#anna holmes

In his book Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business, distinguishes between cultural products such as movies, music, and television, which are commonly used as identity markers, and something like, say, dishwashers or toilet paper, which are what he calls more “functional” domains of life. “Imagine you met someone at a party,” he suggested when we spoke recently, and they asked you, “‘What TV shows do you like?’” You might think, “Well, wait a second, what shows I say may impact what this person thinks about me,” he said, and then you might become cautious about what you pick. According to Berger, a “magnet” model of social influence pushes some people toward conformity and others away from it. In our conversation, he made a distinction between what he called “bandwagon effects” (conformity) and “snob effects” (avoidance when something is too popular), or a need for uniqueness. These motivations aren’t divergent or mutually exclusive, he said; they can, and do, coexist. “It’s not that people only want to fit or only want to stand out,” he said. “Both are true.” Perhaps this means that resistance to hype is not snobbery but identity management—a need for differentiation that gets triggered when a person believes their autonomy is under threat. In other words, maybe my rejection of The Pitt has little to do with the cultural product and much more to do with an effort to retain independence. I’m not rejecting culture; I’m rejecting overidentification—which, in a highly individualistic society like the United States, may not be such an odd reaction.

Author Interview with Anna Holmes

Dressing Anne Bonny and Mary Read: What Female Pirates Wore During the Golden Age of Piracy

You’ve literally ruined me. I’m burned down to my foundations. I may build myself again or I may not. You say obsessions are curable. They are. But people like me swing themselves from one passion to another, and if they miss smash down somewhere where there aren’t any passions at all but only bare boards and sawdust. You have done for me utterly. You know it. That’s why you are trying to persuade yourself that I am a coarse, sprawling, boneless creature, and so it doesn’t matter. When you said, “You’ve been talking unwisely, Rebecca,” you said it with a certain brightness: you felt that you had really caught me at it. I don’t think you’re right about this. But I know you will derive immense satisfaction from thinking of me as an unbalanced young female who flopped about in your drawing-room in an unnecessary heart-attack.

I always knew that you would hurt me to death some day, but I hoped to choose the time and place. You’ve always been unconsciously hostile to me and I have tried to conciliate you by hacking away at my love for you, cutting it down to the little thing that was the most you wanted. I am always at a loss when I meet hostility, because I can love and I can do practically nothing else.

I don’t understand why you wanted me three months ago and don’t want me now. I wish I knew why that were so. It’s something I can’t understand, something I despise. And the worst of it is that if I despise you I rage because you stand between me and peace.