hate is parasocial, too

for destruction ice / is also great

A couple different people sent me this article about Sydney Towle, an influencer with cancer who also has a sizeable anti-fandom that believes she doesn’t have cancer. (Let’s cut to the chase here: Towle does, in fact, have cancer.) After I finished reading the article, my first thought was that nobody who had really dug in on the anti-fandom side was going to change their minds… even when presented with evidence that they were just wrong. Even if they accepted that she was sick (big if!), they’d still be right in some other way.

A little Reddit searching immediately after the fact revealed that, indeed, they did not:

from not-quite-a-snark subreddit

from a revived (?) snark subreddit… also kind of funny how clearly this AI-generated lol

Now, how many people are really dug in to this extent? Probably not that many. Most of them will just drift off to a different snark forum where they can talk about Hilaria Baldwin or whoever. Those people will almost certainly continue to consider Towle to be a fake in some undefined way, but they won’t be posting about it.

My friends sent me this article because I have an interest in people who are obsessed with the idea that other people are faking illnesses, explored at greater length here. More generally, though, the particular type of “parasocial relationship” that is anti-fandom interests me. When we talk about parasocial relationships gone bad, we think about fans who go bankrupt buying merch and tickets, stalkers who swear that they’re married to their idols on the astral plane, club presidents who end up killing their beloveds, and so on. We think of the movie Misery (even if we haven’t seen it) (like me) (I haven’t seen it).

In short, we’re thinking about the dark side of adoration, and adoration gets pretty dark. But adoration isn’t the only feeling that leads you to believe only you have the secret decoder ring to what the person on the screen is saying and doing. Hate can get you there too.

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It tends to be used pejoratively, but I take “parasocial” to be a descriptive term: if you interact, even one-sidedly, with what somebody does often enough, you will have a mental relationship to them.¹ That’s even more true when it involves something that you invite “into your home,” like a daytime TV host, a podcast, or—now—an influencer. By itself, however, a parasocial relationship is just one other texture of daily life. It is not inherently pathological. It’s just something that happens.

In the original 1956 paper that coined the term, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction,” Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl focus on positive parasocial relationships; in an ideally realized parasocial relationship, the audience is “expected to benefit by his wisdom, reflect on his advice, sympathize with him in his difficulties, forgive his mistakes, buy the products that he recommends, and keep his sponsor informed of the esteem in which he is held.” They do concede that other kids of relationships could happen, but are skeptical that “detached curiosity or hostility” could really drive viewership:

Other attitudes than compliance in the assigned role are, of course, possible. One may reject, take an analytical stance, perhaps even find a cynical amusement in refusing the offered gambit and playing some other role not implied in the script, or view the proceedings with detached curiosity or hostility. But such attitudes as these are, usually, for the one-time viewer.

That is, Horton and Wohl can’t quite imagine a situation in which people tune in all the time to keep track of people they hate. Thus, when they consider “pathological” parasocial relationships, they’re more likely to mention people convinced the person on the TV loves them, just as we do. They also discuss some truly bizarre old programming I’d never heard of, like a radio show called The Lonesome Gal that was just this anonymous female voice² talking about… well… being lonesome because she couldn’t really be your girlfriend.³

One of the points of Horton and Wohl’s paper, however, is that the fan relationship isn’t actually a passive act of consumption. It’s a dynamic in which fans play a crucial role, even though on the individual level it remains one-sided. (That is, a public figure’s persona has a relationship with fandom, but the actual person has no relationship with actual fans as such.) So if the fandom of anti-fandom wasn’t in full swing in 1956, it had time to develop, and it has. Hence: hate-reads, “lolcows,” snark forums, and the rest of it.

These negative relationships are parasocial but they’re also much more durable than fandom. If you were a Z-tier vlogger on That Guy With The Glasses there is almost definitely an active snark forum thread about you somewhere,⁴ even if you’ve totally quit the Internet and moved into selling real estate or something. The Swiftie who just kind of stops being into Taylor’s music and following Taylor’s activities is an example of parasocial relationship that’s ended. The Swiftie who gets rid of all her merch and starts posting in subreddits dedicated to how personally evil Taylor Swift is hasn’t really altered her interests, only her emotional response. Anti-fandom grants its participants the illusion of growth without actually requiring them to change.

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As with positive parasocial relationships, though, I think it’s true that negative parasocial relationships form naturally and are not inherently pathological. General-purpose snark forums can be bad, but they’re sort of necessary. Single-person snark forums, on the other hand, are only bad, no matter how famous or obscure the individual happens to be. No single person generates that much material and allowing and encouraging people to develop this level of fixation is bad.

