I Want to be an It Girl. It Girls Are Startups, & Startups Need Funding

June 6, 2023 7:35 AM

"Listen, if you’ve never had any scandals, my advice would be to continue to have none. But if you’ve had one, have as many more as you can. It’s the Kardashian, Trumpian information overload fatigue. There’s a point where people can’t retain enough information to remember every little scandal. Whereas if you have one scandal, people remember, and it defines you.” from Caroline Calloway Survived Cancellation. Now She’s Doubling Down by Lili Anolik [Vanity Fair; ungated]

Previously

posted by chavenet (35 comments total)

I have zero interest in this person, but she may have a point in "if you have fifty billion scandals, they all blend together." That said, then wouldn't people remember you as "that person who's constantly in trouble all the time for bad shit?" Which isn't great either?
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:04 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

This girl is The Worst, but in the sense that a tick or a fruit fly is. She's a survivor and she's adapted to a niche, which is parasitism of a sort that may or may not do lasting harm to its host. She's good at what she does, good enough that I reflexively called her "girl" although she is old enough to have children in grade school. In another time, she would be a high-class courtesan, sleeping with a prince one week and fleeing town ahead of creditors the next.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:06 AM on June 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

It is relevant that Lili Anolik is also the biographer for another hot mess, Eve Babitz. (Babitz also notoriously wrote and published repeatedly, in between her own myth-making)
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:07 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

In early 2019, she went viral as a grifter for launching a national “creativity workshops” tour that failed, rather spectacularly, to come off. She forgot to book venues; promised “mason jar gardens,” then, after 1,200 jars were delivered, had nowhere to put them; promised “orchid crowns” but only managed a single measly non-orchid flower per attendee; etc.
Oh, her. Yuck.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 8:21 AM on June 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

I read this last week and was like, "Tom Waits was right. There's a sucker born every minute. You just happened to come along at the right time."
posted by Kitteh at 8:22 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

oh right it's the mason jar lady, i'm not sure despite the pullquote thesis that she's ever gonna manage NOT to be the mason jar lady without committing some sort of like felony aggravated violence with meme potential, but in sheer attention economy terms you can't fault her for managing to continue to get people to write about her being an attention-chasing mess because here I am through no fault of my own thinking and talking about the mason jar lady again
posted by cortex at 8:24 AM on June 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

So this is one of this year's crop of interchangeable Paris Hiltons?

I do like the line about It Girls being startups and therefore requiring funding, though. +1 insightful.
posted by flabdablet at 8:26 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

“Please Don’t Trust Me” by Clubdub
posted by Going To Maine at 8:29 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The more obvious it becomes that our society is a rigged game that piously insists on its own fairness, the more obvious it becomes that the rich make new laws to grind the poor into dust and then scold them for it, the more despair sets in at ever making things better... generational despair is fertile ground for people who sell the fantasy of Getting Away With It. Not the Horatio Alger types who insist that the game is fair, but people who say it's okay to be a wolf among sheep. Even if you're just a petty, one-non-orchid-when-you-promised-an-orchid-crown kind of wolf, at least you're telling the world you're a wolf.

I could almost see the appeal, but of course there was that whole dimes square thing where she hung out with the "hey isn't fascism kind of cool?" crowd.
posted by cubeb at 8:44 AM on June 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

she went viral as a grifter for launching a national “creativity workshops” tour that failed,

OHHHHHH that person. So 'cancelled' can also mean 'people stopped listening to me and I didn't do anything else newsworthy'?
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:35 AM on June 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

interchangeable Paris Hiltons

Paris Hilton is from a truly wealthy family. Calloway dreams of being Paris Hilton.
posted by praemunire at 10:10 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Calloway makes me her collaborator. She needs one more than anybody I’ve ever met.

Yeah, she wouldn't be such a phenomenon unless all these writers in mainstream publications wrote about her. But she's really good at tapping into the zeitgeist, at starting the conversations that people really want to have. I've always thought that's the function of celebrity gossip - it's really a way for people to indirectly talk about things they really care about. It's been rehashed a million times here now but we love scammers because under capitalism everything is a scam, etc.
posted by airmail at 10:20 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Let's provisionally grant that what she's doing makes sense relative to her own goals.

Why should anyone else care? Why should we help her?
posted by grobstein at 10:54 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The grifter lays on her back, belly baking in the hot sun, beating her legs trying to turn herself over but she can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, grobstein?
posted by flabdablet at 11:07 AM on June 6, 2023 [25 favorites]

I don’t care about Calloway, but I like the writing in the piece. My problem is that this writer likes writing about Calloway, and so by enabling the writer I am also enabling Calloway.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:30 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

My problem is that this writer likes writing about Calloway

I think the author also kind of just likes hanging out with Calloway. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading this, but it also overall reminded me of an amazing line from the recent NYTimes puff piece on Elizabeth Holmes: 'My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!”'
posted by advil at 12:06 PM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't know that we should be "cancelling" anyone for merely grift and hustle when there are billionaires and fascists and transphobes left. But it seems like this woman has had so many "scandals" that I couldn't wade through them all to find if she's hateful or just ambitious. We certainly shouldn't be cancelling anyone just for trying to make money going topless, which is what the article leads with.
posted by rikschell at 12:26 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’ve created a brand out of thin air. I’m a business. But banks don’t see me that way.

