Shopping For Sheep's Clothing
On predatory marketing, girlblogging, and when anti-consumerist discourse becomes a vector for reactionary ideals
Please note that this post is nearing the email length limit, so it might be clipped in your inbox. If you would like to read the full essay, it is available online or in the Substack app.
Be honest: have you ever felt, even just for a fleeting moment, like nobody wants to work anymore? That young people just need to unplug, get out of their heads, and be more resilient? That Tiktok teens have been shopping for identities instead of finding themselves?
There is no shortage of think pieces and essays engaging with such questions. Three months ago, I came across Freya India’s “You Can’t Buy an Authentic Self,” an essay arguing that we can’t find our “true selves” through consumerism, despite what companies might have us believe. The piece explores the link between girlhood and predatory marketing, paying particular attention to how the beauty and wellness industries target trans women by “manipulating vulnerable people.” So why are her comments flooded with people agreeing with her and making transphobic remarks in the same breath?
India’s work can be read in relation to a more recent, growing tradition of writing that follows a typical pattern: it addresses a popular, recognizable concern (one common one right now is the “damaging effects of social media on young girls”) and ties it to a larger web of socially conservative points without making the connection explicit. Because many of these pieces start with a seemingly innocuous concern (social media can be incredibly damaging!), critique neoliberalism, appropriate anti-capitalist or feminist rhetoric, are framed as general cultural criticism, and don’t end with “and that’s why you should turn to the right,” many readers end up missing the implications simmering beneath the surface. It feels necessary to strip this rhetoric down.
These pieces seem subtle in their politics; authors and publications know that the headline “Gen Z Wants to Stay Home, Be Mentally Ill, and Cry Like a Little Baby” will be less appealing to average readers than something like “The Average Gen Z Child Spends $X on Video Games Instead of Saving for the Future,” regardless of whether both essays say the same thing. The key here, of course, is that these talking points are not vague to right-wing audiences, hence why we refer to them as dogwhistles. I find this whole thing quite sinister: I would much rather have social conservatives be honest about their conservatism rather than adopting a pose of progressive concern and moral authority.
of has already written two great essays on the rightward swing within mental health and disability discourse and girlblogging, and I would like to have a broader discussion about how these ideas take root and grow within fashion criticism and consumption discourse. Trans and disabled people have been increasingly visible targets within these conversations, and if you want to stand in solidarity with the people you care about, it is so important to learn how to recognize this rhetoric when you see it.This is an essay on recognizing wolves in sheep’s clothing and resisting the seductive allure of camouflaged moral panics. I will contextualize and analyze three recent examples of such moral panics, which have infiltrated discussions around fashion and consumption habits. I recognize that this is not my typical style of post, and I don’t want it to be read as a bid for cancellation or harassment; I just want people to know what they’re reading because I’m frustrated by the increasing number of well-meaning people falling into an intellectual trap set specifically for them.
A month after I started writing this essay, I saw this series of tweets, which feature a much more obvious example of conservative ideals being wrapped up in fashion discourse.
LeFevre’s original thread includes a list of men’s fashion crimes, like wearing:
7. A pro sports jersey with another man’s name on the back of it.
9. Jewelry (other than watches and wedding rings), because “the only thing more disappointing for a woman than seeing a desirable man with a wedding band on, is seeing a ring on any other finger.”
33. Your heart on your sleeve
40. Women’s clothing.
The subtext here is wild. We escalate from a banal stance on flip flops to policing masculinity using subtle, incel-adjacent references to sexual insecurity – it would be too overt to use the term “beta male” here, but that’s clearly the fear that the “jersey with another man’s name on the back of it” taps into. This language has been memed to death, and while that does little to prevent people from seriously latching onto it, I think it makes it more recognizable – unironic use of terms like “alpha,” “sigma,” or “beta male” is typically a clear sign of online inceldom and the manosphere. Conservative-leaning cultural criticism targeted towards young women seems to have taken a subtler approach, however. (As many conservatives love to remind us, some recent studies have concluded that Gen Z women are more liberal than Gen Z men, so I can’t help but wonder if this subtlety is connected.)
