Influencers appear to have an ideal lifestyle. But there’s a catch, their bodies are important and their work is precarious.
Instagram is developed with the intent to share personal photographs or videos. This turned the platform into a business. Instagram give births and breeds to influencers and influencer marketing, a rising multi-billion dollar industry worth $24 billion, which was just a $1.7 billion nascent industry back in 2015.
Influencers create digital content attract the attention of their followers or potential ones on social media by representing their routine lives in which they also promote products and brands. A large audience means the influencer will get more attention and eventually larger monetization.
The majority of influencers in this category are women who want to develop their identity as a personal brand. On Instagram, there exist 28 million influencers with different range of followers from 1000-1M+. While this provides fortune to many influencers, the work influencers do is precarious. This is in the sense that there are no customary workplace protections, and influencers need to spend a great amount of time and effort to produce a perfect video. This job is 24/7, which requires constant interaction with the public. There’s also another catch that we will discuss in the last half of this article so stay tuned.
The body of influencers is their most precious asset after their digital profile. The selfies or videos that influencers create must comply with the strict standards of attractiveness and femininity, and this is crucial to gain traction. This highlights that influencers need to put in great effort, and they also shape attitudes toward body image.
An easy way to attract followers for women is to post a highly sexualized picture, which is also pornified – an appearance that resembles with porn stars. Drenten and Colleagues conducted a research in which they surveyed 172 social media profiles/pages of women influencers. The sample includes influencers who promote a brand without any remuneration and those who are hired by brands to promote their products. The authors analyzed pictures and communications with followers.
The study unveiled that influencers pornified themselves on Instagram. The authors categorized influencers as soft pornified – in which influencers pose in a way to sexualize their bodies and use gestures that resemble those of porn stars, like playing with their hair and lips, and bending their legs front of the camera – to influencers who post content that is difficult to differentiate from that of a professional porn star. This representation attract users so that these influencers can achieve monetization to promote healthy products, like energy powders, drinks or bars. The data shows a monotonous trend of repetitive sexual representation.
The influencers in this study range from emerging to well-established influencers with millions of followers. These influencers, at times, direct followers to join their OnlyFans or WhatsApp channels to access more explicit content.
However, a dark side of this job is digital sexual harassment, which is not even well-managed by Instagram. The influencers sometimes faced harassing messages, comments, and invasion into privacy. For example, “I love the video, but it’s your boobs that kept me”, “love your ass”, or “I really want you… to beat you with my dick”. Influencers cannot delete these comments because they increase their reach, which eventually contributes to their monetization. Thus, such harassing comments are part of their job. The influencers also fear that a lack of engagement will result in loss of a brand ambassadorship, so instead of deleting, influencers need to politely respond to their audience.
Sexually aggressive comment on Instagram post of an influencer
This harassment is intense, voluminous, and openly done in the digital realm. Lack of traditional workplace protective measures for influencers’ means they have limited recourse. However, when a user, whether a celebrity or an influencer, goes public, they must accept that such a response likely emerge from the public. In retrospect, higher pornified representation of women on social media not only affects influencers (such as through objectification or harassment) but also affects wider society by reducing gender equality. It supports the customary stereotypes in which women are the primary objects for men to satisfy their sexual desires instead of considered equal beings with agency.
