Hey, Aren't You The Horse From "Horsin' Around"?

Some thoughts on getting recognized in public

I’d like to preface this essay by saying that it’s not as concise and polished as I usually like my written work to be. It’s not a serious statement that I’ll stand with for the rest of my life, it’s just some thoughts. I hope you like the thoughts.

I also want to quickly get ahead of soft-hearted fans of mine who might read this essay and, having encountered me in public at some point, feel bad about it now. This is not what I want! Do not read this and feel bad about asking me to sign something, it’s a kind and flattering thing for fans to do. It’s nice to come see fans, it’s an honor. I’m just trying to talk through a vibe here.

I was raised to be pretty serious about privacy, especially internet privacy. For this reason, among others, I was able to avoid a lot of the gnarly rites of passage for young girls online (aka getting stalked, getting groomed, getting doxxed, receiving unsolicited dick pics, et al). I always knew that the internet  – and the world, for that matter – was not a safe place. However, one thing I did put online that I can never take back is my face. Anyone anywhere can look me up and see the face I’m going to have for the rest of my life.

I wouldn’t say I regret it, but I do find myself feeling weird about it sometimes. And it would be dishonest to sweep all of my unease about being watchable online under the rug of safety concerns. It wigs me out that I’m recognizable and I do sometimes feel like I’ve breached my own security, but it’s not really truly about the threat of bodily harm (although that is the extreme example I trot out when people start needling me about my privacy concerns). I mean, it’s true that fans and haters alike sometimes kill people they recognize from a screen. It’s also true that I could be publicly harassed on a really violent level if I were to get on the internet’s bad side, and that is something I worry about. But neither that nor getting murdered are actually the first thoughts I have when I reflect on my face being so available online.

You know what it really feels like? It just feels sad. Or maybe nostalgic. It makes me feel trapped somehow, like I’ll never be an internet virgin again. I’m out there now, and there’s nothing I can do about it. When someone leans in to kiss me, they’re kissing my stage name’s face. When my parents look at me, they see her. When you all look at me, you see my family’s girl, my best friend’s friend, my real-life face. And I can put on a costume and play songs and dance around and tell myself that I’m putting on a hell of a show, that I’m separating my body from my work, but there’s nothing I can do about my face. I can’t smile as somebody else. I can’t take it off. And even when I am asleep and my phone is off, my face might still be talking and singing on somebody else’s screen.

I read a paper recently called “Towards a Cyborg Poetics”, I’ll link it below.¹ I was curious about the author’s thoughts on cyberspace as someone with TikTok experience herself. She had all sorts of neat stuff to say in the paper about cyborgs and womanhood and techno-orientalism, and in the middle of it all there was this concept about faciality. The “faciality machine.” And this was a concept she had learned from a paper I found much less intelligible, but basically, I think it was saying that the face is a constructed center of our perception of our environment, in which we measure a given face in terms of deviation from the norm.² They talked a lot about the Christ Face, the face soul of the modern Imperial Core or whatever. A face is a landscape is a world is a life is a framework. The face is the locus of our analysis of our entire environment. It’s where our internal algorithm centers. Maybe this is why I feel so sentimental about my face. Maybe this is why it bugs me to have my face online more than, say, my hands. You see my face, you size me up. You now know who and what I am in every other aspect of my world, at least to some degree. 

I guess the other thing about it is that I never really felt like I was asked. When I put my songs online, I had no way of knowing the speed with which they’d become popular. As the views climbed and my excitement grew, I scrambled to remove all the videos that felt unsafe to leave up, videos of my friends, my location, my private information. But the videos that went viral were videos of me playing the guitar in bed, and there was nothing I could do to keep the attention, keep the career, keep the music, and just blur out my face. Those videos took on a life of their own, and they took my face with them. I was excited, I was happy, I was grateful, and also I was sad. I mourned the loss of anonymity.

So there’s a feeling here that I did choose. I could’ve taken the videos down. If I were really deeply serious about privacy, about the “virginity” of my face, about saving my face for my real life, I could easily have said “no.” And I didn’t. So part of the mourning is that I feel conflicted, and maybe I actually violated my own boundary by choosing this career in the first place. My ambition overrode my desire for security, for conservation. Maybe I betrayed my own “no” by saying a passive “yes”. And maybe I’d do it again, because it’s the right decision, because it’s so easy, because it’s so great, because I’m so happy and grateful. And then I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and I feel conflicted. I look at photos of me on Instagram and I go, “oh”.

