The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Most students also seem to accept the stereotype that women are “more relational” than men (whereas men are all about themselves), and because social media is supposed to be a sphere for connecting to others, students think it’s simply more of a woman’s world. One piece of anecdotal evidence supports this notion: the online survey—unlike the interview process, which involved random sampling—was all voluntary. Students self-selected to take it, presumably because they had something to say about social media or because the topic interested them. And three-quarters of those who completed the survey were women, which means that, when given the chance, women were more likely to share their opinion about social media. Is this simply because (to return to stereotypes) women are more expressive and so are more likely to complete a survey? Or is it perhaps because women are actually more involved and invested in social media? According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, women absolutely are. And the statistics show that “girls dominate social media,” whereas “boys are more likely to play video games.”7

  Figure 4.1 Student Replies about Gender Differences

  These stereotypes are clear in the answers students gave to the online survey question asking if they noticed gender stereotypes in the ways people post on social media. Eighty-five percent of the students who replied to this question noticed at least some differences in gender, as indicated in Figure 4.1.

  The essay responses to this survey question echo what I heard repeatedly during the interviews about gender and social media. Women are more expressive overall, in the students’ opinions. Women are more relationship-centric, and their expressions are all about appearance, showing images of themselves, displaying their bodies, and getting other people to notice their looks. Women are more about selfies and are more self-centered in general, as well as more likely than men to seek attention (often pathetically so, according to some students). Among those who believe that women and men post the same amount—just about different things—students often explicitly mentioned they believe that typical gender stereotypes apply on social media. Many of them spoke of how unfair gender stereotypes are to women, and how it’s unfortunate that women have to deal with these same stereotypes on social media as well as elsewhere. These students believe women are judged unfairly in general because of such stereotypes and face those same unfair judgments playing out on social media as well.

  For this essay question, students’ answers reflected the same kinds of ideas about men that I heard during the interviews. Respondents wrote of how guys are all about showing their life interests, displaying their hobbies or themselves playing sports, and putting up photos not so much of themselves or their friends but of things they like—travel, cars, and sports being the most popular. For men, social media is about displaying your successes and the things you do in life. Men are considered bold and outspoken, more honest, and funny. Guys get to be more “careless” or “carefree” on social media because overall in our society guys are judged more fairly than women; if men put up an offending post, they probably can get away with it without major negative repercussions, whereas women will get punished for any and all mistakes. A number of students felt that guys were clearly more interested in sex, dating, and hitting on women, and occasionally being vulgar about women on social media—something that didn’t come up at all with regard to what women post.

  Over and over, students’ comments on this subject seem to confirm (at the very least) their belief that social media is more of a woman’s world. And when students are discussing why they believe this is the case, the conversation invevitably cycles back to talk of selfies.

  Laura, for example, is a selfie-hater who thinks selfies are “so dumb.” What’s worse, though, is that she thinks women are the ones being “so dumb” by taking them, especially “naked pictures” or just “very sexual pictures,” in an attempt to get attention and approval on social media. Girls take sexual selfies because they want “likes” and want people to affirm for them, again and again, that they’re beautiful, and they do so in public in front of everyone they know. “I just don’t like [selfies] and it aggravates me when there’s thousands of them on Facebook,” Laura says.

  Laura, like many women I interview, judges other women’s activities on social media rather severely, yet is far kinder and more forgiving when talking about men and how they operate online—at least at first.

