Why Is the Media So Obsessed With Seeing Beautiful Women Fail?

Carl Jung called this tendency for extremes to eventually turn into their opposite over time, “ enantiodromia ,” a way of restoring balance. We see this constantly throughout fashion, aesthetic, culture, politics, and social views. If thin is in today, thick will be in tomorrow, and so it goes with just about everything. If the 2010s were a heyday for girlboss feminism, sex positivity, and celebrating girl power, then the 2020s have lived up to their expected corrective forces of antagonism, with a return to sex negativity, renewed interest in traditional gender roles, and a media that delights in tearing women down. Not just any women, though; ones that are beautiful, successful, and affluent. You know, the ones who had it coming. The Reckoning Perhaps the biggest Easter egg of what was to come (a news cycle dominated almost exclusively by “The Woman We Hate This Week” headlines) was 2019’s admissions scandal nicknamed “ Varsity Blues ,” with influencer Olivia Jade at the center of it all. News had broken that Jade, daughter of Full House star Lori Loughlin and Mossimo founder Mossimo Giannulli, had cheated her way into an Ivy League college with the help of her bribing parents. Jade was a nepo baby, an influencer worth millions of dollars, a young, beautiful girl who, on top of all of this, received a full ride to the University of Southern California based on athletic lies, while rubbing in how little she actually valued her education. In a since-deleted YouTube video posted shortly before the scandal broke, Jade boasted about going to Fiji during her first week of school. "I don't know how much of school I'm gonna attend,” she said to her then 2 million subscribers, “But I'm gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all. But I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying; I don't really care about school, as you guys all know." The internet, scandalized by the lack of gratitude for an opportunity stolen from qualified candidates, only to make a public mockery of her education, swarmed Jade’s family like sharks out for blood. Ethically, it wasn’t great. Optically, it was a disaster. But was this really the most scandalous news to come out of 2019? Was a 19-year-old taking advantage of nepotism really the most morally dubious act the media portrayed it to be? Attempting to scam college admissions offices is basically part and parcel of the application process, so there was nothing unique about this story. The real reason Olivia Jade’s name is, to this day, a nepo baby punchline and a cautionary tale about forsaking your own privilege is because the 2020s have been a decade of comeuppance. In the face of income inequality, social media comparison, the death of monoculture, and the loss of institutional trust, something has been quietly stewing among the masses, and is about to bubble over. Our cultural schadenfreude (pleasure at the misfortune of others) is so palpable, we’re spiritually headed for our own French Revolution. In fact, a recent viral tweet said as much, when, in response to Kylie Jenner running a series of ads for Meta Glasses, someone tweeted , “they got marie-antoinette for less.” The Schadenfreude of Humbling Women Sure enough, we’ve witnessed a bloodlust in recent years which has hardly spared male victims, and if anything, has doled out even greater consequences. For women, conditions are a little different. Being a woman comes with a unique social currency. Our bodies, more closely tied to reproduction and "mate value" than men's, women have, throughout history and across cultures, placed greater importance on beauty practices. There are women who never experience pretty privilege who resent women who derive social capital from their appearance. This "pressure," "expectation," or "beauty standard," whatever you want to call it, has translated into a greater capacity to trade on youth and beauty and inspires a proportionate amount of morbid curiosity, if not resentment, in those who do not possess it. There are women who never experience pretty privilege who resent women who derive social capital from their appearance. Just as well, there are men who resent how easy women seem to have it, how they can float up hierarchies without having to do much work, or so it seems. Take, for example, this journalist, who feels so entitled to even the playing field between herself and more glamorous women, that she feels no sense of shame in writing publicly that while reading The Little House on the Prairie , “it was hard not to feel, on behalf of energetic plain girls everywhere, that there was some justice in pretty, good girl Mary going blind after Measles.” Mary, who is based on a real woman, has committed no crime other than being a threat to another woman’s self-esteem. The punishment of going blind seems hardly proportionate to the crime of being a “pretty, good girl,” but it’s fitting that this journalist’s envy should manifest in a desire to remove her field of sight entirely. To rob her of the faculties that reap her privilege. There are two prevailing ideas about beauty which pose an apparent contradiction. The first is the phenomenon that “ what is beautiful is good .” Studies have established that being more attractive is, by and large, a significant privilege that translates into a myriad of material benefits. The second, called the “ beauty is beastly ” effect, suggests there is a threshold beyond which beauty becomes a liability. Need I even mention this is specific to women? Notably, when beautiful women applied for traditionally masculine roles, where masculine traits were required or valued, they were more likely to be perceived as incompetent and were discriminated against. So, we’ve established at least one way beauty functions as a double-edged sword . You find interesting paradoxes in a society that supposedly reveres, for one minute, the archetypal girlboss, only to delight in the crumbling of her empire , the next. This fate seems to befall a specific kind of woman, too. While there