Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  * * *

  —

  The sun is beginning to sink, painting the sky a burning orange and gilding the gentle tips of the waves that lap against the pier. Gemma leans farther out over the railing and watches as the waves disappear beneath her. Black pillars, the husks of old wooden piers, stick out of the water, casting shadows. She should be getting ready right now. It is Thursday, the night of The Rising’s weekly Social for Social party, and she is supposed to attend it, because she has always attended it and will always attend it so long as it is relevant. Benoit arranged for that. He will be expecting her there tonight. Waiting for her. But Gemma is exhausted. She does not want to go to that dark, cloistered place, no phones allowed. She doesn’t feel like she exists when she’s there.

  Instead, she moves closer to the sun. The pier is crowded and strangers eye her up and down. She has the impression that everyone is watching her, remarking, if only to themselves, on her hair, and gait, and skin, what she is wearing, and if she smiles. She straightens her shoulders and looks straight ahead, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone, not wanting to give in. Somehow, the possibility of their eyes on her has turned the short walk to the end of the pier into a performance, and she becomes confused and forgets if this is how she usually walks, how she usually holds her head, or if it is the invisible audience that is dictating her movements.

  Someone is following her—that much she is sure of as she reaches the end of the pier, where the sun burns before her. She keeps her shoulders squared, refusing to turn around, refusing to give in. The sky is beginning to turn red, as if it were really on fire. Everything is suffused with hot light, the kind of light so thick it appears to have weight and substance, a gauzy film you could hold in your hand.

  I watch her in silence—muzzled, invisible, and at the same time omnipresent, a looming force that surrounds her unseen—as I have done countless times when I have held her image in the palm of my hand. There but not there. I watch as she takes out her phone and turns the camera on herself. I watch as she leans against the railing, and then her back arches slightly and her head tilts upwards, her body moving unbidden to catch the light, find her angle.

  I swear all I do is watch.

  PART TWO

  IT WASN’T UNTIL later that night, when I finally got home, still drunk and far wearier, and recharged my phone, that I learned what had happened. Numbers in red—numbers the Likes of which I’d never seen—blared at me from the bottom of my Instagram app: 147 new Followers, 325 new likes. I stood there swaying, dumbstruck, my throat gone dry. I was already so exhausted, and the revelation of this new reality was so abrupt, that I could not believe what I was seeing. I tapped on the empty heart; it filled with black and then showed me a list of names I didn’t recognize, anonymous faces smiling out of their perfect circles. I slid down the list, found the cause of it all, and in that moment everything changed, although of course in reality the moment had come much earlier, when Benoit had tagged me in a photo.

  Hands shaking, I tapped on the miniature image of myself, watched as it flickered, disappeared, and then consumed my screen. I was splayed out on the bed, legs spread open, fingers pressed into my groin. It was softly lit and yet stark, my body and the rumpled duvet outlined in late afternoon sun. Critics often talk about the “naked” quality of Benoit’s work. There is a realness to it that feels stripped down, and a little gritty, and all the more poignant for it. You could not really see the face of the girl in the photo. I could have been anyone. I could have been Gemma. But Benoit had tagged me. I pressed my thumb against the image and my name appeared, suddenly seeming as anonymous and unknown as all the other strangers online with the identically formatted profiles.

  On the one hand, I was a little appalled. I looked like a slut, the way I was arching my back, my eyes looking out at the camera half-lidded and lascivious. On the other hand, it didn’t matter, because people were Liking it. The image already had 4,614 Likes, 18 Comments, a trail of hieroglyphs from faceless ciphers: Flames. Pink flowers. An eggplant. Another eggplant. Three water droplets.

  HAWT

  Gross

  I’d hit it

  Porn. Report

  Does she have no shame?

  Omg, I wish I looked like her.

  Uh, I can see her vagina.

  I spread my fingers against the screen, zooming in on my crotch. You could see the fingers beneath the silk panties, and to one side a distinct labial fold. That was sort of bad, I thought. I hadn’t realized that I’d been showing, and I felt slightly betrayed that Benoit had chosen to post this one, of the thousand photos he had taken.

