The Outrage Is The Point
Hate & Arousal In Politics, Marketing & Beauty
Hello, I’m Adeline. I write Ginseng & Tonic to deliver a straight shot of cultural & skincare analysis to your inbox most Sundays. Subscribe for deep dives into the intersections of culture and beauty by a former cultural studies professor and current skincare formulator.
Outrage is a rallying cry.
Outrage is a whole vibe right now—from politics to marketing. Hate and arousal are the points of the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on everyone from immigrants and BIPOC to women and poor people.
In turn, the people are responding with rightful outrage: protests in 50 states against the illegal Musk takeover of the federal government, people defacing Teslas and Tesla dealerships with swastikas en masse all over the world.
Even marketing is getting in on the act. Duolingo recently killed off its owl mascot as part of its marketing campaign, making a joke that the bird possibly died in a mass suicide— all in the middle of a bird flu epidemic that is currently being played down by the Trump health authorities.
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This disturbing marketing tactic made plenty of viewers uncomfortable; some of the most somber topics — suicide, mental health — are now simply content fodder for virality. While the company later revealed that the Owl was killed by a Tesla cybertruck, they are now selling a plush version of the dead bird in a coffin — even more clearly commodifying the shock value of the stunt.
It seems that more shocking, the more distasteful, the better. The more enraged the viewer, the better.
But see: the outrage is the point.
Around the same time, the beverage brand Poppi recently ruffled many feathers by sending out entire vending machines of Poppi drinks to highly privileged influencers and WAGS (wives and girlfriends of (sports) players), sparking outrage that these machines could have gone to communities who could have actually used them like public schools and community centers.
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This lavish influencer gifting project led with a spate of harsh Tiktok criticism, with users calling it “a waste of money” and “out of touch.”
But just like the murder of the Duolingo owl, it appears brands are almost purposefully manufacturing this outrage—because it pays off. Slutty Founder’s
writes: “Outrage — (especially Black outrage) is bankable as the impact fosters engagement.”In today’s marketing climate, an outraged consumer is an aroused consumer, one who is driven to act, engage, and to buy.
costs it out: the 35 million organic views generated from the Poppi influencer gifting project only came down to $0.02 cents per view — an outrageously low metric, signifying that this was an extremely successful marketing campaign. In today’s landscape, even backlash is good as it is ultimately engagement and brand awareness.Yet. Can we really blame brands, if it is clear that we are asking for more outrage and arousal? This same week, The Cut profiled 5 Redditors from r/NYCInfluencerSnark and r/LAInfluencerSnark — entire Reddit forums dedicated simply to influencers that people take pleasure and joy in trash talking. Users in these forums are not just snarking — they are outraged at the influencers whose highly curated aspirational lives inspire jealous hate.
The outrage is the point — because right now, it almost seems like it is the only legitimate feeling to have. There’s always someone doing us wrong; there’s always someone to hate, whether we do it in secret or not. And right now, we want that outrage to have a public target, one which is witnessed and sacrificed in the name of collective catharsis.
Understanding the role of outrage right now is even more pressing—because hate is powerfully creating and binding together communities. I will next unpack how hate works to create important in-groups through its targets. Finally, I ask the question: what happens to marginalized folks, who are most commonly the targets of this hate? How should we approach a world full of hate when it it turns its gaze upon us?
Hate: The Emotion That Binds & Defends
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed analyzes the emotion of hate as an attempt to defend against injury.
In her analysis of the Aryan Nations’ website, Ahmed discusses how the white nationalist constructs the minority other as a threat to both the white nationalist himself and to the people he loves. Hatred is projected onto the minority other; such that to the white nationalist, the minority is the “real” source of hate.
Needing to defend themselves against the minority threat works as a binding agent within the white nationalist community. This community comes together out of apparent “love” for one another, love which is created through the fear of the minority other and the need to defend themselves against their imagined injury.
We’re seeing Ahmed’s analysis playing out in real time from different angles.
For snarky Redditors, hatred of the privileged influencer binds the community together. The ostentatious entitlement of the influencer is a threat against the ordinariness of the person on the Reddit threads, who are bound together by shared jealousy.
For the MAGA group, everyone who isn’t a cis able-bodied white man appears to be that imagined source of hate: the immigrant, the person of color who received DEI ‘advantages’, the person on Medicaid, the federal worker; the woman who has an abortion.
The manifold targets of MAGA’s rage demonstrate Sara Ahmed’s analysis that feelings of hate are not anchored in specific targets but instead distributed across various figures. The more hate circulates within the MAGA community, the more it increases as a form of connection within its members.
The circulation of hatred moves among different objects, sticking to some more than others. When an object becomes particularly sticky, it becomes a collective entity within the MAGA imagination, it becomes a collective object of hate.
MAGAts bind together in love for one another against these objects of hate, who they imagine are threats that injure them.