GIRLS, India’s newsletter, explores topics related to “girlhood in the modern world,” with a particular emphasis on technology, social media, gender, and, more subtly, the decline of traditional social virtues. “You Can’t Buy an Authentic Self” is typical of her oeuvre, tying together anxieties around consumption, femininity, and selfhood. (Note: The piece was paywalled as I was putting the finishing touches on this essay, but an audio version is available here.) On the surface, its thesis seems sound enough – it aligns with frustration I have felt towards online fashion communities, and many people have been expressing similar feelings in the wake of the post-COVID micro trend boom. The rhetoric employed in the essay carries us far from that original point, however; it proceeds to frame trans women as chief examples of such frivolous, distracting overconsumption (a subtle point made explicit by many of the citations employed by the author). Employing tactics reminiscent of Jordan Peterson, a noted source of inspiration for India, the essay hooks readers with a widely accepted opening point, only to lure them into more extreme territory under the guise of “genuine concern.”
There is a huge difference between being annoyed at the way online shopping culture has shaped our identities (it is annoying! People are obnoxious about it!) and being annoyed at the way online shopping culture has shaped our identities but especially the identities of trans people, who can’t buy their way into the gender they want because gender is essential and trans people are just confused etc. Don’t let your knee-jerk frustrations around consumption distract from this sleight of hand. So many people are interacting with India’s essay without seriously grappling with its harmful implications, and so many others are using it as an excuse to be explicitly transphobic out of “genuine concern” for young women and their consumption habits. Both of these outcomes are concerning, but they shouldn’t be surprising.
On other platforms and publications, India is an open social conservative and critic of progressive politics, feminism, and “woke culture.” When writing for GIRLS, however, she frequently couches her conservatism in progressive rhetoric, taking basic concerns and observations and quietly weaving them into culture war discourse. In a recent post expressing disappointment towards the author for her increasingly conservative takes, I saw a comment expressing confusion towards some readers’ reactions and suggesting that GIRLS had always been openly socially conservative. While I agree that social conservatism is and always has been central to the GIRLS project, I think its politics have intentionally been made more ambiguous in order to appeal to moderate and even left-leaning audiences – a trend I am seeing more and more online.
This process is most evident when looking at two different versions of the piece side by side, so let’s take a moment to examine the framing and unpack the rhetoric being used.
While the GIRLS version of the essay begins with Tiktok screenshots of a woman discussing the cost of medically transitioning, the Quillette version opens with a collage of Dylan Mulvaney alongside the subtitle, “We should be wary of teaching the next generation that identity is something that can be bought.”
Even before the article starts, we are primed to hear two slightly different messages. The Quillette version makes it clear that this piece is centrally about buying an “identity,” and it relies on Dylan Mulvaney – a common right-wing scapegoat – to make it clear that gender identity is really what we’ll be discussing. The Substack version, in comparison, focuses on buying a “self” and emphasizes the financial aspect of medically transitioning, allowing more left-leaning readers to focus on the “anti-capitalist” points as they read. If you squint, generous readers might even come away concluding that we should consider moving towards wider acceptance of social transitions, reflecting on the unique financial pressures different groups of women face to meet standards of femininity, or exploring the harm stemming from current standards around “passing” (though none of this is stated in the piece).
The thing is, trans people have been having conversations around these issues in and outside of the academy for decades upon decades; there is a vast body of work from which to cite if the author was interested in engaging with these ideas in good faith. India claims to take issue with any plastic surgery marketed to “vulnerable people” as a way to “find your true self,” and one of her central questions seems to be whether gender-affirming procedures like facial feminization surgery (FFS) should be considered vastly different from other cosmetic procedures like nose jobs, breast augmentation, or BBLs. Again, conversations like this have been happening in queer leftist spaces, so it’s frustrating to see this expressed as if it were a thought that the left doesn’t want you to hear. ContraPoints’ “Beauty,” for example, offers a very accessible introduction to some of these points, but she is just one person; her ideas obviously shouldn’t be taken as being representative of the entire transfemme experience.