Oh wow. Jeez. I'm reading it and I still can't quite believe it.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 12:50 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

She's a survivor and she's adapted to a niche, which is parasitism of a sort that may or may not do lasting harm to its host.

That's a lot of words to say she's thin and white.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:23 PM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

The pretty white girl thing is part of what generates so much discourse. I don't just mean her privilege makes it easier for her to get media attention. I mean that people love discourse about white women. It makes her extra controversial. Taylor Swift, Karens...
posted by airmail at 2:32 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I liked this line very much: Yet it could also be argued that Calloway is a writer. A new kind of a writer. A writer who’ll never finish a book because to finish a book is to kill the story
posted by Well I never at 4:26 PM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Needs more ether and mescaline.
posted by flabdablet at 4:31 PM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Thanks for sharing this well-written article, which I found fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way.

Even though I'm bored by people like Calloway, I can't look away from what these phenomena say about These Times.

The aliens need to hurry up and rescue us.
posted by rpfields at 5:10 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

From the pieces in the previouslies (here's the other one from 2019) I thought there was at least a chance she was mostly Clueless White Girl who managed to use her pretty privilege & whiteness to skate out of the messes she got herself into because of her own cluelessness.

After reading this piece? Nah. She's a sociopath. She name-checks "Trumpian" about halfway through and that's exactly it - like a lot of sociopaths (including Trump) she can be charming and funny when she wants to be, and a lot of that is doing the con artist thing of repeating your own ideas back at you and saying exactly what you want to hear in the moment, with no regard for what she might have said five minutes ago or what she might say five minutes in the future. There's no center there, she's not a performance artist, or a new kind of writer, or "authentically criminal" (I mean, she is authentically criminal, as in "fraud", even if Anolik is too blinded by her charms to see it clearly), or any of that other bullshit. She's a plain old scam artist, and the fact that she's managed to do it via social media and is smart to enough to be quasi-meta about it (like titling her book Scammer) isn't a sign of anything deeper.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:19 PM on June 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Could she primary TFG, though?
posted by flabdablet at 5:34 PM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

What. the. fuck.
posted by fuzzy.little.sock at 6:40 PM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

So this is one of this year's crop of interchangeable Paris Hiltons?

I'm no fan of Paris Hilton, but at least she's done some good charity work. Paris has donated to hospitals, done many fundraisers, appeared for Make-A-Wish, supported disaster relief, appeared for LGTBQ events, and most notably produced a documentary bringing to light the abuse in the "tough-love" camps for troubled teens: previously.

Calloway's done jack shit.
posted by fuzzy.little.sock at 7:02 PM on June 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

(Paris Hilton) most notably produced a documentary bringing to light the abuse in the "tough-love" camps for troubled teens: previously.

It both reflects well on her as a deed, and it tells us something about where she came from -- she was a product of the troubled teen industry herself. She was famous for being like rich and repulsive but at the time she was just a couple years out of Provo Canyon, which is a kind of private prison for kids. I don't, like, enjoy her, but if she wanted to make excuses for her public life she would have a lot to work with.

There was a good Trueanon episode about the documentary (host Brace also spent some time in the troubled teen archipelago).
posted by grobstein at 8:02 PM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

I Want to be an It Girl. It Girls Are Startups, & Startups Need Funding

Hold up shouldn't an It Girl be self-sustaining?
posted by grobstein at 8:08 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

shouldn't an It Girl be self-sustaining?

something something smarter than us something exponential redesign something something singularity something
posted by flabdablet at 10:08 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also an It Girl is obviously a Girl that uses It/Its pronouns, not whatever this is.
posted by grobstein at 10:21 PM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Seems like "Calloway" really ought to be two words, not one.
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 5:38 AM on June 7, 2023

Oh and her original surname was Gottschall, which is maybe too on the nose for a self professed scam artist.
posted by cubeb at 10:23 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

She's a plain old scam artist, and the fact that she's managed to do it via social media and is smart to enough to be quasi-meta about it (like titling her book Scammer) isn't a sign of anything deeper.

It's not deep, but the fact that she's been able to keep up the scam even after everyone knew it was a scam is fascinating. I'll admit, I'm the target audience for Caroline Callaway articles. She's absurd and loathsome and doing it all right out in the open.
posted by Mavri at 5:24 PM on June 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm interested in how she'll cope over the next decade. A huge amount of her brand has been connected to youth. I've no doubt she'll still be thin and pretty, but she's not going to be young.
posted by Braeburn at 12:05 AM on June 8, 2023