Of all the dazzling models, actresses, rockstars and other assorted goddesses of glamour that graced the 1990s (you know, back when I was young), I NEVER would have guessed that it would be Pamela Anderson who would someday emerge as the poster girl for growing old with dignity and grace. Back then, Anderson was known for a certain type of sex appeal that was NOT, shall we say, “high class.” She was known for her nude appearances in men’s magazines; her breast implants; her cheesy, “dumb-blonde” public persona; a leaked sex-tape with her ill-behaved, heavy-metal-rocker first husband (Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe); and most of all, her starring role in the laughably empty but hugely popular, beach-themed TV series Bay Watch —which mostly comprised extended shots of swimsuit-clad female lifeguards (all with suspiciously porn-inspired physical assets), urgently running toward the water where someone was in need of rescue.
Now, almost three decades and several marriages later, Anderson has flowered into that rare Hollywood unicorn: a beautiful woman who seems ok with aging—and not in that preachy, pseudo-enlightened and self-important way, either. She just comes across like a normal, happy person, comfortable in her own skin, working on some interesting projects and living a great personal life with two grown kids she loves. At age 57, she seems to have better things to do than spend her life trying artificially to preserve or recapture her youth or her erstwhile status as the preeminent tabloid babe, or “bae” as the youngsters might say these days. (Do they still say that? I don’t know. I’m getting too old to keep up with youth lingo).
Anderson is now often photographed wearing little or no makeup, which periodically sends social media into a tizzy, with responses running the gamut from feminist admiration to manosphere-scorn. The last couple of days were a feeding frenzy when a man with over 175 thousand followers on X (formerly Twitter) posted two images of Anderson, one from her youth and the other recent, with the tag “Women truly do age like milk, especially white blondes.”
I won’t go into too much detail on the various kinds of engagement this post received. But receive engagement it did. Masses and masses of it. And that’s the point, isn’t it? I don’t pretend to know all the nuances of how monetised social media works, but obviously the key commodity they trade in is engagement. The formula for success seems to dictate that at least some of the response that a post gets must be negative. In fact, a truly big hit requires a significant and intense negative response, which in turn will elicit passionate (either approving or outraged) responses from others. This keeps the “conversation” rolling.
One particular genre of posts that seems to provide rich fodder for this kind of engagement farming is what I would call “identity-baiting” which makes a statement (often accompanied by a meme) that is pointedly derogatory toward some demographic group. There are many alarmingly popular varieties of this: anti-Black, anti-White, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, anti-men, anti-women and so on. Sometimes, you throw in some overlapping identities into the mix (perhaps to encourage otherwise aligned responders to turn on each other in interesting and incendiary new ways). Notice how the Pamela Anderson troll, primarily denigrating women, also threw in a little racial knife-twist against white people? Yeah, it didn’t go unnoticed in the replies, either.
The most virulent and ubiquitous subset of this phenomenon seems to be anti-woman. There are entire accounts—with hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers—dedicated to contemptuous takes on women, or sometimes a certain subset of women: feminists, mothers, older women, ex-wives who expect child support, women who complain about sexual harassment, women who are “too picky” about whom they date, women who are not picky enough about whom they date, women who have a high “body count” (I had to look that one up—because to me it sounded like they were talking about soldiers or trained assassins!), women who wait too long to have kids, ad infinitum. Of course, these kinds of anti-female attitudes have been around forever. But in the past, not everyone had a megaphone. Also, by and large, people had to own what they said, because they were interacting in real life or putting their name on published material. Now, anonymous armies can telegraph their “thoughts” to millions of people without having to deal with any fallout personally.
