Fame Junkies Jake Halpern Analysis

The hyper-sexualization of women in social media is more prevalent than ever before and it’s simply because of social media and its culture. Culture referring to the fact that celebrities pretty much rule social media. Women and girls are encouraged to post revealing photos of themselves (that they may not even feel comfortable with) to social media in hopes of gaining exposure. In a society where models, celebrities, and social media stars are posting revealing photos and getting a lot of attention from it, it influences the rest of society to follow, in hopes of gaining that same response from followers and other people. The validity one gets from receiving multiple likes and comments on a photo not only makes one feel important, but it’s

All this information would have helped him forge alliances, or plot a coup, or make plans to have sex covertly with one of the leader’s women. A socially astute early man with a keen eye for gathering information on the powerful was probably far more likely to survive and reproduce…over time this sort of natural selection may have favoured behaviour similar to celebrity-watching.” (pg. 155) By keeping tabs on celebrities and just actively taking part in social media sites by following celebrities or retweeting their posts, humans naturally need to fit in and copy whatever celebrities are doing; hence that when celebrities are over-sexualized in the media, it becomes a social normality and is copied by others in order to fit in. Social media is just the outlet and source to gain this

Social media is about numbers; how many followers you have, how many likes you get on a photo, the list continues. For what? For the validity and to fit in. The pressure from social media can lead people, women specifically, to body image issues and eating disorders, as achieving that perfect image is what is craved and desired from followers/viewers. An example of social media pressure and striving for perfection would be Essena O’neill, an 18 year old girl from Australia who had over 600,000 Instagram followers. She would self promote herself and ads would pay her to promote their products. Her life looked seamlessly “perfect” on social media, but she opened up about what it’s really like: “I remember I obsessively checked the like count for a full week since uploading it. It got 5 likes. This was when I was so hungry for social media validation”. Half a million followers and a lot of editing of photos later, she came to the realization that it’s all fake and the life she leads on Instagram is just not how it was in real life. She ended up going back and changing the captions to a lot of her photos, and delete over 2000 of