  Maniacally, I began refreshing my screen over and over again, my heart clanging like a bell as the symbols on my screen lit up and disappeared, then lit up again, and the day’s frustrations vanished.

  One comment read, in all-cap letters: I WANT TO BE HER.

  I screenshotted it immediately, my brain humming with pleasure. I thought: Me too. I want to be her, too.

  * * *

  —

  That the photo would go viral was not something I ever expected. The irony is, if it hadn’t been deleted, it might have faded into obscurity. You see, it was the photo’s censure that launched it to the Popular page.

  Shortly after Benoit put up the image, I reposted it to my Instagram feed. The caption was pretty innocuous and plain—I think I said something like new work with the talented @HansBenoit. But it performed well. By the time I went to bed that night, it had 1,029 Likes, making it my most Liked post to date. I fell asleep feeling a kind of peace I hadn’t felt in months. Then the next morning, even before both eyes were fully open, I checked Instagram, nervous, hungover, and excited to see how many more people might have Liked it. But the image was gone. I refreshed my feed. All trace of it had vanished—the Likes, the Comments—as if it had never happened, and I might have thought I’d actually hallucinated it, except for the message I received from Instagram telling me it had been removed for violating “community guidelines.” Worse, I saw that Benoit’s post had also been deleted. Yesterday, my photo had been next to one of Gemma, our faces staring out side by side from his grid, but now there was only her, people that visited his page today would only see her, they wouldn’t even know I’d been there at all.

  Then I called up Jason, utterly devastated, and while we were on the phone together, I saw that Benoit had reposted the image. Jason read the new caption out loud in a breathless, astonished voice:

  “ ‘Female pleasure = Female power,’ ” he began. “Oh, that is good!” He cleared his throat and kept reading. “ ‘Instagram removed this post, even though there is no nudity, and what is shown is not only natural but beautiful. Instagram is okay with the female body as long as it is displayed for the enjoyment of others—but a woman enjoying HERSELF, her very own body, is deemed inappropriate.’ ”

  I watched the Likes and Comments roll in.

  Amen.

  Female sexuality has been demonized too long!

  Fuck Instagram.

  “You need to repost,” said Jason. “Now.”

  After we got off the phone, I spent some time looking around for caption ideas.

  I posted a series of three shots, each one progressively zooming in closer on my crotch area so that the final image was of only my hand beneath the panties. The caption read Give the patriarchy the finger! I’d seen that somewhere under a picture of two teen girls holding protest signs.

  I had a hope that the image would get at least as many Likes as the first. It was more or less a repost, so it was possible that some of my Followers would blow by it without Liking, thinking they’d seen it before. Or maybe some of them would even be annoyed that I was clogging up their feed, even though most of the stuff we see on Instagram is just copies of something else anyway. But then I saw that Benoit’s repost now had 20 percent more Likes than his original, so I figured
it would balance out, and I wasn’t worried anyone would report it again, not now that it was about feminism. I put my phone down and tried to resist checking it again for as long as I could. I lasted about ten minutes at a time. Within an hour and a half, the post had cracked 1K, and I started to feel a tickle of excitement. Already, engagement was way up. Most of my posts get around twenty-five Comments, which is pretty good given my Follower count, but this one already had fifty. My mother had commented of course, Jason too (proud of you!), but there were dozens of others.

  Thank you, one girl, who didn’t look older than fifteen, had written.

  YASSSSS, another wrote.

  This. Is. So. Brave.

  Patriarchy, be warned: We’re coming for you.

  People were tagging their friends, and it was spreading. The post approached 2K Likes and then soared past it. Julia sent a screenshot to our group chat: DUDE, she wrote. You’re blowing up!