The citations that are present in India’s essay, however, are incredibly telling. Because the author doesn’t name the posts included in hyperlinks or conclude with a Works Cited list (though the latter isn’t common practice on Substack), readers don’t see references like “Why Capitalism Loves Transgenderism,” “Demi Lovato Admits They Get Confused Over Pronouns After Coming Out as Non-binary,” or gender critical (read: TERF) piece called “if that was my true self, then why did it take so much work?”
Without actually clicking on any references, the true agenda of the piece is somewhat obscured, but it’s so important to think critically about how all of this “evidence” hangs together. Making an explicit connection between transness and consumption, India writes: “You are more than products you buy. Than the stuff you consume. Than your identity label that conveniently comes with a shopping list (A Shopping Guide for Trans Kids!).” In the shopping list she links, option #4 is putting out a call for hand-me-downs, #5 is thrifting, and #6 is getting existing clothes tailored. The hyper-consumerist horror of it all! I think that most people would agree that we are more than the products we buy, but buying clothes that fit you – whether due to social transition, a pre-teen growth spurt, or both – seems far from seeking out a “consumption-based identity.” (Also, you can find a shopping guide for anything. The Bump has a list of 64 shopping essentials for newborns. How dare they commodify an identity that’s definitely just a phase?! This just in: babies should be the real targets of overconsumption. See how ridiculous this sounds?)
Near the end of her essay, India writes:
I think if a true self exists it is the version of you outside the market. Stripped of all your products and procedures. [. . .] Now we’ve convinced a generation that their authentic self is the personality they built out of products or the self-esteem they borrowed from surgeries. But being comfortable in your body isn’t expensive. That’s a convenient and lucrative lie. It’s not expensive; it’s difficult. It’s extremely difficult to accept yourself. Impossible, even. The only way to get anywhere close to self-acceptance is to earn it, to become someone deserving of it. To put ego aside and focus on feeling aligned internally rather than externally.
A perfect fusion of both the GIRLS and Quillette pieces, this paragraph seamlessly conflates gender identity with highly abstracted “authentic selfhood” in yet another sleight of hand. Out of context, it reads like your average, slightly edgy critique of consumerism; it is general enough to apply to virtually anyone. Within the broader context of the piece, however, phrases like a “personality [. . .] built out of products” or “self esteem [. . .] borrowed from surgeries” become incredibly loaded by framing transness – particularly trans femininity– as manufactured, inauthentic, a frivolous costume to put on. This is classic transmisogyny dressed up as anti-capitalism.
Of course, this “anti-capitalism” is a pretense – the real assertion here is that identity is something immutable and self-evident from birth, so anyone trying to help you “create” an identity is profit-seeking and lying to you. This trending anti-capitalist façade is most easily observed on the far-right: in her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly warns audience members about the predatory “billion dollar industry” encouraging young, confused “victims” to transition;1 Scott Howard’s The Transgender-Industrial Complex (2020) suggests that the trans agenda involves working with the “depraved” ruling class to create a “transhumanist globalist dystopia,” as one positive review puts it; columnist Pedro Gonzales blames “the medical establishment, Big Pharma, the culture industry and government agencies” for convincing confused youth to transition, turning them into “ideal customers for the health-care industry.” Each of these critiques frame trans people as either passive victims or scheming masterminds of consumerism and capital (all the while ignoring the fact that many trans people exist without medically transitioning). These points also run parallel to the infamous “transgender social contagion theory,” which Julia Serano outlines and debunks here.2
I am not saying that India is swept up in or convinced by these more extreme theories – I have no idea what she personally believes. Whether India is echoing these points out of malice or ignorance, however, their implications are cruel and heavy, and I find it far more concerning to see people circulating these essays or repeating her tone and talking points in “The Commodification of X” essays without considering the weight behind their words.