I often refer to the performance aspect of my job as “being Mickey Mouse.” I put on the costume, I play the role, I make the audience happy, and then I go home and I take the costume off. When I get recognized in public, it’s very odd. In one way, it means I’m suddenly on the clock. In another way, it means that I have my costume’s face, and she has mine. And I’m happy that my work is important to somebody and I’m grateful to be recognized, and at the same time it’s like. That’s not me. I’m not Mickey Mouse, I’m just the guy in the costume. Do you really want the guy in the suit to give you his autograph? It’s like an emperor’s new clothes situation. You think I’m in costume, and I think I’m not. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The whole thing is very strange, for both parties.

I don’t like to talk about politics on social media anymore, I don’t think it’s a good place to do it, for a number of reasons. But I would consider myself, broadly, some kind of anarchist. That’s just what I believe in. And the whole thing about anarchy is that it’s not actually a specific prescription for a particular kind of society, it’s actually more like a set of rules and a method for organizing possible societies into either “valid” or “invalid.” You look at a society and you say, “is everyone’s humanity honored here? Is every hierarchy justified? Is every person’s agency accounted for?” And if the answer to all those things is yes, then I guess that society gets the anarchist stamp of approval. And with that in mind, celebrity is a strange and tricky concept. I feel like it’s taken for granted that it’s a good and normal thing, when that may not actually be the case.

It’s true that celebrity has existed for a very long time. From the art world to the religious world, the government world, and even kind of in the mythical, historical world, celebrity has its legacy. It feels like we’ve always had this concept of the few special people that everybody else wants a piece of. The fans want a little bit of contact, they want to interact, they want a trinket, a souvenir, a memory. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. Furthermore, there’s a case to be made that everyone in that structure is choosing to be there which makes the hierarchy justified, and therefore anarchy-approved. But I do think that this whole celebrity thing is pretty clearly a hierarchy, and it remains under-examined. I don’t know if it’s actually justified. Especially now that the nature of parasocial interaction is so rapidly changing, so overwhelming and so complex, I don’t really know how to dependably evaluate specific parasocial hierarchies to see if I think they are justified.

So much media coverage is spent evaluating the actions of celebrities – is he a good man? Should she have endorsed that product? Why isn’t she sexually appealing to me? Did he really hurt that girl? – but very little explores the ethics of celebrity in the first place. It reminds me of the way people online like to roast billionaires for their personal shortcomings. And it’s like, okay, sure, maybe, but also who cares? As if it would all be okay otherwise. As if it would be alright for billionaires to exist if they were just better people. As if their personality is the problem. It just feels a little silly. It feels like a big distraction. It doesn’t matter if the King is nice or not – do you actually want a King at all?

I feel a similar way about celebrity. It just wears a little thin. Now that I am an artist with fans of my own, my relationship to people I was previously a fan of has changed significantly. The mirage shimmers. I find myself taking a step back, and instead of wondering why a celebrity has a bad take on climate justice or whatever, I ask myself, why am I wasting my precious time on earth looking to a professional entertainer for information about climate justice? There’s kind of nothing a celebrity can do right, just like there’s kind of nothing a billionaire can do right. It’s not about them. The story isn’t about them, it’s about you. You specifically and everybody else. Your precious time and energy creates the hierarchy. And I have to wonder, why? Is the hierarchy justified?

It’s a lot. I guess I just feel kind of confused and abstract about it all. And just like with money, there’s this eerie feeling that if you let go of fame in this environment, if you just let go of it without intentionally, consciously forcing it somewhere else, it will only float up and never trickle down. Putting fame and money in the hands of people who threaten Capitalism is like swimming upstream. It’s like running on the moon. The physics are entirely against you. So even as I am deeply ambivalent about being recognizable as a microcelebrity, for both personal and political reasons, I also feel like self-sabotaging and freaking the fuck out is not a particularly wise career move either. I like my job, I’m very lucky to have it, and I hope to get better at it. I do not want a world where the only people who can accumulate fame and money are the people who feel completely and indefinitely entitled to it. So I’ve decided to keep the lottery ticket, I don’t throw it away, and I mourn the loss of my virgin face. So I’m Mickey Mouse. So I’m Penelope Scott. Welcome to the show.

1. Meiya Rose Sparks Lin, “Towards A Cyborg Poetics: Race, Technology, and Desire in Asian American Science Fiction Poetry,” (Wellesley, 2022), https://repository.wellesley.edu/object/ir1769.

2. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

^[I took this citation from the paper from the “Towards a Cyborg Poetics” paper]