is no shortage of women deemed frumpy, mid, and annoying, and society’s lack of patience with such women tends to rear its ugly head rather early, it does not look like the passionate settling of scores, the justice-seeking, the venomous, vicious sadism that it does for the beautiful woman who just seems to have it all. These women come in all stripes: ethical, unethical, innocent, malevolent, meek, and arrogant. Some get caught in the crosshairs of major scandals because they truly did something wrong, whether it’s allegedly cookie stuffing to improperly claim affiliate commissions (most recently, Phoebe Gates), fostering a toxic work culture, or being found guilty of defamation . Genuinely problematic stuff. But there’s no question that the societal glance that turns into a fixed gaze, like a car crash you can’t look away from even though you know your pause to take in the scenery is backing up traffic all the way up I-95, has more to do with schadenfreude than anything else. When women seem to have it all: fame, fortune, beauty, influence, society derives pleasure from their misfortune. Sydney Sweeney saying she has “ good genes ” in a jean ad turned into concern trolling about promoting white supremacy and eugenics, as well as accusations that she was oversexualizing herself, conspicuously right around the time men around the world crowned her the modern sex symbol. Despite presenting a remarkably consistent persona over the years, it was only after she reached this status of beloved, beautiful, sexy, and unashamed of her popularity with men that women, in particular, seemed eager to take her down a peg. Or Brooke Schofield , a once-beloved influencer and co-host of the Cancelled podcast, whose leaked “problematic” tweets from when she was a teenager turned her entire audience against her right around the time she seemed untouchable: physically glowing up, rising in popularity and wealth. Ever since, if she posts about undergoing an aesthetic optimization procedure like blepharoplasty, people concern troll her, telling her that it “actually looks terrible,” that she “ruined her face” and is “promoting unrealistic beauty standards” to her female followers. The trend is clear. When women seem to have it all (fame, fortune, beauty, influence), society derives pleasure from their misfortune. The Danger of Envy In a 2013 review paper investigating the relationship between stereotypes, envy, schadenfreude, and harm, psychologists Mina Cikara and Susan T. Fiske found that stereotypes alone (rather than a personal relationship or having been victimized by the person) were enough to predict who participants would empathize with and who they secretly enjoyed seeing fail or experience misfortune. Per the review, “A potent predictor of schadenfreude is envy, which, according to the stereotype content model, is elicited by high-status, competitive targets.” As background, the review explains there are several conditions which predict schadenfreude: when misfortune benefits the observers, when the misfortune seems deserved, and when the misfortune befalls an envied target. The last condition is the most malicious motivator, as the envied target's suffering doesn’t translate into any tangible benefits for the observer, nor does it serve any greater justice. Humans are highly social creatures who are comparing themselves to others all the time. This allows us to assess where we rank in social hierarchies. This means we tend to form ingroups and outgroups and are less likely to empathize with outgroups. Sometimes, something more sinister is afoot: not mere apathy or an absence of empathy, but outright pleasure at witnessing an outgroup member’s pain. Not all outgroup members are made equal, however, and this review points us to the stereotype content model, a framework that organizes all group stereotypes along two fundamental dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth is assessed based on whether people are perceived to be cooperative or competitive, while competence is judged on an assessment of high or low status. On a scale that maps warmth and competence, there are four broad stereotype categories and associated prejudices. Researchers found that groups perceived as warm and competent produce feelings of pride. People in this category include students and the middle class. Groups who seem neither warm nor competent elicit disgust, so these might be people who are homeless or addicted to drugs. Remaining groups produced more ambivalent emotions. Incompetent but warm groups like the elderly and disabled elicit pity, while competent but cold groups like successful business professionals elicit envy, the latter of which is the most likely to produce schadenfreude. Participants were asked to take part in four different experiments, the first of which paired photographs of individuals (drug addict, elderly woman, a man in a business suit) with everyday positive, negative, and neutral events presented as statements like "won a $5 bet," "got soaked by a taxi," and "went to the bathroom," and participants were told to report how good or bad they felt. The participants reported feeling happiest when good things happened to warm groups, saddest when bad things happened to warm groups, and least bad when bad things happened to stereotypically envied groups. Interestingly, even when participants didn’t admit to feeling happy when bad things happened to stereotypically envied groups, their facial expressions betrayed a secret joy, producing disproportionate smiles. In the second experiment, researchers wanted to see whether this emotional reaction carried over into behavior, so the participants were presented with a game-show scenario in which they could choose the fate of the game’s players. Since they had “won a challenge,” they were exempt from the punishment faced by the rest. The participants were asked to decide whether to deploy a mild electric shock to all five players or a stronger shock to one player, sparing the other four. Participants engaging in the thought experiment were more willing to shock (and implicitly, cause harm to and sacrifice) the envied targets than the pitied, admired, or disgusted targets. Even when participants didn’t admit to feeling happy when bad things happened to stereotypically envied groups, their facial expressions betrayed a secret joy. In the third experiment, researchers wanted to see if they could reverse the effects by modifying perceptions of status and competitiveness. By providing participants with counterstereotypic information about investment bankers, which was the stereotypically envied group, the investment bankers were portrayed as more cooperative or struggling rather than high status and competitive. This caused the participants to report greater sympathy and less schadenfreude because they were less envious, suggesting that schadenfreude has less to do with any particular group as people and more to do with whether they pose a salient threat to our self-esteem by presenting as high status, competent, and competitive. In the final experiment, researchers used fMRI brain scans to study Red Sox and Yankees fans, notorious rivals, as they watched baseball plays depicting the successes and failures of their own team and their rival’s teams. Schadenfreude literally showed up in brain scans. Witnessing the rival team fail increased activation in the ventral striatum, a brain region associated with reward processing. Those who exhibited greater ventral striatum activation reported a greater willingness to antagonize (heckle, insult, threaten, or even hit) fans of the rival team than participants who showed weaker neural responses. The Implications of Schadenfreude for Women Conventionally attractive influencers like Brooke Monk receive outsized levels of hate , with attempts to humble her for her appearance or being ‘uglier’ than her boyfriend, clearly out of envy, and bizarrely, seem to largely come from men. This seems counterintuitive at first, but makes sense when you think about it for a moment. The people who seem to leave these comments are men glazing Monk’s boyfriend while devaluing Monk’s appearance, accusing her of fraud for “needing pounds of makeup” to become her boyfriend’s “looksmatch” (someone of equal attractiveness to their partner). These are angry, resentful, and lonely men who have overdosed on dating discourse and read too many anecdotes about women’s “unrealistic standards.” (See: her perceived unwillingness to give them, specifically, a chance.) Most importantly, it’s consistent with research findings that schadenfreude is most palpable and malicious toward targets that threaten our self-esteem by representing high status or competitive opponents, even if only through stereotypes. While these men don’t know nor have they been harmed personally by Monk, she represents something bigger, more personal, and touchy for them: insecurity about their own value; a paranoia that they are unlovable, and that her levity about her good fortune (she jokes about punching above her weight in the dating market, insisting, modestly, that her boyfriend is more naturally attractive than her) is taking for granted the power they so desperately wish they had. That insecurity is being reflected back at them through their projections onto Monk. She is not just a young girl with a conventionally attractive boyfriend. She is a popular influencer who has amassed a following (seemingly in large part) because she is young and beautiful. She is openly “gloating” about how she punched above her weight in the dating market, and admits (more like is overly modest) that her beauty is largely an illusion made possible with makeup tricks. These men feel threatened by her because she represents what they most want but are powerless to get. The only remaining option to preserve their sense of self-worth is to devalue her. In other words, envy is strongly predictive of schadenfreude. Though people may have no personal connection to the person they are enjoying witnessing suffer, and may have never been personally victimized by them, their mere belonging to a stereotypically envied group (notably, wealthy and successful people), the less empathy we have for them, and the more pleasure we get from seeing them failing, in pain, or being humiliated. Worst of all is how invisible this can all be. People tend not to admit to antisocial behavior like schadenfreude unless it's in a socially acceptable context, like competitive sports, but physiological testing reveals its neurological presence, even when people don't fess up to it. From one particular experiment, experiencing schadenfreude was predictive of willingness to harm the person they envied. Not only are people delighting in your failures, but they're more likely to kick you while you're down. Not only are people delighting in your failures, but they're more likely to kick you while you're down. It's curious that schadenfreude was modifiable when people's perceptions of envied targets changed, suggesting it’s not a fixed outcome, but dependent on someone’s status feeling threatening to you. When that person is perceived as having more warmth or lower status, schadenfreude reduces. This could explain our cultural obsession with building women up only to tear them down once they “get too big.” Being a beautiful woman is one of the most precarious high-status, envy-inducing positions you can occupy in society. It’s why it was always so commonplace to regard models as anorexic airheads with nothing interesting to say, and perhaps why inviting those models into our living rooms every day with shows like America’s Next Top Model had something to do with the change in public perception of models. We saw them at their lowest (contradicting high status) and got to know them as people, seeing how personable they could be (a signal of warmth), which has been shown to reduce schadenfreude in stereotypically envied people. The next time you’re about to project onto a beautiful, successful woman or delight in her downfall, ask yourself if she actually did anything wrong. Maybe the answer is yes, but maybe, just maybe, you’re projecting.