Caroline Calloway is an enigma. She’s a social media influencer by definition but nothing you would expect an influencer to be by practice. Caroline tells her whole life story in every caption she writes, shares selfies of her crying in bed, and her feed is a mess of random images.
This, to me, is a good thing. The world is full of too many fashionable women and filtered photos and online giveaways – we need more people who are real and raw and unfiltered.
Caroline is all of these things. And yet, the world hates her for it. The question is, why?
The answer is complicated.
Let me backtrack for a second – who is Caroline Calloway? If you don’t know her face then you have surely heard her name- there’s been story after story in the media about her lately. The media whirlwind started in early September when Caroline’s former best friend and self-professed ghost writer, Natalie Beach, wrote an exposé of sorts in The Cut.
Natalie says she was responsible for a lot of Caroline’s career success, and called Caroline out as a scammer (this wasn’t the first time Caroline has been called as such) and, overall, painted a pretty unkind image of the 27-year-old influencer.
It’s easy to dislike Caroline after reading Natalie’s piece. I admit even I was convinced Caroline is not a nice person. But I don’t hate her. In fact, I’m not sure any hatred of Caroline is justified.
With Caroline – with her online persona at least – what you see is what you get. She makes no attempt to paint her life as perfect or her mental health as stable or carefully curate her feed. Everything that she is and every thought that she has is spilled onto her Instagram account for the world to see.
The world hates her for it. Yet, if she were perfectly primped and crimped and filtered, the world would call her “fake” and hate her all the same.
It’s a rock and a hard place, an impossibility, and infuriating. But, for Caroline, the hatred is normal. Speaking to Buzzfeed News, Caroline joked about the hatred and how she’s been called a liar, a sociopath, a c*nt, a scammer, and has been told to kill herself.
“What’s the worst thing they can do, call me evil?” she asked. “Oh wait, they already did.”
Caroline has her own explanation for all the hate. Speaking to Buzzfeed she said, “I think that is people wanting to condemn young white girls with lots of Instagram followers…our culture f*cking loves to hate them.”
My theory is slightly different: the world thinks they hate Caroline, but really they hate what she represents.
She represents a sub-culture of entitled white women. According to Natalie, Caroline is unaware and selfish and two-faced. She reminds us of every bad friend we’ve ever had – unreliable, disloyal, fickle.
Caroline represents the personality traits we hate in others and fear in ourselves. Her honestly about her mental health plays into a similar fear – we ask ourselves “will I be like that one day?” and wonder if we’ll ever be truly happy. If Caroline, with her fancy life and fame, still struggles with her demons, then how can we ever expect to escape ours?
That brings us to the question: Is Caroline actually scammer? Can you be a scammer if you’re so unapologetically honest all the time?
The short answer is yes: honesty doesn’t necessarily equal morality.
The long answer is a lot more complicated and something I can’t fully speak to – only Caroline knows her real intentions. Whether those intentions are genuine or not there’s one thing I’m certain of: she doesn’t deserve our hatred.