"She Looks Like an Instagram" Or, How Empowerment Became A Brand
How the aesthetics of self-help shape its message and marketing
For all of Instagram’s aesthetic twists and turns, it’s pretty easy to pick out an influencer (or an aspiring influencer) when you see one.
“She looks like an Instagram,” writes Jia Tolentino, “which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal.”
The outfits might change, the bodies might become more diverse, the font choices might evolve—but what stays remarkably stable is the underlying character of the influencer aesthetic: empowerment.
Selling Empowerment
This is the second installment of my series, Self-Help, LLC. In this series, I’m taking a close look at how self-improvement has taken over our lives and businesses—often in unexpected ways.
Today, we’re exploring the tricky business of selling empowerment—both how it’s used against us and how we can avoid replicating the harm that’s done. Specifically, we’re going deep on the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.
Before we get into it, a couple of quick notes: first, this isn’t just for women. This phenomenon has parallels across the gender spectrum. Second, we’re talking about the female lifestyle empowerment brand as a certain aesthetic and marketing strategy—not as a representation of femininity or a gender essentialist perspective of women in general.
Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.
So, what is a female lifestyle empowerment brand?
Kelly Diels, who coined the term in 2016, defines it this way:
She’s The Perfect Woman in the form of a business or a brand. She’s everything we’re supposed to be in order to be socially acceptable—white, thin, pretty, straight, cis, able-bodied, uber-positive, and smiley…
The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand is what our culture insists women embody and a business blueprint that leverages privilege to create authority over other women.
Kelly is a writer and culture-maker who uses marketing and business strategy to question our assumptions about gender, size, disability, race, and other identities. I’ve known Kelly for over 14 years. I’m pretty sure she was the first person I ever talked to—on the literal phone—“from the internet.” And so when I started to put this series together, I knew I wanted to talk with her.
The female lifestyle empowerment brand is an attitude, an ethos, and it’s an aesthetic. You know what the female lifestyle empowerment brand looks like, even if you’ve never come across the term before today. Maybe you have a specific person in mind. Or maybe you just know that general social media aesthetic when you see it.
The picture of the female lifestyle empowerment brand in your mind is probably tall, white, thin, blonde, nondisabled, wealthy (or at least signaling wealth), etc. My picture of the female lifestyle empowerment brand includes a floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat. Depending on where you live, your interests, and your class, you might very well know someone who presents in this way—even if they’re not an influencer.
There’s nothing wrong with presenting this way, of course.
The problem, as Kelly told me, is when the female lifestyle empowerment brand takes “all of those privileged statuses” and amplifies them as marketing assets. Essentially, the female lifestyle empowerment brand turns the visual cues in profile pics, Instagram posts, website images, and videos into a source of credibility—and, with it, power.
Female lifestyle empowerment brands rely “more on broadcasting wealth, whiteness, or conventional attractiveness than the substance of their work,” Kelly explained.
Images Are Powerful
Advertising is an almost exclusively visual medium today. It uses photographs and video to convey a message with very few words. But it wasn’t always this way. If you look back through magazine ads from the pre-television era, advertisements were often exclusively or predominantly text-based.
Images—moving or still—won out for many reasons. Media theorist Roland Barthes argued that images have a rhetorical power that other media can’t match.1 Images allow you to show rather than tell. When we know we’re viewing an ad, that’s all fine and good. We know we’re interacting with marketing, even if that marketing is acting on us in covert ways.
Today, however, the line between ad and editorial has never been blurrier. Social media have disarmed our spidey senses when it comes to images and advertising. Is that Instagram post simply “content?” Or is it an ad? If it’s an ad, what exactly is it selling?
Marketers—from huge brands to upstart consumer brands to personal brands—saturate the media environment with images that appear to be candid snapshots or casual video diaries. But these, too, are ads. Our bodies no longer reproduce the lessons of the marketplace—they become both factory floor and marketplace. We can’t help but optimize our production and presentation.
When we choose to post an image to our Instagram feed, or shoot a video for TikTok, or use a photo to compose an ad, the image communicates with the audience. In the same way I agonize over the font choice for a logo, I might agonize over how to wear my hair or what top to wear in a selfie. Both the font and my personal presentation say something about my brand—and I want to get it right. Every image contains layers of messages–some explicit and overt, others implicit and covert. Those messages are deliberate and constructed.
Yet, Barthes tells us that the way we interact with photographs and videos leaves us with the sense that we’re viewing something real and objective. So when we see the image of “empowerment” as that tall, thin blonde, conventionally attractive woman—the one who looks like an Instagram—we start to naturalize the message that this is what empowerment looks like. This is how empowerment presents itself. It’s the message of the medium.
The more we internalize that message, the more we start to recognize that we, too, should reproduce the lessons of the marketplace in order to claim our own power. We need nicer clothes, better hair, finer shoes. We need to live or vacation in locations that photograph well. We need the right art on our walls to turn our Zoom background into another signal of our brands. And we might start to recognize that the look of empowerment is expensive, exclusive, and privileged. Not to mention hard work.
