Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
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Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
Lately, more and more content has been posted on TikTok and Instagram discussing the risks of contraception. Content creators have shared concerns about the pill’s side effects, from weight gain to decreased sex drive and mood swings. Other claims are misleading because they exaggerate risks related to contraception, cancer, and infertility.
Many of these posts and videos are created by wellness influencers who cultivate an impression of authenticity by sharing their personal lives with their followers. This makes it difficult for people to decide what to believe and who to trust, even though they are not qualified as doctors.
The wellness movement first emerged in the United States in the 1970s as an alternative to the standard medical model. Rather than viewing health as the absence of disease, the pioneers of the wellness movement conceived of wellness as a lifestyle in pursuit of optimal health and vitality.
The movement was inspired by the 1961 book High Level Wellness by statistician and physician Halbert L. Dunn. Dan believed that wellness involves a holistic approach to health that encompasses mind, body, and spirit in order to maximize a person’s potential.
The ethos and alternative lifestyle practices associated with the wellness movement resonated with the hippie movement. It also merged with other counterculture movements, such as the civil rights movement and the women’s movement.
The women’s movement criticized what they perceived to be the patriarchal medical system in postwar America and defended women’s right to bodily autonomy. Activists fought for women’s right to be involved in decisions about their health and the treatment they received.
Women’s rights activists also fought for reproductive rights, including the right for unmarried women to legally be prescribed contraceptives.
But today’s online backlash against birth control is occurring in a context of curtailment of women’s reproductive rights. When natural contraceptive methods result in unwanted pregnancies, some women no longer have the right to choose. This raises questions about how the pill has been reframed from a source of liberation to something harmful by some female wellness influencers.
Role of social media
Social media has changed the way we connect and communicate online. It has also lowered the barrier to fame, allowing content creators to build personal brands and gain large followings by sharing their experiences and lifestyle advice.
Unlike the doctor-patient relationship, which is characterized by professional distance, influencers establish trust and intimacy by cultivating an impression of approachability with their followers. This usually involves being vulnerable with viewers by providing behind-the-scenes access to their personal lives and sharing their personal failures and successes.
We tend to trust people we perceive to be similar to ourselves. For this reason, many women may consult friends and relatives for health information. People trust influencers because they appear approachable, trustworthy, autonomous, and independent of political and commercial interests associated with the media and traditional experts and authority figures. It’s for a reason.
The trend to look beyond organizational expertise when it comes to medical information is not new. Scientific knowledge has always been constructed through a combination of expert and non-expert opinions. What has changed is that science communication is now online and social media has allowed people, whether they are experts or not, to create and publish content on these sites. In some cases, misinformation is created collectively and shared online.
While the wellness movement was once primarily associated with liberal ideology, many journalists and researchers have recently focused on the intersection of wellness debates and far-right politics. This shift has been further accentuated by the pandemic, where health has become a gateway to misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Despite this convergence, the backlash against contraception cannot be reduced to politics alone. While some conservative influencers promote natural contraceptive methods (such as timing sex with your menstrual cycle) rather than synthetic hormonal methods, many influencers have continued to do so for decades. I have more general concerns about the economic and political incentives of companies and pharmaceutical companies that are
These concerns often manifest in criticism of experts and elites who they see as being compromised by money and power.
Instead, wellness influencers typically prioritize what my colleagues and I have previously referred to as “native expertise,” knowledge that comes from intuition and experience rather than from being an expert. This often manifests itself in the promotion of lifestyles that are portrayed as natural, ancestral, and primitive. Experts and doctors trusted by these influential people tend to be rejected by the establishment.
Today, many wellness influencers share similar concerns as the 1970s women’s movement about male doctors telling women what to do with their bodies. They want to be heard, believed, and in control of their bodies. But one notable difference between the women’s movement and the female entrepreneurs who advocate for women’s health online is that the advice influencers share is often monetized. Most influencers seem less interested in political change and more interested in promoting a particular lifestyle, product, or service.
why is this important
In the late 20th century, the wellness movement gave way to the wellness industry. Wellness has become a commodity.
Social media has further commodified wellness, and influencers are using it to create lucrative personal brands. The financial benefits of instilling mistrust and establishing yourself as a trusted alternative have made women’s wellness a confusing place for consumers.
Because influencers typically share opinions rather than facts, they often use disclaimers to legally protect themselves, making their content difficult to regulate. Rather than diminishing their authority, these anecdotes are at the heart of it, with influencers trading on their apparent ordinariness.
People critical of contraception may be motivated by a variety of factors and experiences, and it would be a mistake to attribute all criticism to misinformation. But who we trust influences what we believe. If the backlash against contraception highlights anything, it’s that misinformation is less about information and more about trust, identity, and relationships.