  It was a pure high, the kind I used to get when I first started doing coke, before the foreknowledge of a comedown was permanently knit into the experience: a feeling of expansion, of rightness within the world, like in those dreams where I suddenly discover a door in my cramped apartment and it leads to an entirely new wing. So much space. Then, almost immediately, there is the urgent desire for more, to inhale it all. Unfortunately, that’s also the first sign the high is already slipping through your fingers. (It’s a cruel irony that the first high is always the best, the first comedown always the easiest, and, hooked on that one-time illusory experience, you’ll spend years chasing that intensity only to find that it’s receding at an ever-faster clip.) The post hit 5K. It hit 10K. I walked around the edge of the bed until it met the wall, then turned and retraced my steps. I did this over and over again, biting my nails, until the ground beneath me blurred and I was dizzy. I noticed my t-shirt was wet. I’d sweated through it. I tore it off. I slid off my boxers and stepped into the shower, blasting my body with cold water. When I closed my eyes, I saw red bubbles, an imprint of circles and numbers behind my eyelids. I got out of the shower and barely bothered drying off before picking up my phone.

  I can’t believe this is happening, I wrote to Julia and Blake. Two hours after being posted, the image now had 30K Likes. I got into bed, still dripping wet, and put the covers over my body. My battery was getting low, and I plugged in my phone. I had moved past the exhilaration phase, to that numbed-out feeling of invincibility that comes after the fourth or fifth line. My thumb had ceased being a thumb; it was simply a lever that generated names, numbers, colorful symbols, data for my eyes to process.

  Sometimes there was a three- or five-second lag, so that for one instant—sharp inhale—there appeared to be nothing new, and I stared at the screen, holding my breath, heart sinking, until, with one desperate swipe of my thumb, my screen would explode again in an orgy of red bubbles. The release I experienced then was doubly intense, heightened by the delay. Marry me, people wrote. You deserve the nobel peace prize or some shiz, another wrote. Encouraged by my exhibitionism, perhaps, or simply fueled by a narcissistic impulse, people shared deeply personal stories of sexual abuse and sexual shame and anything else they wanted to read into it. I’m also a survivor of sexual trauma, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me to see another rape survivor sharing this kind of thing, one person wrote, quite inexplicably.

  When the vitriol started rolling in, I really got excited. Everyone knows you’re not anyone on the Internet until someone has threatened to rape or kill you, and I drummed my fingers along my lips, feasting on the ugly things people wrote: they called me a whore, a cunt, said that I should kill myself, threatened to rape me except ur such a slut ud probably let me, and I laughed because the guy who’d written that looked like he was fifteen; his face was covered in acne and he was on his school’s softball team. The Comments that actually creeped me out were from the men proclaiming to be “feminist allies” and then begging me to go out with them. If I were your boyfriend, I wouldn’t let you out of the house, one guy wrote, apparently thinking that was a compliment.

  Jason called.

  “Have you seen the New York Mag thing yet?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I’d been too invested in watching my feed skyrocket to even think of looking at anything else.

  “Google yourself.”

  I did, and dozens of headlines appeared:

  Model Activist Calls Out Instagram for Censoring Female Pleasure

  Why Is Female Masturbation Still Taboo? Model Mickey Jones Wants to Know

  Model Flips Off Patriarchy in VERY NSFW Way

  Instagram Slammed for Removing Feminist Model’s Post on Female Masturbation

  I’m Sorry, but This Is Porn: Why Instagram Should Remove Fashion Model’s Post

  “So does tomorrow work then, three p.m.?” Jason asked, though I was too busy feverishly scanning the headlines to follow anything he was saying.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, “sure.”

  “The interview should last just twenty minutes. She’ll call you.”

