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THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING COURSE was run by an influencer called Tammy Lane. She was a mother based in Salt Lake City with fifty thousand followers online who promised to teach us how to start making six figures a month on Instagram alone. It was advertised as a six-week intensive course (in smaller font on the sign-up page: one hour-long Zoom call a week!) and cost $1,500. By my estimates of how many women were in the introductory Zoom call, it was safe to say Tammy had made her monthly quota.
In the first Zoom meeting, I expected to see a computer screen filled with women like the ones I’d gone to college with, smart and savvy and violently progressive. Instead, the Zoom opened to reveal a gallery of women who looked like me. This was the first time I realized that the business of influence was not a secular calling. Nearly everyone had a little cross necklace glistening on their chest, except for one curly-haired woman from New Jersey, Rachel Weissman, who looked increasingly distressed in the opening minutes of the call until finally she turned her video off.
We prayed at the opening and the closing of each meeting. In the module, dozens of versions of myself stared back at me, with usernames like JesusMomma and OGOrganic. I couldn’t tell if the women were older than me or younger, but I could immediately see what kind of communities they came from. I saw it in their presentation, in the way they laughed and
frowned and cried on cue. I saw it in the way they talked about their families in the sixty-second window when they were meant to offer brief introductory bios about themselves. Hi, everyone, I’m Natalie Heller Mills. Mother of three, with a fourth on the way! My husband, Caleb, runs our family farm, which we lovingly call Yesteryear Ranch. We sell milk, cheeses, and organic exotic vegetables. But that’s enough about me! What about you?
—
“I want you all to be so proud of yourselves for signing up today,” Tammy said at the opening of the call. “By showing up for this call today, you’ve taken the biggest step of your journey: the first one.” She paused to let the gravity of the situation really land.
Tammy was the kind of woman who screamed debutante. She was taking the call from her immaculate kitchen. Each time she spoke, she shifted the laptop a little bit so that a new part of the room was highlighted. The eight- burner stovetop; the two stainless-steel dishwashers. The sparkling countertops, the rows of mason jars containing neat little piles of powder, ranging in color from terra-cotta brown to cocaine white. At times, she would lean in toward the laptop screen, blocking out the background entirely, her poreless face beaming out at us like a lunar eclipse. “The hardest thing a mother will ever do is to put herself first. Am I right? Raise your hand, ladies, if you haven’t put yourself first in years.”
A hundred hands shot into the air. I thought, This is unbearably corny, but I should put my hand up, too, just to play along. Then I realized my hand was already raised. Tammy was good.
According to Tammy, the most powerful force on the planet was the power of the Divine Christian Feminine (trademark pending!). We were limitless resources; the original Energizer Bunnies. All we needed to do to
achieve our wildest dreams was to channel our own infinite store of energy.
“If you are your true, authentic self, then the sales will happen effortlessly,” she said confidently while she clicked through a clearly homemade PowerPoint presentation. The slides sped quickly along and seemed only loosely connected to what Tammy was saying. A stock picture of a blond woman twirling in a field of flowers; a screenshot of a bank account with a balance of $80,000; a cartoon pyramid rendering of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a frowny-faced lady stick figure standing at the bottom.
“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Tammy continued, her eyes glowing psychotically from the computer light. “Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” She paused here for effect. “Oprah said that.”
Tammy’s talking points flowed zippily along from reassurance to damnation to jubilance. I could practically feel the collective psychic weight of a hundred relatively gullible women trying to hold so many contradicting truths in their brain at one time: everything they had to succeed was already inside them, but also they needed to pay this woman in order to succeed, and a truly successful social media sales cycle should happen effortlessly, it should happen in our sleep, and yet we needed to start reclaiming some of our own time from our families so that we could commit ourselves to the effort, and the point of this course was to remind women to sink further into their own Divine Christian Feminine, and also, it was time to develop some hard masculine skills, ladies, it was time to learn some math!
I glanced at my computer screen. We were only eight minutes into the session, and already a few women were crying openly. As Tammy rolled neatly into a thirty-minute monologue about harnessing the power of the Divine Christian Feminine to drive sales online, I tried to mirror the expressions of the other women at all the appropriate times, discomfort and
awe and unbridled delight. I was having a hard time organically intuiting the correct response for any given moment. I resisted typing my own questions into the chat: When are we going to learn about hashtags? Can someone explain the analytics dashboard on Instagram to me? Why do some of my photos get a hundred likes and only one comment? Why do my cheeks itch when I haven’t checked my phone in the last hour? Why are you better than me at this, Tammy Lane? Why am I here?