What I really hate about these places, though, is that they allow people to become extremely, self-righteously cruel without ever really admitting it. Because (in their minds) they’re all just little nobodies, and if you came and poked your nose into their forum, you did it to yourself. Never mind if they are messaging your family or otherwise proactively contacting you—you just shouldn’t notice. At the same time, they consider themselves crusaders for justice, unmasking fakes and holding them “accountable.” And so you end up with an atmosphere where people will egg each other on to say the most over-the-top things about somebody while being able to claim either that “all’s fair in love and celebrity” or “very important,” whichever defense is easier to use at the moment.

Thus: sure, okay, Towle has cancer, but she’s presenting an unrealistic standard of “carrying on” for people with cancer, which is almost as bad as accusing a stranger of faking cancer for no reason—maybe even worse, if you really think about it.

In most cases, I think what the sick person is really guilty of is just being annoying. However, sick people are annoying! That’s just how it is. Many people on r/illnessfakers claim to be either chronically ill or medical professionals, and I think, to do some armchair psychoanalysis myself, if that is the case they are just simply burned out on levels of “being annoying” they cannot escape in daily life so… they go after girls on TikTok with POTS. Indeed, one of the biggest snarkers on Towle’s forum worked in healthcare, though not as a provider.⁵ But for these places to function, it is not enough to find somebody irritating; they have to deserve it, because they’re objectively bad. They’re “shoved down your throat,” which is why you have to seek out stuff about them all the time.

And yet… Sydney Towle isn’t really shoved down anybody’s throat, is she? Influencers are very easy to avoid. I do not interact with their content because I don’t go looking for it. Sydney Towle is not famous. She is “more famous” than me, but so is an unusually big state fair pumpkin. If you resent somebody for successfully capturing and monetizing your attention, sure, I would too, but the way to deal with that is to withdraw that attention. If your algorithm is serving up stuff you hate, you train it to give you other stuff. If you refuse to do this, on some level, you should admit to yourself that you like it and that you are as much the audience for this material as the imagined sheep-like fans you both despise and act to “protect.”

1. For instance, I had a very complicated mental relationship with the early morning guy on New York’s WQXR station when I lived there. We had a kind of enemies-to-friends arc that played out entirely in my mind. At first I found him annoying. Then lockdown happened and I was like:

All that was parasocial.

2. When Jean King (the voice of the Lonesome Gal) appeared “in persona,” she would wear a mask.

3. Here’s a quote they provide from the show:

Darling, you look so tired, and a little put out about something this evening .... You are worried, I feel it. Lover, you need rest ... rest and someone who understands you. Come, lie down on the couch, relax, I want to stroke your hair gently ... I am with you now, always with you. You are never alone, you must never forget that you mean everything to me, that I live only for you, your Lonesome Gal.

They also discuss a similar, but frankly even weirder, program for TV called Count Sheep:

Not so Miss Nancy Berg, who began to appear last year in a five-minute television spot called Count Sheep. She is seen at 1 A. M. each weekday. After an announcement card has flashed to warn the audience that she is about to appear, and a commercial has been read, the stage is entirely given over to Miss Berg. She emerges in a lavishly decorated bedroom clad in a peignoir, or negligee, minces around the room, stretches, yawns, jumps into bed, and then wriggles out again for a final romp with her French poodle. Then she crawls under the covers, cuddles up for the night, and composes herself for sleep. The camera pans down for an enormous close-up, and the microphones catch Miss Berg whispering a sleepy “Good-night.” From out of the distance soft music fades in, and the last thing the viewers see is a cartoon of sheep jumping over a fence. The program is over.

4. Have I used this example before…? Well, it’s still true.

5. Not to defend the honor of r/illnessfakers, however, but I don’t think Sydney Towle would have ever been accepted as a “subject” there. She isn’t really their type. You can see some screenshots from the old snark forum here and as cruel as r/illnessfakers can generally be, they’re not really that kind of cruel. They have rules about interaction with their “subjects.” You cannot do this kind of thing there:

I mean, I’m sure people do cross these lines. The idea, cherished by that subreddit, that everybody on a forum dedicated to scrutinizing essentially random people’s lives to prove they’re liars is also scrupulously observing the rules of not interacting with their objects of paranoid speculation seems very silly to me. In general, r/illnessfakers is delusional about itself and what it does, but those delusions keep it from becoming as bad as it could be. Still bad, obviously, but if you venture into the more unfiltered online worlds available, you’ll see what I mean.