  I wanted to ask who the interview was for, but I was having trouble stringing together words. We hung up, leaving me once again to the masturbatory pleasure of reading about myself online. Everyone wanted to talk about what it meant that everyone was talking about it, and some people argued that it was a boon to feminism that we were all talking about it, and some people said it was the worst possible thing for feminism, and no one wanted to admit that at least part of the reason why everyone was talking about it was for the immemorial reason that it was a hot girl lying on a bed, almost showing her vagina. My Follower count doubled, then tripled. At a certain point, I looked up and saw that it was dark out. I was still naked, sitting up cross-legged in bed. It occurred to me I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day, and I forced myself to the kitchen, my head swaying like a helium balloon. I chugged several glasses of water, hoping that might give my body a sense of weight, substance, make me feel less like something that could float away. When it didn’t, I dug out a deformed box of freezer-burned Eggo waffles from a block of blue-white ice and popped them in the toaster. Julia called, but I ignored it.

  U coming out tn? she texted.

  My Eggo waffles dinged, and I ate them leaning over the counter, mentally composing a text to Julia. I could not explain why, but I did not want to see her or Blake or anyone else I knew. I kept thinking about what my Followers might imagine me doing that night, what I could post, but couldn’t think of anything specific.

  Gonna lay low I think, kinda exhausted, I texted Julia back, employing the wishy-washy language I used to decline plans. I think, as if I didn’t already know, as if thinking you were declining plans was somehow different than actually declining them.

  Aw c’MON we need to celebrate u becoming famous.

  HA HA, I wrote back, though of course I was enormously pleased with myself. So not famous.

  Ur like the Malala of female masturbation.

  That time I actually did laugh out loud.

  Lol, I wrote. You’re funny, but still no.

  C’mon, it’s La Boite. EVERYONE’s gonna be there.

  I froze. The last time I had gone to La Boîte, I’d seen Gemma. It was just the beginning, I was nothing to her then. Had that happened now, now that I was anointed, nearly on her level, I was sure that interaction would have played out differently. We would have become friends. It seemed absurd the way I had chased her only a day ago; I remembered—though it was through a thick fog of alcohol—the way I’d toiled around the record store, shifty-eyed, and later sought her out on the street, wandering the winding West Village streets to the pier, where I had passed out for…I didn’t know how long. I couldn’t fully remember what had happened. The rest of that excursion remained a blur, overshadowed by the evening’s excitement; indeed, my days before going viral were already growing less distinct in my mind. Idly, I opened up Instagram and g
azed at my post again. It occurred to me that Gemma would have seen it, as a close Follower of Benoit’s she couldn’t have failed to have seen it—in fact, it was possible she had seen the first post well before me. The thought both thrilled and terrified me, and it was with shaking hands that I searched for her name among the Likers and Commenters.

  But it was nowhere to be found. Thinking my eyes must be playing tricks on me, I filled myself a glass of vodka and drank it down. I searched again. Nothing. I visited her profile in a panic; had she seen it then, and found it ugly, juvenile, in poor taste? She was embarrassed by me, and furious at Benoit. She disavowed us, refusing to Like or Follow. I felt sick. But as her page refreshed, I realized she had not posted, not even a Story, since the last selfie she took on the pier that day, her face painted orange by the sun: Pre-partying for @TheRising tn, and by pre-party I mean gazing forlornly at the sun completely alone. Relief washed over me. Maybe she had not seen the post after all. She normally posted to her grid every day and broadcast several Stories, but occasionally a few days would go by without a peep from her and then she’d post something explaining her absence, that she was traveling, or sick, or doing a “digital detox” or taking a “quick mental health break.” Probably that was what was going on. I wasn’t really worried; in Montauk, she had talked about needing a break, and then she’d gotten sick. So it made sense that she was taking a little time off. It never occurred to me that anything might have happened to her. I didn’t think about that possibility until much later. At that moment, all I could do was imagine her reaction when she did log back on and saw what happened. I replayed the scene in my mind over and over again, watched as her eyebrows drew together in consternation and then slid up her forehead in surprise. She would tug on the locket that hung around her neck, as she often did when she was deep in thought. In some versions, Gemma was happy for me; in others, she was jealous. I didn’t know which would be sweeter. But every version ended the same way, with Gemma DMing me and asking to get a “coffee or bite or drink.”