The New Yorker Effect 🪤

What you see on social media can stand in your way of being shamelessly sexy. Here’s what to do about it.

Short Answer ⏰

Comparing yourself to others on social media creates a shame spiral that traps you in four ways: expectation, comparison, striving, and validation. To counteract this, change your media diet (follow fewer accounts that make you feel terrible, and more accounts that make you feel good), reflect on what exactly you are jealous of in a post so you can take action to make it happen, and consider taking a social media break altogether.

Longer Answer 🍷

Yesterday, a post on Instagram completely derailed me. It was from Ellie (not her real name), whom I grew up with in London, and whose new book is featured in The New Yorker. Ellie’s sweet traditional publishing deal and PR team are propelling her to worldwide success. Plus, she had a smiling picture of her with her family around her book. I don’t have any of that! Within half a second of seeing that Instagram post, I felt like an utter failure, and I was furious.

Preparing this post for The Sex Report, the first study I read was called “Why don’t I look like her?” How adolescent girls view social media and its connection to body image.” In it, researchers in Australia interviewed 24 girls aged 14-17 about how using social media affects their body image. So, what does my book jealousy have to do with Australian teenage girls? Well, we both scroll on social media, a.k.a. the perfect shame spiral recipe for all women everywhere.

And as we know, to be shamelessly sexy, we need to work on our shame. But social media constantly challenges us on this by hitting us with a never-ending conflicting barrage of ideas, images, and representations about who we are supposed to be. And how [insert esteemed societal thing, e.g., pretty, successful] we are supposed to be as well. The researchers casually state that “The potential harms of negative body image is an important public health concern,” because body dissatisfaction, exacerbated by social media, has been linked to low self-esteem, eating disorders, plus our old friends, depression and anxiety. For me, this translates to: no matter in what way we’re comparing ourselves to others, regularly feeling like an utter failure from seeing Instagram posts is bad for us.

Let’s take a deeper look at the four themes the researchers identified for how social media causes us to compare ourselves to others:

The 4 Traps of Social Media Comparison

* “Wow, so that’s what she’s been up to?” 😲

Researcher speak: “Expectation”

The researchers thought that seeing over-sexualized images would have the biggest negative impact on girls’ body image, making them believe they were only valued for their appearance (Objectification Theory). But instead, they found that seeing an attractive photo of a peer was more likely to bring up strong feelings of body inadequacy.

Seeing attractive peers hurt the most because it created the “expectation” that a girl had to look a certain way. Actually, seeing photos of attractive celebrities wasn’t as bad either, because the girls believed their attractiveness was less attainable. Researchers also found that the girls' moods and feelings about themselves at the time of scrolling contributed to their negative body perceptions.

This echoed my experience. I don’t care if Michelle Obama is on tour for her umpteenth best-seller, but Ellie getting featured in The New Yorker? That’s where I need to be! Plus, it didn’t