Capitalism has failed so many people. Overconsumption is exploiting and ruining lives. Regardless of how unplugged anyone tries to be, it is difficult to avoid being inundated with advertisements. It makes sense that many young writers and readers are seeking out conversations around predatory marketing, especially as it relates to the construction of deleterious beauty standards and gender norms. However, it is frustrating to see bad actors take advantage of wide-ranging dissatisfaction and divert attention both away from any kind of structural change and towards conspiracy. This tactic is not just limited to discussions of fashion, queerness, and gender identity, of course. We can observe a very similar phenomenon in right-wing discussions around mental health, another hot-button conversation online to which India also frequently contributes.
“Stop Rewarding Victimhood and Bring Back Defiance,” a piece written by Freya India for Konstantin Kisin, discusses the supposed rise of a victimhood mentality among Gen Z youth. India critiques the glamorization of and identification with mental illness, which she views as the central cause of this shift. Again, she suggests that these identities are essentially being sold to us by Big Pharma and Tiktok influencers, framing this as an issue about online consumption.
India discusses how the “billion-dollar mental health industry pushes us to pathologise normal negative emotions” with terms like executive dysfunction and rejection sensitive dysphoria, likening clinical labels to spiritual or metaphysical forms of consumption. There are many reasons to critique the medical-industrial complex, but when such critiques target those who “reward suffering,” “label [their] laziness as ‘ADHD executive dysfunction,” or “hoard and hang onto every painful experience,” we abandon all sensitivity and move from the structural to the individual. As
points out,Resorting to the dopamine rush of endless scrolling, or to the sticking-plaster medical intervention of SSRIs, is not a cop out or a lack of resilience on the part of the individual - it is evidence of an abdication of duty from those who have the political and institutional responsibility to do something. It is not needless decadence or moral failing. It is a cry for help. Framing phones, or medication, or the rejection of tradition writ large as the root of the problem instead of the symptoms of it is a coward’s way out of confronting an ugly reality.
I am also troubled with the ways diagnoses can be presented and discussed online, but videos from struggling teens should not be taken as representations of a larger culture of victimhood. One of the worst things the internet has encouraged us to do is rationalize personal annoyances by casting them as indications of morality. Some people make rage bait videos. Some people make repetitive “signs you have [insert illness]” videos because they frequently go viral and likely help make money through the creator fund. Some people are genuinely struggling or are dealing with their condition imperfectly, as many young people do. It seems ridiculous to take the latter as a sign of generational moral failing. I think it’s very harmful to teach people to assume that everyone around them is just lazy, selfish, coddled, and failing to adequately measure up to an arbitrary set of standards – it creates people who are primed to argue online, sure, but not actually prepared for real-world interactions. We can’t encourage this culture of disdain and superiority (which is ironically what the right accuses the left of doing) if we genuinely want anyone to improve the loneliness epidemic, mental health crisis, and build community.
I also understand that the desire to participate in “kids these days” discourse is strong, particularly for young adults who finally feel old enough to participate in it, but it is irresponsible to turn throwaway grievances into pieces shared with large audiences without doing substantive research. Complaints about “kids these days” are often very similar across time periods, and panic around increased mental illness is also nothing new. Care for a brief historical overview?
With the rapid growth of asylums in the mid nineteenth century, concerns over the “national epidemic of insanity” grew. Andrew Wynter’s “Lunacy On the Increase?” (1857) voices some of these concerns, citing isolation, lethargy, and mental inactivity as causes of “mental ruin.” Conversely, it is the “toil-worn artisans” and craftsmen, for Wynter, who “live in the great eye of the world and keep step with the great march of civilization.” He suggests that “English fields can afford cretins as plentifully as the upland valleys of the mountain range seldom visited by the foot of the traveller; whilst, on the other hand, in the workshop and the public assembly, ‘As iron weareth iron, so man sharpeneth the face of his friend.’” Here, the urban proletariat is framed as noble, tough, stoic, and full of purpose, an optimized figure of biblical productivity. This rhetoric emphasizes progress, of moving forward and keeping step with the “great march of civilization,” tying the Protestant work ethic to a need to serve capital. This sentiment is clearly still alive and well.