  In Laura’s opinion, you just don’t see guys putting up selfies. She cites the example of a friend of hers who is extremely handsome. “He’s a great-looking dude, but you would never know that off of his Facebook, because he just doesn’t post anything,” she tells me. “He doesn’t care, but girls make sure they have the best picture because they think guys are going on there, which they may, I don’t really know.” Laura thinks women simply care more about social media, but then she goes on to express a bit of a double standard about the men now, too. “Guys don’t really care that much about Facebook and making sure that they have a good Facebook, and then when they do, you’re like, ‘Why do you care so much about yourself? Why are you so arrogant? He’s taking really good pictures of himself. Why does he think so highly of himself?’ ”

  Although Laura thinks it’s ridiculous for women to post selfies, she perceives it as “normal girl behavior”—it’s just more of a girl thing to do. But when a guy stoops to such behavior, it’s even worse. Men aren’t known to participate on social media in the way women do, so when you see one engaging in what is stereotyped as “typical online feminine behavior,” he gets judged extremely harshly—as harshly as Laura (and her peers) will judge another woman. The worst thing a guy can do on social media is act like women do when they are on it.

  Ian, a junior at a private university in the Midwest, acknowledges straightaway that he will be defaulting to stereotypes in order to discuss gender on social media. “With girls, obviously these are blatant stereotypes, there seems to be kind of two categories. Avid Facebook user—that’s a girl,” he says, by way of starting out. “There’s the one who touches up all of her photos using Instagram or, you know, Photoshop or whatever, maybe adjust the lighting a little bit, so everybody looks really nice in the photos or something, and posts tons and tons, you know, forty photos from a night. You know, four of them are the same group photo, someone’s looking like this and then like that, and then, maybe some other person got pulled into the photo, but it’s like, man, one group photo, one big group photo would have been enough to say who was there, that it was a party and all the information. And you have to scroll through thirty permutations of the same photo really.”

  That’s just one type of girl Ian sees on Facebook. Ian goes on to describe the other. “And then you get the girls who are very self-deprecating and will post a silly photo of themselves from their childhood,” he says. “My girlfriend’s good friend is big on this. She’s lost weight recently, but she used to post these photos of herself from sixth, seventh grade, you know, when she had big red cheeks and was real chubby and all of that. It gets tons and tons of love and ‘likes,’ and everybody’s laughing and having a good time, but it’s almost like a produced candidness. It’s like, you’re seeing a goofy look of me, but you’re not going to think any less of me. It’s because I realize this is silly of me as well.”

  For Ian, like others, social media is very much a “girl thing” because women are appearance-conscious, and women like posting photos of themselves looking good and partying with their friends. Either this, or women are self-deprecating and silly, which is also, in his view, about appearances. For Ian, women are not to be taken seriously in general, and certainly not on social media.

  Ian was blunt about employing gender stereotypes, but some other students were incredibly nuanced and eloquent on the topic. One such young woman, who was very pro-selfie, went on at length about how, in her opinion, negative judgments about selfies have everything to do with negative judgments about women and stereotypes about gender and race. “I’ve noticed that when we make fun
of selfie culture, our jokes are intertwined with jokes about white girls and valley girls, which is something that I’m pretty bitter about,” she wrote. “I get the feeling that if more guys than girls took selfies, the jokes wouldn’t be so popular, and we wouldn’t look down on the selfie takers as much. This might be linked to the fact that girls are encouraged to care about their looks by every aspect of popular culture, but are also encouraged to be humble and somewhat modest by the exact same entities.”

  Not everyone feels this way, though. In fact, some people believe that social media—and in particular the trend of taking selfies—is making guys care about their appearances and their bodies in ways they haven’t before. Tara, for instance, tells me that her opinion on gender, selfies, and social media has changed recently.

  “If you asked me this a couple years ago, I’d say, ‘Yeah, only girls post selfies,’ but there are a lot of males that act the exact same way on Instagram and Twitter,” Tara says. “Instagram was a girlie thing, but now it’s really not. A lot of guys are on it, and they essentially post the same sunset, same workout pictures, that kind of thing.” Tara thinks the difference is simply that Instagram’s popularity has shot up and that the apps are easy to download on people’s phones. “I think it’s more, just, the image of Instagram developed and became bigger. Now basically everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get it’ and download [it] on their phone.”

  But Joe, a sophomore at a private-secular university, happens to be a power lifter, and this changes his entire experience of selfies and social media, though he starts off with a joke about guys and selfies.

