Becoming the Sellout With Other Women

It’s shame as punishment for not following the rules she’s being suffocated under.

For a long time I didn’t post photos of myself online.

I had decided the internet didn’t deserve my face, or maybe I had decided my face didn’t deserve the internet. Either way I kept it off. I had a private Facebook where my kids took center stage and occasionally I would appear as their crew.

During the pandemic I left social media entirely for one year. I wanted to recreated the phone free kid and teen years I had enjoyed. It was magical.

What eventually shifted it was practical: if you run an online business, people need to see a human behind it. Especially now, when the default assumption is that everything is a bot. A face is proof of existence. So I started posting mine.

At first it was hard. I did a lot of somatic work to find safety in my own image. That might sound silly to some people but it’s my truth. On some level I didn’t find photos of myself to feel safe. I had even done some very conservative modeling in my 20’s for local magazines. I felt so much internal shame over those photos that at the time I hid them. Sharing them in the last few years also became part of a larger play at owning my physical form.

I am in my forties. I have had three children. I have a pretty average jean size, which shouldn’t matter. But it does to most women and that doesn’t protect me. I am not wearing makeup in most of these photos. I do try to wear makeup but it never really layers the way the YouTube videos seem to say it will. One day!

I even had a cold when I took the one that caused the latest incident.

What happened when I published an essay on Medium that some women disagreed with — not an essay about my body, an essay about men and boys — was that the first move was to question my integrity due to a top that revealed my shoulders. No cleavage. Just my shoulders. The commenter moved into calling my face and eyes seductive in some way she felt I could control.

She called out my use of close ups of my face in my writing. A practice that is super important in the age of AI. One I am sure she would never have a problem with if I as a man. Irony.

It’s funny I had never thought of photos of my face as an attempt at getting male sexual attention. In the age of constant streams of mostly naked women they just felt like, well, photos of my face. Sometimes a tank top or tube top. I work from home, it’s a pretty casual operation. I hardly think about it when I snap a selfie for my writing anymore.

But to this woman my eyes were a threat.

I want to sit with that for a second because I think it contains everything about working through modern female culture.

There is a tax on women who don’t follow the script.

I have watched it operate my entire life and I have paid it and I have sometimes collected it from other women without fully understanding what I was doing.

The script changes depending on the tribe.

But the enforcement mechanism is always the same: your body, your choices, your happiness become the evidence against you. If I say something about men that challenges the dominant narrative in a tribe of women, the quickest available weapon is not a counter-argument. It’s my body. It’s look at her, thinking anyone wants to see her. She should be ashamed.

Next it’s usually questioning if I have a trauma privilege card big enough to have an opinion. I probably do, but it’s not one I would play. My degrees and certifications are after that. Followed finally by challenging my right to get paid for an online business. Making money through creating content as a single mom becomes a crime. If none of that works they will find something else.

I have come to realize when another woman has decided to shame you as a sell-out there is nothing you can do to satisfy her scorn.

It’s shame as punishment for not following the rules she’s being suffocated under.

In the age of the women’s liberation movement. In the year 2026. A woman in her natural state, no filter, air-dried hair, is apparently a provocation that requires correction if she dares to have an idea that might be hard for other women to digest.

I find this more interesting than offensive.

Here is what I’ve learned in the last three years as my work has become more popular and my views have shifted: finding your new tribe almost always means upsetting your current one.

Not with a fight. Just —when you start moving toward women who are genuinely celebratory, then some women in your existing orbit register it as a betrayal. As selling out.

Selling out looks like: saying something middle of the road about men. Being happy with a partner. Not feeling grief about your age. Having a body you don’t apologize for. Holding an opinion that diverges from the one the group requires. Not wanting to bond through complaining.

The women I am trying to find — and trying to coach my clients toward — are not threatened by difference. A different political read on a situation, a different parenting choice, a different relationship structure: these things don’t destabilize them because they have enough of a grasp on themselves that your choices don’t read as an indictment of theirs.

Those women exist. There are more of them than the internet suggests. The internet, as a system, rewards the punitive ones because punishment generates engagement and engagement generates money, and here we are.

My forties feel, strangely, like landing.

Not because everything is resolved. Because I am no longer waiting for permission from the dominant tribe to decide who I am. I’m not ashamed of my body. I’m not haunted by what an ex thinks of me. I’m not performing either youth or wisdom. I am not proud or ashamed of something like divorce or my green eyes. I just exist in my actual life, which is full and specific and occasionally photographed with air-dried hair and no makeup and apparently that is controversial. Or worthy of attack.

I wrote an essay about my son and men and the stories we tell about boys.

Someone responded by telling me my eyes were a problem for them.

It says more about her than me. But it’s a powerful thing to look at adult mean girl culture and stand up against it. To say I don’t need your permission to exist outside of your comfort zone.

If you want to you know how to surround yourself with more powerful women it’s through being willing to stand inside yourself regardless of whether that pleases or displeases your current tribe of female friends.

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I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.