—
Two years had passed since the disastrous visit with my family. In the time since, I had given birth to Stetson, our new darling little boy. The day of his delivery, I actually leaned forward in the hospital bed and caught him myself, guiding the crown of his head out into the world. With Stetson, there had been no postpartum period, no miserable few months, because I had almost immediately gotten pregnant again. All praise to the Highest! I’d written in the caption of the pregnancy announcement. Our fourth, a little girl, was due in a few months.
As for my family: Abigail’s divorce had been finalized a few days after she gave birth to her fifth child: an underweight little girl named Kaitlyn. I thought the metaphorical significance of ending the B’s was embarrassingly heavy-handed; my mother was openly relieved about it. Abigail and her four B’s and her one K were living with my mother now. Two adults, four children, and one infant crammed into a three-bedroom home. What was my sister doing for money? Well. I had been right. She couldn’t find a job, and so she was bagging groceries with the teenagers in town.
We weren’t speaking at the moment. Which was fine. Arguably ideal.
Though it did mean I had to drive fifteen minutes farther to the grocery store on the other side of town to avoid seeing her; it also meant I’d been freed
from the obligation to witness my sister slowly destroy her own life. I was too busy for that! Too busy managing Caleb and the children and my burgeoning social media account, which documented the day-to-day events of our sweet little farm. (Per the emailed paragraph of analysis on my page that I would eventually receive from Tammy Lane as one of the deliverables for paying full price for the course, referencing Yesteryear Ranch as our sweet little farm was a good decision. Specifically, it was “Approachable, Intimate, and Creative!”) Now the Instagram account for my sweet little farm had just over a thousand sweet little followers. Only half of them, it seemed, were actually human—and none of them were interested in telling me what they thought of my sweet little farm. These followers never commented on my pictures. They never sent me private messages. Only a small handful of them were even willing to take the meager step of pressing like on the photos. Sometimes it felt like I was standing on my front porch, staring out at a silent army. What do you want? I wanted to say. How do I activate you?
I had no clue. Before long, the account felt less like an interesting errand and more like a necessary chore, a constant itch I needed to scratch. If Tammy’s social media ad had never reached me, I might have given up on the account entirely. I certainly wouldn’t have realized on my own that the account could become profitable. But the ad did find me. More importantly, it found me at the perfect time: only an hour or so after I finally had the phone call with Doug that I had been dreading for months. He was pulling back on funds, he said, in advance of his presidential run. Our annual disbursement would be cut in half. “That’s the thing about running for president,” he said amiably. “It’ll bankrupt you if you’re not careful!”
—
WANT TO MAKE SIX FIGURES A MONTH OF PASSIVE INCOME FROM YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT???
—
Yes. Yes I did. In fact I needed to.
—
Hence the class. Hence my willingness to give Tammy Lane $1,500 for a course that could’ve been designed by an eighth grader. Hence my patience as Tammy launched into her fifth monologue about divine inner light. No matter how grating or generic she seemed to me, I had to admit: there was something she was doing right. Something she had figured out that I, for some reason, could not. After all, no one would have paid $1,500 to get Instagram advice from me.
—
After Tammy’s big Zoom speech (she promised we would get into hard numbers at next week’s meeting), we split off into breakout rooms of ten and twelve, where we would give one another open feedback on our accounts. In my Zoom breakout room, ten of the twelve women were from Idaho, and everyone lived on a farm. For an hour, our Assigned Mentor, a young woman named Cassidy who had twenty thousand followers and who was, I would learn many months later, Tammy Lane’s niece, ran us through a series of spiritual exercises to unlock the Lioness within.
The first thing we did was share, round-robin-style, some details about our social media presence. A woman named Robin went first. “Hiiii, I’m Robiiiin,” she said in chirpy singsong. “And I run a cattle ranch.”
A chorus of women replied in unison, like the Greek chorus for a play about pyramid schemes. “Hiiii, Robin!”
Cassidy pulled Robin’s Instagram up onto the shared screen, and we collectively went through her photos, telling her what we liked and didn’t like. Like: the spontaneous photos of her children. Authentic! Dislike: the captions where she talked (jokingly!) about hating the future wives of her twelve- and thirteen-year-old sons. Cringe! Like: the picture of a thunderstorm sweeping over the flatlands, combined with a Bible passage about the Lord’s power. Appropriate! Dislike: the picture of Robin smiling next to her local butcher with a big grin, both of them covered in blood.
Nightmarish!
“You’re totally on the right path,” Cassidy said passionately. “You just need to narrow in on your specific message. Know what I mean?”
