Democratizing the Strip Club: On the Vice of Influencers

Profane social media profiles may get “likes," but they do not lead to virtue

In an ideal world, an “influencer” would be a good role model — someone who influences us toward high moral standards and virtuous character, who inspires deep thought and edifying action.

The sad reality is most influencers are not necessarily virtuous. Many of them use profanity to be competitive, and all of them offer a cheap imitation of real friendship to get you to buy products they’ve been paid to promote.

As people spend more and more of their lives online, over half of Gen Z reports they want to be influencers when they grow up. The vanguard of influencers is Alix Earle, who boasts a combined 11 million followers on Instagram and TikTok. Alix is a 24-year-old construction magnate heiress from New Jersey. Her profile became popular after her "Get Ready With Me" videos went viral, in which she does her makeup and shares personal, “relatable” details about her life while selling products.

But Alix doesn’t just sell us products — she is a product, a commodity available for consumption. Her main content strategy is to post nearly-naked photos of herself — implants bulging out of ill-fitting string bikinis, pumped full of fillers, posing in a way that would make a well-adjusted person blush.

She’s a digital stripper selling us tanning lotion and Carl’s Jr. burgers. Perhaps the worst thing about social media is that it’s democratized the strip club. Alix’s image is being “hot,” rich, and extremely self-involved. It makes sense that she’s selling fast food — she is fast food. Instant gratification, but you’ll feel sick afterwards.

I was in the middle of writing this Substack criticizing influencers like Alik when I noticed conservatives on X championing her new Carl’s Jr. commercial as a “return to tradition:”

Apparently, the opposite of “woke” is profanity, the end of sexualized ads is a “slump,” and digital vice is a bastion of a “Golden Age.”

Woke advertisements that promoted transgenderism, obesity, and ugliness showed us a demoralized and downward-trending culture, but heterosexual profanity is just the other side of the same degenerate coin. Being “so back” as a culture would be championing family values and virtue.

Orthodox Christianity — the most ancient form of Christianity — teaches us to lead a life of sacrifice and service to others, to think of ourselves less. In the Orthodox tradition, pride is considered the root of all sin — an extreme focus on the self, which leads to arrogance, self-righteousness, and feeling superior to others. Orthodoxy teaches us that the only path to godliness is humility, the “mother of all virtues.” If humility means not being the center of attention, influencing is the complete opposite. It is inherently rooted in commanding attention — which necessarily requires pride, boasting, and vanity.

Influencing is a game of visibility, and influencers are at the mercy of the platform’s algorithms. This not only incentivizes them to share profane, sexual images, but also to share increasingly personal details of their lives, leading them to post relentlessly as they bid to stay relevant and compete with younger, better-looking, or more interesting accounts. They appeal to base human desires for sex and friendship.

This relentless posting in turn creates a false sense of knowing among followers. Engaging with an influencer on social media underscores our desire to connect with others — it’s normal to want friends and loved ones, but our brains are not evolved to tell the difference between a person on a screen and a person in real life. Alik Earle’s followers clearly feel like they know her, but they don’t. They are in a parasocial relationship with her, a one-sided connection in which they feel a sense of intimacy, admiration, or familiarity with her because she shares so much of herself. She, on the other hand, doesn’t know them personally at all. It’s fast food friendship.

These false relationships don’t bode well for our sense of community. I wonder how much impact the rise of influencers have had on what is called the “loneliness epidemic.” Probably quite a lot. As people spend more and more of their time online, they’re more interested in the lives of influencers than in the lives of the flesh-and-blood people around them, and that’s a shame.

Dunbar’s number tells us humans don’t seem to be wired to engage in/maintain healthy relationships with thousands of people — let alone hundreds of thousands. Humans can comfortably maintain social network of about 150 individual relationships. The quality of relationships we have with others is also important, and the amount of “relationships” on social media by nature makes them poor quality. These one-sided relationships contradict the very definition of a relationship — which is a connection or bond between two people who know each other. Relationships with influencers appear to fulfill our social needs, but it’s a facade.

Not only is there harm done to the viewer, who gets a false sense of relating — influencing hurts the influencer, too.

Orienting your life around your personal image creates a lot of traps. Pride, as I mentioned, but seemingly these influencers also never feel like they are enough or have enough. To be competitive, they must compare themselves to other influencers constantly. They desire newer and nicer clothing, bigger houses, more exotic trips, and more engagement. This pride-fueled life is deeply unsatisfying, so they buy more and show more so they can earn more. Engagement must increase, so influencers increase the hours they spend thinking about how things will look to strangers, rather than experiencing it themselves or cultivating a life of intimate relationships that are actually fulfilling.

Imagine the kinds of thoughts that must haunt an influencer:

“Her husband does TikTok dances with her, I wish mine would! He must not love me enough. Well, these guys in my DMs think I’m special and pretty…”

“Wow, look at the engagement she got on this video with her daughter! Maybe I should start posting videos with mine, even though I wanted to protect her privacy…”

“I don’t want to post slutty pictures, but I had a little cleavage in this photo and my impressions were a lot higher than my last post. Maybe I can post this one of me in a bikini — it isn’t slutty, I’m at the beach!”

“My family seems unhappy when I spend so much time on my phone, but they don’t realize how important I am. I’m doing this to inspire my fans!”

The slope is slippery. Gradually, you begin selling out your own life to people you’ve never even met.

It’s ironic that conservatives are “we are so back”-ing over Alix Earles. The right-wing bimbo industrial complex is nothing new, but it is what ushered in the woke revolution, a madness we suffered for 15 years.

Too much of the mainstream conservative right — supposedly the party of family values — saw a nearly-naked 24-year-old girl as a culture war win. Many on X reminded me in replies that not all conservatives are Christian, and therefore are “not prudes.” But you don’t need to be a Christian to see why public profanity undermines our nation.

Christianity tells us to think beyond this mortal coil and into eternity. The quality of our souls is all we will take with us when we die. Conservatives, influencers, and their followers would do well to think beyond instant gratification or cheap culture war battles.