The situation of the actress is just one example of the ‘hate’ of the networks towards young, attractive and successful women. We are facing the concept ‘woman’d’ or ‘mujereada’, where unjustified hatred seizes certain female characters.
On June 23 of this year, the Canadian writer and activist Rayne Fisher-Quann published a tweet warning about the possibility that Ottessa Moshfegh, the writer who became famous around the world after the publication in 2018 of her book My year of rest and relaxation , I was about to be “woman’d”. A term coined by herself and that, in a completely free way, we could translate into Spanish as “mujereada”.
Ottessa moshfegh is on the verge of getting woman’d I can feel it (woman’d is what I call it when everyone stops liking a woman at the same time)
Woman’d designates, according to the creator of the term, a situation in which, at a specific moment, everyone stops liking a woman at the same time and begins to be criticized, especially on the internet. In a later article for iD magazine , the writer developed this theory a little further and explained that the fame in networks of women with a high public profile is governed on many occasions by a very specific life cycle, which elevates them and destroys, and that has been repeated over and over again, with different protagonists.
It would all start with his rise to success. We could be talking about a singer, an actress or any other type of public personality: politician, writer, film director… At first, the newcomer seems young, new, refreshing, and her image becomes synonymous with money. Her face on a cover makes the number of copies sold multiply, a post about her on social networks receives many more “likes” than any other, she is compared to other goddesses of the past: the new Audrey Hepburn, the successor to Amy Winehouse… Her number of fans grows exponentially, spurred on by the media. Anything she does or says is welcome and contributes to her fame: from a funny video on TikTok to finding out which book rests on her nightstand.
It’s hard to say exactly when this changes, but usually at the height of his popularity, one day, something happens. Maybe she unintentionally makes a mistake, like not saying hello to a kid waiting outside her concert (probably because she doesn’t even see him), or she makes an unfunny joke on Instagram. It could be that someone pointed out in networks that she walks in a strange way, or that she suffered a mental health bump or simply that she was “cooler when she was not THAT famous”.
Then people start turning their backs on her, criticizing her for no clear reason. The media, which until recently praised her, echoes that people now hate her on the networks. To illustrate her downturn in popularity, they publish a selection of her wittiest tweets messing with her, which further amplifies her criticism. The former star has just fallen from grace, she has just been woman’d .
If this doesn’t make his star go out for good, perhaps, some time later, a documentary about his career may return the love of his former fans, or nostalgia may more than anything else and he will star in a well-known comeback .
Surely, as they read the definition, many readers will have been thinking of several examples of women who have gone through this process. Britney Spears’ rise to success and subsequent destruction (and comeback ) is perhaps one of the best examples to be found of this phenomenon, but there are many more.
Anne Hathaway, was during the first decade of the 2000s one of the most adored actresses in Hollywood thanks to movies like A Surprise Princess or The Devil Wears Prada . But one day, after receiving a lot of awards for her role as Fantine in Les Miserables (2012), she began to criticize her for things like sounding too fake in her Oscar acceptance speech or for saying that she cried when she was seen on screen. . First it was a soft rumor, then it exploded, it went global and a hashtag was even created to label the publications putting it to the broth: #Hathahate. The New York Times in 2013 came to publish an article entitled Do we really hate Anna Hathaway? In which haters of the actress commented that they hated her for “being so perfect that she is not a normal person” or for being “unbearable” for having calculated each of her movements. After years deprived of the love of her former followers, her spectacular appearance upon her arrival at the Cannes Film Festival last May, has once again brought her the favor of fans and the media.
Another example is Millie Bobby Brown, who became an early international star at just 12 years old after playing Eleven in the Stranger Things series . She graced magazine covers and was hypersexualized in the media when she was still a child. The networks began to hate her when she was only 14 years old. Homophobic tweets that she had not written were attributed to her and a growing number of YouTubers began to upload content criticizing her for no really clear reason. They said that she uploaded too many videos singing while she was driving, that she cringed too much , or that she had made too much money too fast. It seemed like just hating her went viral.
Being woman’d is not the same as being criticized
Fisher-Quann makes an important caveat in his article. Being woman’d has nothing to do with being criticized. Any creator or public woman can suffer a bad criticism in a reasoned way without this entailing any problem from the point of view of feminism, on the contrary.
Women deserve to have their work judged by the same standards as any other artist, regardless of their gender identity. The problem is that usually these rational criticisms are used as a justification for visceral criticism and without reason. An inseparable characteristic of being woman’d is that reasoned criticism is never received.
In the case of Ottessa Moshfegh cited in Fisher-Quann’s initial tweet, the bad reviews of the writer’s new work, Lapvona , which will be published by Alfaguara in January 2023, would be generating a feeling of “if this article is so blunt the critics The smartest thing to do must be to hate her.” In this case, a legitimate criticism would be on the verge of producing contempt without any real basis. Any writer can publish a bad book and this should not arouse a general hatred for him or her as an individual.
For all this, being woman’d or mujereada , is for many women a trap in which it is almost impossible not to fall. In addition, the intensity and perseverance of the hatred in the networks and the demand for perfection that is almost unattainable for girls with a high social profile, make the process even easier.
Hate towards women, a pandemic in the networks
We are so used to it happening that it seems inevitable that female artists and professionals who have some success will have to face hate and harassment online.
According to a study conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) titled Hidden Hate. How Instagram fails to act on 9 in 10 reports of misogyny in DMs , analyzed thousands of direct messages received by five well-known women on Instagram: actress Amber Heard, TV presenter Rachel Riley, activist Jamie Klingler, journalist Bryony Gordon and the creator of the South Asian culture magazine Burnt Roti, Sharan Dhaliwal.
In total, 8,717 direct messages were analyzed, of which 1 in 15 violated Instagram rules that prohibit misogyny, homophobia, racism, nudity or sexual activity, graphic violence, and threats of violence. The worst thing is that the platform did nothing to prevent or punish these messages in 90% of cases.
An impossible standard to reach
In addition, to this brutal hatred towards women in the networks, a special form of dehumanization is added that tries to make us believe that female icons are perfect, almost divine women and that, therefore, it is impossible for them to make a mistake, that in some moment cease to be absolutely sublime.
That is why many famous women have opted, before trying to knock them off their pedestal, to show their imperfection, something that never ceases to surprise as unnecessary. Perfection is something that has never exactly accompanied our species. This advance recognition that they will make mistakes in the future is as ridiculous as admitting that sometimes a woman eats or goes to the bathroom.
Women as objects of consumption
The main reason why this type of process enjoys such good health will not surprise anyone. Through “womanization”, women become objects of consumption at the service of an industry that takes advantage of them: first of their success and then of their contempt.
In the past, this type of fall from grace sold millions of newspapers and magazines, filled hours and hours of television that viewers around the world devoured with great pleasure. With the advent of the internet, woman’d women went through gossip blogs, digital editions and finally reached social networks, where between publication and publication, the ads brought great benefits to huge multinationals such as Meta, Google or Twitter.
As long as no one does anything, women who excel in any field will always be at risk of being woman’d , of being locked in some kind of horrible fantasy from which it is not easy to get out. Their real merits or demerits will not matter much and they will have no choice but to wait for, perhaps one day, their redemption to arrive.
