individually customized, essentially fed with content closely related to the people they are connected to, such as friends and family, based on the commonality of their lives and interests.
While Weibo reached 230 million daily active users (according to its official Q1 2021 earnings report), why, with a huge user base, gender equality, feminist social movements, and countless news stories about sexual assault and domestic violence are not effectively disseminated to a mass audience is a question worth pondering. If apathy and disinterest in gender equality is the status quo of the general public, which I believe is a reality grossly distorted, indeed a far cry from the human nature supposedly marked by varying degrees of empathy and mutual understanding. In that case, social media, marked by its innate anonymity and millions of well-insulated echo chambers reinforced by algorism, should take partial responsibility.
Bibliography
Duffy, Brooke Erin, and Emily Hund. “Gendered Visibility on Social Media: Navigating Instagram’s Authenticity Bind.” Social Media & the Self: An Open Reader, 2019, https://doi.org/10.32376/3f8575cb.3f03db0e.