Not all women (are influencers)
The permission to make a spectacle of women.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
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On August 9th, The Cut published exactly the kind of headline I like to read: “The Food52 Executive Who Used the Company Credit Card for Everything.” Shannon Muldoon, former director of Food52’s in-house creative studio, reportedly spent more than $270,000 with the company credit card on flights and luxury clothing. Perfect media gossip story, no notes, no one gets hurt except a company that for some reason took months to notice they were missing almost $300k.
The comments, as always, were not as fun, but it was one in particular that got me hot and bothered during my one precious life on earth. It read: “Once again proving the age old wisdom: ‘Few things in life are more useless than internet influencers.’”
This comment struck me as odd, because nowhere in the story is Muldoon described as an influencer. In fact, the piece makes note of her professional credentials:
“But she had some major places on her résumé,” said a former staffer. “She had worked at Bon Appétit prior, and she had a bunch of stories about those times, and she said she’d worked at the New York Times and Wayfair.” (The Times confirmed her employment as a producer for T Brand Studio.)
Muldoon no doubt had a following on her Instagram (now offline), but she had a full-time job—that’s where she was stealing from! Evidence of her lavish purchases were posted on her social media and screen-grabbed for the piece, but social media (at that time, at least) did not appear to be her career.
I’ve noticed something in the years I’ve covered internet culture. The word “influencer” is often used when really the commenter or outlet just means “woman.” In Muldoon’s case, her infractions were being used to affirm a pre-existing dislike of content creators. In other cases, a woman is labelled an “influencer” as a way to justify why she’s being written about at all.
I first remember this happening in 2020, when Houston “influencer” Alexis Sharkey went missing. Her body was found the next day on the side of a road; she was believed to have been killed by her partner. It became national news, with the lede of every article being sure to identify her as a content creator with as many as 23,000 followers. The thing is, many of those followers were rubberneckers who had heard about her disappearance and were tuning in. I remember this because I was covering the story on the website that was the predecessor to Embedded (hypocrisy, thy name is Kate). Sharkey now has over 70,000 followers.
Alexis Sharkey was a representative for the MLM beauty company Monat and would post about their products. But at no point, at least on her grid feed, had she ever posted or disclosed sponsored content. She was a career influencer in headline only, because if she’s an influencer, then it’s okay to profit off clicks about her death.