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it this way: “Beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.” Someone who doesn’t look like the ideal woman, who doesn’t look like an Instagram—or, at the least, isn’t trying to look like an Instagram—doesn’t belong on top of the social hierarchy.
Entangled as we are in our visual culture, we learn to spot the symbols of power early.
We also learn to align ourselves with those symbols, either by taking them on or by sidling up to those who display them. Subconsciously, “our automatic response is to fall into an obedience groove,” Kelly told me. We process that old familiar story of who is better, more powerful, and more respected without even realizing what’s happening. This pattern reinforces inequality in every corner of society—but for our purposes, it poses a particular problem when it comes to marketing and sales.
The female lifestyle empowerment brand, consciously or not, leverages its status markers to build credibility and desire in its marketing. Because those visual status cues are so strong, that means they don’t have to work as hard to explain what they’re offering, why they’re the right person to offer it, or who their offer is for. Customers end up buying for proximity to power as much as they buy for the supposed value proposition.
The female lifestyle empowerment brand—really any marketing message that’s aesthetic rather than substantive—serves as a constant reminder of what we lack. Even while those same messages claim to offer solutions, the underlying message is that we don’t measure up… yet. While people who make success look so easy tell us that we can do it, too, they’re also often broadcasting all of the reasons we haven’t achieved success yet.
“When we look at someone and see those signals, we want to emulate and obey them so that we too can have” their power, Kelly told me.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that women aren’t born; they’re made. We’re influenced by social expectations, yes. We’re also influenced by the lessons of the marketplace—and how those lessons translate to the board room, the bedroom, and the beach vacation. The way we perform gender is capitalized as well as socialized. We notice all the ways they do or don’t match the expectations of the marketplace. We notice the things that need to change or be hidden.
When I was growing up, this was largely transmitted through magazines like Seventeen and Sassy. But today, it’s transmitted through Instagram. And so part of the way women are made—a never-ending process, by the way—is through the messages encoded in the aesthetics of the female lifestyle empowerment brand.
We learn the right camera angles, lighting tricks, outfits, facial expressions, and location secrets… all of which is work. That is aesthetic labor.2 Of course, all but a very small group of people have identities that exclude them from the desired aesthetic—no matter how much aesthetic labor is performed. Yet, the female lifestyle empowerment brand continues to sell strategies that leverage their privileged appearance.
Kelly asks, “If you’ve got a recipe that relies on those qualities and you’re selling it to everybody, how is a disabled trans person going to make that work?” How, indeed.
Aesthetic Work-Life Balance?
“Basically, there is more work on women’s shoulders than ever before and fewer resources available to them for sharing that labor or offloading that labor,” says Kelly.
At the risk of stating the obvious, women are overwhelmed, exhausted, and overworked. The female lifestyle empowerment brand promises relief. We see images of well-rested and well-resourced people who garner respect and power.
Even when we know there’s a whole lot more going on behind the scenes, many of us can’t help but desire that same “look” for ourselves. “It’s like catnip,” Kelly exclaimed. I’m totally attracted to it.”
Kelly and I both come from working-class backgrounds. Kelly told me that the women in her family were housekeepers and caregivers. She was the first person in her family to go to college. For people like us who didn’t know what living without constant financial stress looked like before we became successful, these depictions of women can be valuable in their own ways.
Kelly offers up the Real Housewives franchise as an example. “Seeing women on vacation, having fun with lots of money, enjoying themselves, and having leisure time—it is a foreign language to me. It is completely fascinating and seductive.” So whether it’s a housewife in Beverly Hills, a girl boss CEO, or the influencer you follow on Instagram, we learn that being an ambitious woman doesn’t have to mean misery and endless labor. That’s valuable.
But it’s not the whole picture. For every image of wealth and ease we see, there are thousands of images we don’t see: the images of the people—housekeepers, errand-runners, nannies, personal or virtual assistants, service workers, etc.—who make that wealth and ease possible. We don’t see how presenting oneself as ‘empowered’ by conventional standards of success and beauty inherently relies on exploiting others (or oneself).
Here’s how Micki McGee put it:
If everyone is busy making sure that they get to ‘be all they can be,’ then who will clean the house, cook the dinners, diaper the babies, and nurse the infirm, not to mention labor in the factories, sweep the streets, drive the taxis, and load the sanitation trucks?
Watching The Real Housewives can be fun and valuable because it shows women who are not miserable (at least some of the time). But this depiction of carefree abandon and overwhelming wealth comes at the expense of the oppression of others.
Influencers peddle hope and empowerment through messages that proclaim the viewer is a queen who is deserving of support and care. “For someone who is like doing everything for everyone and is emotionally exhausted and is fitting like seven days of labor to five, that is a really compelling message.” But once you’re sold, you learn that becoming the queen of your life “actually involves outsourcing and downloading all of your labor onto other women who are getting paid even less than you so that you can retain the excess.”