  “I’m going to preface [my answer] with a really quick comic that I saw, it’s like, ‘How guys should take selfies,’ ” he says. “It’s like, ‘First, pick up your phone. Then lower it. Lower it even more. Set it on the table. Guys don’t take selfies.’ ” Joe laughs at the joke before continuing, telling me, “So I’ve never been a super big person taking selfies and stuff.” Then Joe turns to the subject of selfies and women. “I think the problem with selfies is that they can promote vanity to some extent. You spend twenty-five minutes getting your makeup ready, just so you can take a snap to send to your boyfriend or a guy you’re crushing on. Then beyond the vanity aspect, they do promote more of a superficial image of who you are.” But, for Joe, selfies don’t always have to be superficial. Sometimes a selfie is just a nice picture. The problem, he says, is “when you see somebody who’s purposely posing in a certain manner, you know, positioning themself in a certain way, facial expression, et cetera, I think it portrays a certain mentality. An example of that would be the duck face. You know? With certain females, I’ve even seen some guys [do it].”

  I heard a lot about the infamous “duck face” selfies that women take—lips puckered, cheeks sucked in. This pose is particular to women, according to just about everyone, though Joe has “even seem some guys” post such photos. People on campuses with Greek life seem to think that making the “duck face” was typical sorority behavior. It is a style of selfie that students like to make fun of, but that no one admits to taking themselves.

  Joe isn’t done talking about “duck face” selfies. He continues, “If you see a girl posing with the ‘duck face,’ you’re like, ‘Oh this girl is very vapid. She’s not very intelligent. She’s superficial. She’s very into how she looks and her clothes.’ And she may be an amazing, great individual, very bubbly, very talkative person. You’re not going to get that from the selfie that you just saw. You’re just going to see her as being whatever society has attached to the ‘duck face.’ And what society has attached to the ‘duck face’ is, it’s a primarily suburban white girl type of thing, who’s not exceptionally intelligent, she likes to drink you know, lattes, wear Ugg boots, and she’s kind of stupid. And so I think when you see that, unintentionally, even if you’re aware of it, you may have some stereotypes preconceived.”

  After Joe finishes this speech, he shifts direction on the subject of gender and social media. “To be completely honest,” he says, “I have not noticed too much of a difference” between men and women. Women put up photos, but guys put up photos, too, and people of both genders react. “It’s not like girls are the only ones complimenting. Girls compliment pictures. Guys compliment pictures. Girls will say, ‘I just went to the store.’ Guys will say, ‘I just went to the store.’ Girls will say, ‘Look, I’m working on this project, you should check it out guys.’ And guys will also say the same thing.”

  Many students raise the subject of how a woman’s body and self-image are affected by all those perfect selfies (and the bikini photo, if someone dares post one); very few students talk about how men are just as affected by having all these images coming at everyone all the time—but Joe is one of them.

  “Before I got into power lifting I was into bodybuilding, and I followed a lot of bodybuilders on Facebook and stuff,” Joe tells me. “All these different guys who are either body builders or physique models. And they’d always have pictures. And I would see these pictures and it’s like, ‘Oh wow! I’m really aiming to have a really big back like this guy. I really want a nice peak on my bicep like this guy. Look at that guy’s calves. He’s really cut up. He’s like 4 percent body fat. I wonder if I can get to that.’ ” For Joe, the photos are inspiring. Rather than making him feel inferior, they make him want to meet his bodybuilding goals. But he credits his ability to not let these photos get him down to “being a relatively well-informed individual and to some degree intelligent,” he says. “I think that I can objectively look at these postings by these people and say, you know what, I’m going to work toward that goal. I will most likely never get to where they are at. I’m going to become the best version of me that I can be. And I’m going to do everything I can. Maybe one day I will be close to where they’re at, but I don’t think that I could ever get there. Now that’s coming from the perspective of somebody who is well-informed and is aware.”

