You Don’t Need to Be Real to Be Popular
Your audience doesn’t mind if you’re fake
About a month ago a motorcycle-loving Japanese woman with 27,800 followers on Twitter revealed that he was actually a 50-year old Japanese man who had been using a photo app to make his face look like a young woman.
According to the BBC, the man (named Soya) did this because, “No one will read what a normal middle-aged man, taking care of his motorcycle and taking pictures outside, posts on his account.” By editing his pictures to look like a young, attractive woman, he was far more popular on Twitter. “I get as many as 1,000 likes now, though it was usually below 10 before,” Soya continued in his segment on the TV program Getsuyou Kara Yofukashi (Sitting Up Late From Monday).
While that’s strange to start, the weirdness only continues. Even after eagle-eyed fans unmasked the motorcyclist after spotting an unedited reflection in a selfie, Soya is still editing his photos. And people are still talking to his alter ego as though she’s real.
We say we want authenticity, but what we want is a convincing fraud
In my younger days of trying to be a Cool Girl, I found that I got a lot more male attention when I guzzled beer, pretended to like soccer, and feigned an…