In the MAGA circulation of hatred, some objects are more sticky than others. We see its main targets clearly in the executive orders handed down after the election: the undocumented immigrant “freeloading” on the US economy (while paying $75 billion in taxes in 2022); the unqualified DEI hire who is “stealing” the job of white men (while having more degrees and years of experience than they do); the imagined freewheeling woman who “uses abortion as birth control” (when no one does this).
But: the circulation of hate discriminates. Hate doesn’t stick to all groups of people equally. It sticks most to those who occupy marginalized identities, especially those who inhabit more than one at the same time. How do those of us who become objects of hate function in this collective discourse?
When Hate Becomes Self-Directed
And here’s the nub: for those of us who become objects of hate because of our marginalized identities, we in turn experience the constant impulse to turn that hate inward, onto ourselves.
Towards the end on her chapter on hate, Sara Ahmed analyzes a quote from Black revolutionary activist Audre Lorde. In this quote, Lorde is a child on a Brooklyn train, who suddenly realizes a white woman is staring at her in sheer hate and disgust.
Lorde starts looking around, wondering what is causing such a strong reaction. She wonders if there is a cockroach somewhere the woman is staring at.
After a while, Lorde realizes that there is no cockroach. The hatred and the disgust in the woman’s gaze is being directed at her.
When Ahmed reads this moment, she argues that at this moment Lorde begins to occupy the white woman’s perspective. And occupying that white woman’s perspective means to start identifying her own body as an object of hate.
When hate against you is the dominant framework in the society you live in, resisting this identification as an object of hate is very difficult.
And when we identify our own bodies as objects of hate, we’ve lost the battle.
The rise of #conservativecore also means the odds are stacked against our resistance.
#Conservativecore is exemplified by the #tradwife trend of celebrating regressive gender roles that has been dominating social media for the last few years. The #tradwife aesthetic isn’t just a harmless focus on modest dresses, long hair and understated makeup; it’s also a call to a return to a regressive form of femininity signifying submission and dedication to home and family.
calls this out, along with how Ivanka Trump and her daughter’s dresses at the 2025 inauguration eerily evoke the Handmaid’s Tale, “a chilling sign of how hyper-traditional femininity is being embraced in elite circles.”
And #conservativecore goes deeper.
highlights a trend where the terms “facial harmonization” and “facial balancing” collected billions of views across social media platforms last summer, with people searching to create for themselves wide eyes, plump lips and defined jawlines — all typically Eurocentric features. Going further, DeFino reminds us that “facial harmony” actually has its roots in 18th and 19th century eugenics, and the pseudoscience of racial hierarchies.For those of us who are not able-bodied, straight, cis, thin, white or blonde, it is all the more important now to resist the impulse to self-hatred.
Instead—I would suggest turning to satire— one of the most historically classic forms of dealing with rage in the age of pending authoritarianism.
We can witness this, for example, in the new “It’s Giving Dusty” trend that’s taking over Tiktok.
As the account Diet Prada explains, “It’s Giving Dusty” is a magnificent roast of #conservativecore. It critiques Republican Makeup — think Trump’s fake tan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Karoline Leavitt. There are over 85.2M posts referencing it on Tiktok.
It’s Giving Dusty is unmoisturized skin, cakey foundation and stark undereeyes, often paired with dry, smudged mascara and overdrawn lips. All gloriously roasted by Tiktok influencers recreating signature Republican looks on camera—only to look like addled versions of their aspirational white conservative selves.
The outrage is the point. But for those of us for whom the outrage is now often turned against—it is imperative for us to not turn our outrage against ourselves.
The collective is looking for a public target, to be seen, witnessed and destroyed — all for a public catharsis with that destruction.
Let us refuse the mantle of that public target. Let us refuse to be the sacrificial lambs for the collective’s anger. And this begins by resisting the narrative to internalize the hate directed at us. Our lives and our communities depend on it.
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So this post has blown my mind out the frame and for all I know, I joined Substack to come across this post. There’s so much I want to say, especially because this post resonates deeply, but I’ll say this:
In my first and latest post (it was ambitious) I share an observation that has been bugging me for almost close to 2 years … everyday I feel like I am being trolled and trolling is the new key to success.
Even in my bio, I say that I am here to practice trolling. But YES … it’s the outrage. You explained it so much better. In my post, I mention how marginalized communities are especially vulnerable and a few other things.
My writing isn’t as polished as your’s, but you let me know I am on the right track with my observation AND you gave me some more stuff to think about!!!! I look forward to studying and referencing this post in the future.
Thank you for the mention, Adeline! This was such an interesting read. It really makes you think about how much negativity has taken over. It’s crazy how outrage spreads so much faster than positivity. You know the saying: if you have a good experience, you’ll tell a few people, but if it’s a bad one, you will tell the whole world… As someone who leans toward the positive, I find this pretty sad, especially when brands join in.