Keeping cards close to a well-covered chest

Mary Harrington published a compelling essay last week at her excellent Substack, “Reactionary Feminist,” in which she describes the double-edged sword of baring your soul online.

“It brings many positives: a heightened closeness with readers, and sometimes also of honesty. It often feels necessary to explain why a topic is important to me,” she wrote. “Feedback from readers suggests that many appreciate a writer who is willing to argue from the heart as well as the head — which means being willing to speak personally.”

“But,” she added, “I also wrestle constantly with the question of what is, or is not, a proper topic of discussion for the public digital domain.”

The sharper side of that sword is that self-disclosure makes the poster an object of discourse. In the online world, to share is to objectify and, ultimately, to invite critique. Whether it’s your ideas, your face, or your family, the process an online object must undergo as it makes its way through the discourse machine can be brutal.

Best-case scenario: The thing is abstracted, disaggregated from context, and flattened in order to distill it down to key points. And the worst? The thing is deliberately maligned and shoehorned into whatever other Current Thing is dominating attention at the moment, especially now that the algorithms have shifted to favor engagement.

Harrington describes the work of your typical influencer as an exercise in “total self-productisation” — an unlovely word for an unlovely concept, premised on the disclosure of intimate moments. “Once such material is a source of income and professional clout,” she wrote, “the disclosures have to keep coming: the machine always wants more.”

The machine wants all of you. Harrington is trying to parse the subtler issue of topics one must not cover for a literate audience. But for most, self-disclosure is image-based.

The mental and physical toll of living under the fluorescent tyranny of sex positivity is real.

Over the summer, I wrote for the American Conservative on the topic of Instagram poseurs: the young, hot women who have made it big making themselves into avatars of sexual desire. The platform, and all other social media platforms, has become a real race to the bottom. Literally. It’s about who can show the most skin without revealing everything. For that, links to OnlyFans are in the bio.

(And that was the thrust of my argument: Women are collectively facilitating the pornification of everything by eye-banging their Instagram followers.)

Whether intimacy is physical or emotional, the same principle applies. The more you show, the more you must show to stay on the cutting edge of public interest. And just as our relationships are cheapened by oversharing intimate details of our relationships, so are our spirits made vulnerable to injury by the oversharing of our physical bodies. If Thomas Aquinas is right that the soul forms the body (anima forma corporis), then they are essentially, symbiotically connected. Damage to one often damages the other.

Sadly, modern women have grown up in the digital age, constantly surrounded by glittering images of sex as a commodity in the form of advertising, celebrities, and porn. The cultural milieu is the air we breathe; thus the cultivation of the avatar-self as a sex symbol can feel like second nature, as much as “being vulnerable” to your “followers.” The mental and physical toll of living under the fluorescent tyranny of sex positivity is real, but as is the case with so many of our society’s most corrosive elements, mere noticing is taken as an indictment.

To avoid the spiritual degradation of boundless self-disclosure, Harrington settles on a few rules of thumb: no pictures of her family, no selfies, no discussion of any interpersonal relationships except with the other party’s explicit consent, no pictures of friends except in a professional context, and “self-disclosure only in the context of wider argument.”

I thought I might expand on this, adjusting for my audience (hey, ladies) for your more regular purposes (using platforms as a true social media, not as a public figure).

Above all, don’t s**t where you eat

Take a clear view of the digital geopolitical scene, the nature of the platforms, your goals, your real life, and how all of these could potentially intersect. Different platforms should be used for different purposes, and levels of privacy and anonymity can be adjusted in order to ask questions that need answers without sacrificing your dignity.

If you’re a regular person who isn’t trying to sell a product, there is no reason to link a Twitter account you use to lurk dissident political discourse to an Instagram you use to share baby pictures with your normie friends. No need to link the two, and no need to cross-pollinate memes, if you care about not alienating old friends.

And, by the way, that’s a righteous concern. Plenty of wonderful people genuinely believe that being liberal is the same as being nice. They don’t have any background in political philosophy, and they don’t want one. You don’t have to pretend to be something you aren’t, but you also don’t need to be Laura Loomer about it.

Platforms should be viewed as tools with purposes, not virtual representations of who you are,for which the whole truth is owed, an idea that impels foolish people to be everything, everywhere, all at once online. All for a false notion of integrity! Parse your platforms; protect yourself.

No sex stuff

Last week, chaos erupted on Twitter as some fairly prominent, self-identifying conservative women disclosed some extremely personal information about their (morally licit) sex lives with their husbands.

This seems to be a trend. Usually it's perimenopausal, evangelical “tradwives” with bizarre diatribes about being available for sex with their husbands in the middle of the day on the front lawn. This is a great example of taking on the progressive frame despite pretending to be something else.

It is not “conservative” to talk about sex in public; it’s indecent. And the way they talk about it is bordering on smut. At a certain point, prurient monomania becomes more immodest than a sexy selfie.

Single-sex spaces are superior

Those women shouldn’t have been talking about their anatomy or their husbands' bodily fluids, but they really shouldn’t have been talking about them in mixed company.

That brings me to this next rule: Find yourself a group chat, and if questions must be asked and answered about intimate things, let them be asked and answered in private.

I love women. I’d lose my mind without my female friends. If a man entered our space, it would change the dynamic. It would make the space public, and it would naturally curtail self-disclosure to protect the dignity of everyone. If your girlfriends aren’t the only ones attached to your profile, or if it is public, keep this in mind.

Don’t post your body

It goes without saying, but be aware of what strangers do to images of the female body that they discover online. Novelty itself is a commodity, and the depravity of some guys knows no bounds.

I believe any images that are revealing of the feminine assets in the slightest are a no-go for the public domain. If you must reveal yourself, reveal very little. I try to keep it above the chin.

I’m interested to know what kind of standards readers keep for themselves. Leave them in the comments. And share this article with your friends, sisters, daughters. Maybe we can make a master list.