Becoming a queen might be held out as feminism, but it’s not. “That is just patriarchy. Old patriarchy in a new bottle. It's you switching places from prey to predator, and I want something better from us. I don't think the only two roles available in this world are prey or predator.” Instead of “rebelling [your] way into the status quo,” we might begin by questioning why we’d want to model our self-care after an authoritarian ruler.
Female lifestyle empowerment marketing tries to convince the target that they can have it all. But they never reveal the price of having it all. That price, even beyond the 24/7 hustle, is the cost of tapping into the spoils of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism—which is to say the pain, exhaustion, and anxiety of others.
There is a world in which we can have relationships, resources, families, and meaningful work—all of the things that make for a rich life. But to attain them, we have to want those things as much for others as we do ourselves. We have to be willing to help others access what they need at the same time we’re accessing what we need.
Are your practices creating realities where other people don't have what they need to survive? And if that is how you're creating your leisure, then something's out of balance. But there's a way to create flourishing for you that doesn't compromise other people's well-being.
That's the spot we wanna aim for.
After all, reproducing the lessons of the marketplace doesn’t change anything for anyone. It merely entrenches a deeply unsatisfying status quo. Maybe “having it all” isn’t about being on top of the social hierarchy and, instead, about having enough.
Marketing with Substance
Earlier, you were likely able to imagine what the female lifestyle empowerment brand looked like—even if you’d never heard the term before. You knew there was a certain feminine aesthetic that exudes power and success, even as it relies on privilege and status symbols to do so. And you know that laboring toward that aesthetic (or whatever aesthetic represents success in your online neighborhood) works. People tend to gravitate to those who are selling empowerment through their bodies and images.
When something works, it’s tempting to replicate it. Even when we don’t really want to. So what does marketing without this kind of aesthetic rhetoric look like?
Persuasion, Kelly told me, “doesn’t have to mean that we are nefarious and that we exploit people and trick them into making bad decisions for themselves.” Unfortunately, many of the common tactics in online marketing are “actually quite chilling when you take them apart.” Luckily, we have other options.
“Everything that has been used against you can be a source of power,” Kelly told me. “If there’s an identity that our culture has a bias against, there’s a way that you can use that as a source of good information and power.”
As an autistic person, I know that there is a lot of bias against how I show up in the world and interact with people. However, I also know that the way my autistic mind works is a huge source of power for me. Because I need to break down social concepts into rational frameworks, it means I have a much easier time communicating those social concepts to others who might take them for granted or not realize the ways they operate.
“I'm a fat woman in a big body,” says Kelly, who also tells me that she’s been asked in interviews how her body affects her career. “Usually, it’s no good for my career. But what is really useful is, because I'm in this body, it means I have access to information about our culture that someone in a straight size body does not have access to. When you have access to different information and know how things work in a way that other people don't, that means you're a source of creativity and good information that other people in the room are not.”
Kelly says, “I actually ask people to think about all the things they're ashamed of. It might be internal wounds, or it might be cultural injuries that are getting visited upon us because we have marginalized identities. Literally, go through them, write them all down. And then flip it: How is that a source of power? And now you have the list of what you need to be focusing on. So I know that I need to focus on my voice, the strength of my ideas, seeing things differently, and creativity, and those are gonna be the things that I rise for.”
Kelly also suggests building out your own framework for analysis. We must be able to take stock of our actions in relation to the way oppressive systems work. We need to build what Dr. Barbara J. Love called a liberatory consciousness, explains Kelly. By becoming more aware of social and political systems, we can exercise greater agency over the way we do business. “What happens when we're newly awakened to power and structures and oppression in our culture is we get very obedient, and we start taking rules from people who we think are more fluent in the language of justice than we are,” Kelly told me.
Liberation and empowerment aren’t products of rule-following. They’re products of critical thinking. “I want us to be able to independently come to our own conclusions,” Kelly tells me.
The next time you see someone who “looks like an Instagram,” remember that there is a message embedded in that image. It’s a message about power, identity, and market forces. It’s the lessons of the marketplace, the existing social order, behind a polaroid filter of self-expression.
Empowerment isn’t for sale—only the status quo.
For more, see Roland Barthes’s “The Rhetoric of the Image.”
The term aesthetic labor was coined in a paper by Chris Warhurst, Dennis Nickson, Anne Witz, and Anne Marie Cullen in 2000:
We define ‘aesthetic labor’ as a supply of ‘embodied capacities and attributes’ possessed by workers at the point of entry into employment. Employers then mobilise, develop, and commodify these capacities and attributes through processes of recruitment, selection, and training, transforming them into ‘competencies’ or ‘skills’ which are then aesthetically geared towards producing a ‘style’ of service encounter.