The distraught expression on Robin’s face indicated that no, she did not understand what Cassidy meant—but already we were moving along to Ashley Ann, a woman from—you guessed it—Idaho, who helped her husband run—you guessed it—a cattle farm. “I’m just really struggling to differentiate myself.”
Cassidy, our fearless teenage leader, nodded sagely. “It’s the hardest and most important part. You need to dig deep, deep down and ask yourself: What makes me so special? What can I offer that other people can’t?”
“Right,” Ashley Ann said, nodding fervently.
“I mean right now,” Cassidy said kindly. “Tell us right now what makes
you special.”
The Zoom call was silent.
“Um,” Ashley Ann said.
It was very apparent that everyone on the call had realized simultaneously that they were interfacing with their direct competitors. Everyone had some
kind of farm. Everyone was trying to sell their farm products directly to consumers online.
“I’m…funny?” Ashley Ann said. “And kind?”
“Perfect,” Cassidy gushed. “So now you just have to show those things
on your account!”
“But—”
“I have a question, actually,” another woman said nervously. “Does anyone ever call y’all a…breeder?”
Cassidy looked confused. “Like, cattle breeder?”
“No, like, breeding humans?”
There was an undulation of discomfort. I thought of the one comment I had received in the last week, from an anonymous user without a picture: Ur giving off major cult vibes fyi “Let’s talk about online trolls at the end of the call,” Cassidy said firmly.
She gazed across all the little face boxes, clearly trying to restore a sense of authority. “Next! Let’s do…Natalie!”
“Hi, everyone!” I said to fifteen flickering faces. “I’m Natalie. My account is YesteryearRanch. I have just over a thousand followers right now, and I—”
—
Don’t know if they’re real people. Don’t know why they followed me. Don’t know if they like me. Don’t know what to do with them. Don’t know why I’m here.
—
“—would like to drive more engagement on my page.”
Everyone nodded enthusiastically, an audience of bobbing chicken heads.
Cassidy brought my account onto the screen. “Let’s see what we have here.” The room was silent as she scrolled slowly through my feed. There was me, smiling in front of the barn, and then there was Caleb, milking our latest dairy cow, and then there was Clementine, twirling through the fields in black and white.
“All right, gang,” Cassidy said. “What do we think?”
“Your brand identity is a little…stiff,” Ashley Ann said.
I chirped brightly, “How do you mean?”
“You look really tired,” one woman said.
“You don’t come across as very likable,” another woman piped up.
“Let’s use ‘relatable,’ ” Cassidy said quickly. “She doesn’t come across as very relatable.” Cassidy stopped scrolling and paused on a photo of me with the kids, Clementine leaning against my legs, toddler Samuel in one arm, baby Stetson in the other. She read my caption aloud. “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.”
“I like the caption,” Robin said. “I just can’t really put my finger on it,
there’s something kind of…off?”
“It’s the smile,” Ashley Ann said.
“That’s it!” Robin exclaimed. “It’s the smile. You don’t actually look
happy. You look like you’re grimacing.”
Fifteen heads nodded in unison.
“That’s just my smile, though. That’s just how I smile!”
“Here’s the thing, Natalie.” Cassidy gave me a cloying wince. “I think what Ashley Ann is saying, here, is that it looks like you’re pretending.”
I laughed again, though it sounded more like a cough. “Isn’t everyone?”
Ashley Ann rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, sort of, but it’s not supposed to be so obvious.” She looked to Cassidy for approval. “Right?”
Cassidy nodded gravely. “Emotions need to come across as totally authentic. Why don’t you practice smiling in a mirror? It sounds silly, but it works. You have no clue how you look to others.”
—
“Mama?”
I turned around. Clementine was standing in the doorway. Six years old, gripping her blankie tightly in one fist. Dark watchful eyes. Mouth small and pink as a rosebud. “What are you doing?”
The Zoom call had ended. It was late at night. Caleb was down at his office in the barn, sitting in front of the computer, and I—well. “I’m practicing being likable.”
Clementine walked over to the mirror, peered at her own reflection.
“What’s likable?”
I positioned her in front of me so that we were looking at each other in the mirror. For the millionth time, I found myself startled at how similar we looked, down to the scowl. A little minnow of irritation swam through me.
You have no clue how you look to others. “You’re a big girl now, Clementine.
You need to learn how to smile.”
“Why?”
I resisted the very strong urge to press my fingers into the clay of her cheeks and drag the ends of her lips upward. “Because it makes other people feel safe and warm and loved. Don’t you want to make other people feel safe
and warm and loved?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“Then try it. Try to smile.”
She tried. It looked terrible.
“That’s close, but it needs to reach your eyes. Like this.”
Then I showed her what I’d learned.