  But not everyone is as self-aware as Joe thinks he is, or as comfortable about their own body and its limits. “People who may be less aware”—Joe hesitates here before moving forward—“I don’t mean to stereotype anybody, the average American, the average American high schooler, they are heavily influenced on body image by seeing these things. If you had somebody seeing all these postings by athletes with great physiques, they would be like, ‘Wow,’ you know, ‘I need to have a great physique’ or ‘That’s what I want to work toward because that guy’s really cool.’ Other people are saying, ‘He must be cool. I want to be cool. I’ve got to look this way. I’ve got to make myself into what this guy is.’ ”

  If resisting the urge to wish you were different is hard for “the average American guy,” Joe thinks, the images people are exposed to on social media are far harder on women. “I think even more than with guys, with girls there’s an incredible, incredible, incredible social pressure to fit that Barbie doll model,” he says. “And for guys, too, it’s completely ridiculous to see all these pictures of these Photoshopped, touched-up women … . and it creates this completely unrealistic expectation for both sexes on what their beauty is supposed to be. So girls will spend two hours, three hours in the morning putting their makeup on to go to school because they can’t have a zit, a single zit on their forehead showing, or a little red spot on their cheek because if they do, that’ll show to others that they’re not perfect and that they’re therefore not as desirable as somebody else … . and so I think that body image is very warped by social media especially in the eye of the uninformed or the less informed individual.”

  While social media may indeed be more of a “girl’s world” in the sense that women participate more regularly, it certainly doesn’t seem to be a fairer one as far as women (and women’s bodies and appearance) are concerned.8 This makes social media yet another sphere where women experience sexism in our culture, and where men, ultimately, have it easier than women do. Young women not only must live up to expectations around professionalism an
d image-building but also must look good doing it. They have to walk an impossible line between being sweet and innocent yet also sexy (at least to a degree). Missteps can cost them both socially and in their future careers. Overall, college students feel pressured to maintain a presence on social media, yet because social media is really “for girls” and those girls can be oh-so-annoying when they post too much, women have to be especially careful about how they post because they are being scrutinized more closely by everyone else (including—maybe even especially—by other women).

  The trend toward taking selfies and documenting everything people do is not just about gender stereotypes, but there’s no doubt it exacerbates them. Women—young women especially—are expected to offer up their images not only for viewing but also for evaluation. Girls and women have always been judged by their appearances, but social media takes this tendency to a new level of intensity and constancy. And while stereotypes about gender and social media abound among college students, the institutions they attend do not seem to be taking this issue seriously enough to unpack and critically analyze such biases in the classroom. So they simply rage on.

  THE FUTURE OF THE SELFIE

  So, fifty years from now, will people be calling this the “Selfie Generation,” as Tanuja wondered? The odds seem pretty good. Tanuja might want to trademark the phrase. And while the “Selfie Generation” may be new, the gender stereotypes are very, very old.

  But if that phrase were to become shorthand, implying that today’s young people are all entitled narcissists, that would be very far from the truth. Some selfies may be expressions of narcissism, but many are merely playful, self-affirming (and even empowering) creative expressions of identity, in a sphere where playfulness and creativity attached to one’s real name is at a premium. The downside of this trend, however, is worrisome. It seems to foster overwhelming anxiety among young people of all varieties, especially young women. It feeds right into college students’ anxieties about documenting certain highlights about their lives for a particular audience, as well as the importance of curating a particular image online. Just as the professionalization of social media has exacerbated the dissonance between the real and online selves, the trend toward taking selfies and the pressure to constantly prove what one is doing and with whom (remember: “pics or it didn’t happen!”) interrupt the real lives and experiences of students with ever greater frequency. Young people feel anxiety and stress around what they perceive as fakery in how they and others present themselves online. Yet with the pressure to post photos to prove that their lives are great comes a further intrusion into time spent alone, with friends, and participating in the activities they enjoy. Whatever else selfies are, they are a particularly immediate and egregious cause of the happiness effect.