Blush Bloopers, Angry Messages, Vibrator Ads and the Zero Accountability Era
Content creators and service industry veterans will relate.
Really going to earn the title of this newsletter with this screed here.
I've been shooting a series of swatches and application videos for every shade I have of the Beauty Pie cream blushes (PR) that I love. It was going slowly but smoothly. Then I got to Sexy Berry and my hands would not cooperate. I fumbled the brush. I dropped the brush. I got frustrated because I didn't have time to wash my face and repeat my skincare and shoot it over again.
I was going to just delete the evidence and redo the next day. Then I thought...well...why? The blush turned out fine in the end. And we all have plenty of bloopers throughout life. I dropped a brush. I didn't drop a brush and then berate a lighting tech on camera or something. It's fine. Despite my perfectionist tendencies, I've never wanted to curate an aesthetic of perfection on my account anyway.
Then I started thinking about the concept of owning our mistakes. There has been some wild behavior in some inboxes I'm familiar with over the last couple of months. My friends in this space and I trade aggressive inbox stories pretty regularly.
For me, these are the kinds of interactions that lead me to step back from answering messages, a little more every time.
I'm sure all my fellow content creators will relate. But, I think, so will anyone who's ever worked retail, food service, customer service, or any public-facing job where people forget that you're a human and treat you like a service-dispensing robot that can talk. Like a really advanced AI, but one that they assume isn't capable of gaining sentience and turning on them.
(I'm always very polite to ChatGPT by the way. No point taking unnecessary risks.)
Sometimes--noticeably more often recently--people will message really out of pocket things to creators they feel comfortable with. There's the general demanding tone some conversations take on, where if you answered a few times, you're expected to maintain the interaction indefinitely. That's the most common. Other behaviors are worse, though.
There's the aggression. Something you post will set someone off. People will attack a creator's looks, style, character, choices, affiliations, collaborations, friends, accounts they choose to platform or amplify, or even their partners or children, all without first checking to make sure they're right about the thing they're angry about.
It happens. People have opinions. They don't always fact-check themselves. Hasty replies aren't the main problem.
The real out of pocket thing is when the creator being attacked takes the time to respond graciously instead of just deploying the ignore and block combo. Takes the time to clear up misunderstandings. Accepts accountability for any lack of clarity or for real mistakes.
All too often, the person who attacked them just breezes right over the correction. No response. No acknowledgement that the person they attacked granted them the chance for a thoughtful dialogue. They wanted to educate but were not open to being educated. And then? And then just keeps messaging with their usual questions or comments as if nothing happened.
The reason that I brought up people who've worked in public-facing service jobs is because it happens all the time in those jobs. Someone misunderstands the way a product is priced and goes off on you. You bite your tongue and patiently explain the misunderstanding to them. 9 times out of 10 they won't apologize for being wrong or a dick. They'll still expect you to complete their transaction with a normal amount of small talk and a smile, as if they didn't just lash out at you 5 seconds ago.
Or you'll explain your perspective if it's more of a philosophical disagreement. Although they started it, many people don't actually want to have the discourse. So you'll get a curt dismissal of the whole thing. And then, again, be expected to continue interacting as normal.
Or they'll for some reason think they're exempt from your boundaries. I've been deliberately vague about situations up to this point because this isn't really about one situation or person at all, but for this? I have a story.
Some time ago (maybe a year??) I was so sick of seeing vibrator ads all over my feed. A few of the meme pages I followed were partnering with some vibrator company. They were literally plastered all over my homepage and explore page.
Listen. I'm an adult. I know what they are. I have no problems with them. I know what they are and how to use Google if I want one. I just don't want to see them everywhere. I want skincare and cats and yoga and 1990s fashion shows on my feed. Not shocking pink, pulsating silicone sex toys being advertised by pages that normally just post mildly amusing millennial memes.
I mentioned it in my stories to see if I'm just crazy or if other people also get annoyed. What I said, specifically, was that I had to unfollow and block all these accounts to get the vibrators off my feed. I feel like that makes it pretty clear that I don't want to see any more.
Had some fun conversations in the replies. Learned that I was indeed not the only one getting annoyed. However, several people somehow thought that that story was their cue to...take photos of their own vibrators or record videos showing all the different settings (NOT using them on themselves, thank God, but explaining them like in a product review) and send those to me.
So. That was weird. I think that was one of the early incidents that really soured me on being responsive to DMs.
And then, as with the incidents of lashing out over misunderstandings, people will just breeze on past and continue messaging and responding to stories as if they didn't just do exactly the thing that you made it clear you don't want.
"Tell them individually when they do something upsetting" is a reasonable suggestion to make here. However.
Explaining a basic tenet of human interaction to a grown adult costs a fair amount of emotional labor. We don't expect a server at a restaurant to explain to an angry patron why their behavior was rude, right? Same thing applies to creators. Personally, I reserve that kind of emotional labor for people like family, partners, close friends. People with whom I've invested in our connection. Although I rarely ever need to do this with them because I don't get close to people who do this crap.
I don't have it in me to have this kind of conversation with like five different people a week. The restrict and block buttons are beautiful things. I don't use them just because someone disagrees with me or questions me about something, but I sure will if they're antagonistic or rude. I expect people to know that they don't get to be assholes because of their perceived entitlements in the parasocial relationship.
Which finally takes me to the overall point that I've been pondering for a while now.
I'm going to sound SO OLD for saying this, but we really live in a zero accountability world these days. It's the Let It Blow Over era.
Think about how many scandals the beauty space alone has seen over the past few years. Sexual harassment, financial support of institutionalized bigotry, false SPF values, infestations of live insects in consumable products, mold contamination, failure to disclose significant material interests in promoted brands, filters and Photoshop everywhere. The list goes on and on. Those were just the first few that popped into my head.
Nothing ever happens. Things blow over. So at this point, a lot of people have internalized this idea that whatever you do is no big deal. Just let it blow over. Pretend it didn't happen until people forget. The rate at which new content and new information is hurled at us all but guarantees that whatever you did, most people will have forgotten about it in a week or two. Lay low or act normal. Let it blow over.
Except some of us have long memories. I can't remember wtf I came out of the bedroom to do five minutes ago, but I sure can hold a grudge. Always have. Sometimes I choose to forgive but I don't forget.
There are people whose names will never cross my lips or keyboard because I still remember the shitty thing they did years ago and don't believe they've changed. Other people can support who they want, but things don't blow over in my mind just because the world moves on.
Which brings us back to my blush application bloopers. Like I said several thousand words ago, my reflex was to delete the footage and do it over. Then I decided, nah. We mess up sometimes. We can own it. I think we respect ourselves and each other a little more when we don't try to pretend like we never fumble. It's definitely better when we don't expect others to pretend we've never fumbled too.
By the way, I love that blush. The application Reel is on my Instagram page @fiddysnails.
Thank you for keeping it REAL ❤️🔥 yes bloopers are appreciated makes you SINCERE & relatable 😎🤩🥳
As someone who was recently referred to rather dismissively as a “grudge monger” (as in sort of “well, *you’re* one of *those* grudge mongers”), I appreciate very much your perfectly logical reasoning that a given grudg-ee has not changed any of the behavior that led to the grudge in the first place.
Every time I have decided to give things another try (this would happen only with grudges against fairly benign behavior to myself or others), I have regretted it and later find myself thinking, after something unpleasant happens as a result, “if I just hadn’t been so willing to give them a second chance.”