A 1919 Delineator article worries that “mental deficiency might also be prevalent to an alarming extent in the general population.” A 1953 article written for the Evening Star notes that while “people all over America [. . .] fear that insanity and mental breakdowns are more common today than ever,” the National Association of Mental Health concluded that there had “been no evidence of an increase or decrease in incidence.” In the 80s and 90s, concerns around the prevalence of mental illness and learning challenges in millennial children resulted in similar conservative backlash, with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (an anti-psychiatry organization run by the Church of Scientology) campaigning against the use of Prozac and Ritalin for minors with depression and ADHD.
India and her fellow champions of social contagion theory are simply trumpeting an old moral panic. It is nothing new – in fact, it is undermined by its very longevity. It is unsettling to see this relatively recent resurgence develop a kind of self-awareness, however. As Naomi Klein notes of her research into conservative media for Doppelganger (2023):3
People asked me whether I was worried that, in listening to Steve Bannon so much, I might begin to agree with him—that I might red-pill myself or something. But that is not what worried me. What worried me is [. . .] hearing Steve Bannon take up these issues that I knew to be very powerful, these traditionally left-wing issues that had been kind of left unattended. When I would hear Bannon cosplaying Chomsky, or my own politics, it wasn’t that I thought he believed it. It’s that he was using this political move to great effect, looking at the people and the issues that the Democratic Party has abandoned.4
Even deep inside the blogosphere, even in lifestyle or fashion writing (which far too many people dismiss as being apolitical), I think this observation is crucial. The medical-industrial complex and wellness and beauty industries absolutely deserve critiques, but we can’t let ourselves be seduced by those feigning progressivism while ultimately only reinforcing existing social hierarchies and radicalizing people to the right. Just as self-described environmentalists can be ecofascists, self-described anti-consumers and anti-capitalists are not necessarily progressives (or genuine anti-consumers/anti-capitalists, for that matter!).
So. I am not saying that we should stop critiquing consumerism, corporations, and marketing – I just think we need to discuss how these critiques are being parroted and weaponized. Since many of these conservative-leaning pieces rely on readers to connect the ideological dots instead of making their real concerns explicit, it is more important than ever to read critically. What are the implications of a given piece? Who is the target audience? What ideal world or system is being proposed, and what needs to change in order to achieve it? Questions like these are helpful to consider if you are learning to spot conservative dogwhistles in action.
Many industries are trying to sell us versions of ourselves, but what if we resisted the appeal of moral panics and focused instead on the root issues to which they respond? Gender-affirming surgeries could not be framed as frivolous, bourgeois expenses if healthcare were free. Ethical consumption would look entirely different if resources were pooled and traded secondhand. Mental health outcomes might be different if teens could inherit a world with universal basic income and free education instead of housing and climate crises. Scolding people for their supposed lack of resilience will not improve conditions for the rest of us. It is cruelty disguised as critique.
J. Logan Smilges’ “Transcrip Critique” (forthcoming from the Quarterly Journal of Speech) unpacks Taylor Greene’s speech in greater detail, paying particular attention to how ableist and transphobic rhetoric interact.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle has also done great work to unpack these claims.
I have just started reading Doppelganger, but it touches on many of my essay’s themes in greater depth. I would highly recommend it so far.
Tolentino, Jia. “Naomi Klein Sees Uncanny Doubles in Our Politics.” The New Yorker, 10 Sept. 2023, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/naomi-klein-sees-uncanny-doubles-in-our-politics.
Finally, a fresh and critical look on topics and author so beloved on this platform by many. “It is more important than ever to read critically.” Indeed. Thank you for your work!
Thank you for calling out Freya India!!
I was confused at first by the number of left leaning people who follow her considering she writes for far right rags — and honestly I almost fell for it too. But you article put of a lot of clarity on the way she (and others like her) operates.