The tropes for woman-baiting have also developed some new angles. The last decade has seen the evolution of misogynistic contempt spurred by whether a woman appears to support or criticise certain policies or cultural-linguistic changes having to do with transgenderism. If you have any concerns about it, you’re a hateful “TERF” (trans exclusionary radical feminist). If you have any sympathy for it, you’re a male-pandering “handmaiden”. Perhaps the most obvious new sexist slur is “Karen”—which started out as a put down for a middle or upper class white woman who complained about something—anything at all—that a person of colour happens to have done. So, basically, if you’re a white woman and you have a dispute over dog-park etiquette with another visitor to the park, and he happens to be a black man, you’re essentially toast. You’re going to be threatened on social media and your employer will be harassed into firing you. No, that’s not hypothetical. It really happened. In fact, that was the advent of the “Karen” trope. Four years later, many people still believe the troll-version of the events, even though the purported “victim” has been on record saying that it was a relatively ordinary fight gone a little out of hand and that, while he thinks she was being unreasonable, the turn of events was unintended and wrong. “Karen” as an epithet for women perceived to be entitled narcissists (and usually, but not always, white) seems to have migrated to any and all contexts in which a woman complains about something or is perceived to be doing so. Also, it’s now deployed as often by rightwing trolls as leftwing trolls.
It would be easy to laugh this off as another weird social media phenomenon that nobody in real life cares about. But we live in a world where regressive religious fanatics in some countries are finding newer and more bloodcurdling ways to constrict the life of women—countries where it’s now unlawful for a woman to work, to study, to drive, to leave the house without a male escort, to have any part of her body, face or hair uncovered, to sing, to talk in public, to talk in her home in a voice loud enough to be heard from outside, to train as midwives (which was the last remaining legal profession for women in the country where this was just banned, and it also means women in childbirth can have no trained caregivers). Even in the United States, some recent decisions of the Supreme Court have rolled back some of women’s hard-won protections. Obviously, these are not comparable situations by any means, but we don’t expect them to be comparable, do we? One is the world’s most repressive regime, the other is the world’s oldest constitutional republic, the storied land of the free. So, no. I’m not comparing; I’m just cataloging the troubling DIRECTION of women’s rights all over the world. It’s certainly worth noting, don’t you think?
Given this state of things, seeing social media threads calling to “repeal the 19th Amendment” (which recognised the constitutional right of American women to vote) does not tickle my funny bone. And not all of it is even MEANT as a joke. There are people advocating for the removal of women’s input in public and political life and claiming women do not belong in any profession other than perhaps nursing or typing or fashion. What’s even worse is that some of the purveyors of this stuff are themselves women.
That said, I would, of course, caution against taking such trolling too seriously. As a liberal, I’ve often complained that a lot of my fellow liberals— including my fellow feminists—have a damaging tendency to paint a much darker picture of the world than the one we actually live in, in terms of race and gender relations (outside of the repressive countries I referred to earlier). I stand by that position, because I do think it’s largely correct. But two things can be true at once, and it’s also true that tamping down on women’s progress is something that is loudly advocated by a lot of people, even in societies where it seemed unthinkable just a decade or two ago.
Believe it or not, there is ONE positive way to interpret the pervasiveness of woman-baiting on social media. Keeping in mind that viral engagement farming feeds on opposition, the “popularity” of this type of content likely means it is expected to engender (pardon the pun) a lot of outrage. And it works. Legions of women and men do come out to condemn and fight the misogynists. So, there’s that.
Still, whatever the intent of the trolls who post this stuff, and regardless of the enormous backlash they get, it’s still disheartening to see how much of a non-ironic market there seems to be for straight-up misogyny. Most of these viral posts are either created by or marketed to men who have deep resentments against women, often because of their own failures relating to women or getting their attention. Some are bitter that women, for the first time in history, seem to be doing really well in life by their own efforts—with or without men. They are always watching out for some uppity bae (to avoid using that other “B-word”!) who needs to be dragged down and put in her place. I realise this is an awfully pat analysis. I don’t mean to suggest it’s the whole picture of what feeds this trend. Not even close. But it is at least PART of why this kind of content finds such a ready market.
At the end of the day, we must remind ourselves not to expect a more edifying discourse on women’s issues (or any topic?) on some of these platforms, especially with these engagement baiting viral posts. It’s silly, kind of like expecting thought-provoking storylines on Bay Watch.
The author is a lawyer, writer and editor based in Manhattan, New York