The Attention Trap

When attention is required for professional success, women are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

We’ll be back on Monday with a subscribers-only podcast episode about the way that romantic comedies are finding a home on streaming platforms. (Yes, we did in fact watch “Marry Me”! You’re welcome!) In the meantime, here’s a blog from Emma, prompted by the recent Taylor Lorenz-Maggie Haberman media dustup over whether or not journalists should be “brands.”

There are few things I find more mortifying than self-promotion.

I feel the need to say this up front because I am already, one sentence into this essay, trying to assure you that I am not that kind of Very Online writer: the one who so transparently wants all the accolades and the likes and the retweets and the eyeballs. I mean, sure, I’m happy you’re here… on this Substack… reading my work. But I’d like to think you just happened upon it, the way one might wander into a coffee shop during a midmorning stroll. (A coffee shop that you definitely did not hear about because your friend posted an Instagram story about it.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the specific mortification of begging people to engage with your public work because of a recent media dustup, sparked by an Insider article which included this quote from former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz: “Younger people recognize the power of having their own brand and audience, and the longer you stay at a job that restricts you from outside opportunities, the less relevant your brand becomes.”

At the sight of the word “brand,” some established journalists lost their minds — and, in truly meta fashion, expressed their contempt via their own personally-branded Twitter accounts. From there the conversation spiraled. The “tenured class” of journalists, as Elizabeth Spiers put it in a sharp piece for Medium, argued that talking about yourself as a brand is “cringey” behavior, and we should be focusing on Big Important Things, like war, rather than concerning ourselves with people who are hellbent on “seeking attention.” The “normie journos” (again, quoting Spiers) — a.k.a. people who are too young or too marginalized to depend on the goodwill and audience development teams of prestigious legacy media brands to edit, publish and promote their work — pushed back, arguing that self-branding and self-promotion are not vanity projects, but rather professional necessities in a constantly shifting, fundamentally unstable and unequal industry.

As a writer and podcaster who lost my job last year after working at the same digital outlet for a decade, I pretty decidedly come down on the side of the normie journos. But what’s been really niggling at me is the tenor of the conversation — the condescension, the gatekeeping, and the gendered nature of the whole mess.

There’s a reason that NYMag columnist Shawn McCreesh chose to paint Lorenz as a “giggling” girl who covers “spoiled brats” in his Monday column about the spat. Both descriptors indicate a lack of seriousness, conjuring images of a silly schoolgirl twirling her hair and staring up at the clouds. The implication is that such surface-level vapidity is incompatible with Big Serious pursuits like journalism.

The desire to be seen and take up space publicly has long been wielded as a weapon against women, a way to shame them out of arenas that were traditionally the domain of men. This is why the women of the tenured class must distance themselves from the obvious labor of self-promotion. They want you, want all of us, want themselves, to rest assured that they aren’t those types of girls. They are real professionals, not attention whores.

The attention whore, also known as the drama queen and the fame whore, is nearly always a woman. It’s right there in the language. Amanda Montell, author of the “Wordslut” and “Cultish,” told me that there is simply a “much larger wealth of feminine slurs than there are masculine slurs.” And the vast majority of these slurs are tied to the idea of “contemptible promiscuity.”

Even words that may have started out as neutrally or positively feminine-coded often go through a process of semantic change called pejoration, where they accumulate negative connotation over time. “Nearly every English word that references femininity throughout the history of time has at some point devolved to mean something negative, ultimately leading to a sexual slur,” said Montell.

The end result is the cultural understanding that a woman who is everywhere — either sexually or because she’s all over your TV and Twitter feed and Instagram Explore and TikTok for you page — is not to be trusted.

It’s a sly, linguistic way to keep women and other marginalized folks in their place, that is, out of the public domain — at least in ways that the dominant class has deemed unacceptable. As Montell pointed out to me, when we disparage women or other marginalized folks “for building brands in order to convey a message, we’re almost punishing them for their own oppression. They get scrappy and then we punish them for being embarrassing.”

We all consume those lessons, policing our own behaviors even if we suffer as a result. Shame is a powerful tool, one that is expertly wielded by gatekeepers and passed on to the layperson. Maybe that’s why I wanted you to know that I also wasn’t that type of girl.

The embarrassing truth is, I both crave attention and am repelled by it. I want the opportunities that come along with being a known entity — both the creative projects and the ability to not feel immense stress about my finances — but the visibility of that labor makes me squeamish.

How humiliating to let others know you think you deserve to take up space. That you want things that may be seen as “unearned.”

And yet, I grit my teeth and do the thing that makes me want to crawl out of my skin, because I know I can’t do the things I love if I opt out of the mechanisms that allow my work to reach peoples’ eyes and ears.

Shameless indeed.

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