EXHIBITS

Social media icons collection

Although women throughout the deep eighteenth century fought against the idea that their reputations should be based on their outward appearance, women’s reputations today are still based on appearing to be perfect, but the platform for reputation construction has changed to social media. Social media is the perfect platform for building reputations because it makes people more socially connected while helping them keep up appearances. In 2008, Cameron Anderson and Aiwa Shirako conducted a study on reputation construction and found that “individuals who were well known among their peers developed reputations more easily than individuals who were not.” [1] It makes sense that women who have many social media followers quickly build reputations because they are socially connected, but the reputations are built off of a shallow representation of the individual. 

Sample of an Instagram feed

Society continues to emphasize women's appearances in reputation construction as seen in the way women use social media. The Pew Research Center conducted a study of social media platforms and discovered that more women use “Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram…while online discussion forums like Reddit, Digg or Slashdot attract a greater share of male users.” [2] Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram are all picture-based social media platforms, and the finding that women use them more than men solidifies the idea that women’s reputations continue to be based on appearances instead of character. Rachel Simmons, a gender researcher quoted in The Atlantic, explains that young women use picture-based social media such as Instagram because it “gives you the power to modify your appearance.” [3] Ways to appear perfect are built into Instagram’s interface which makes it a great way for women to try to build their reputations.

Women use picture-based social media because they have to keep up the image of “effortless perfection” that has persisted since the eighteenth century. In 2003, Duke University conducted a Women’s Initiative on their campus, and they found that undergraduate women feel the need to convey “effortless perfection” which is “the expectation that one would be smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular, and that all this would happen without visible effort.” [4] Just as in the 1700s, women need to appear perfect without even trying, and social media is the platform women use to build their reputations today because it allows them to show the parts of their lives they want to be seen instead of the whole picture which often has more depth than they portray on their profiles. There needs to be a radical shift in the way women’s reputations are constructed.  Instead of women's reputations being built on appearances, they need to be built on character just as women have been arguing since the eighteenth century.