Hetty Douglas is an artist whose name has trended on Twitter and made headlines in The Daily Mail, the Metro, The Sun, The Daily Star, The Evening Standard and The Mirror. Thinkpieces on her have featured on Huck, Spiked, VICE, *The *Tab and The Independent. Far from being shortlisted for the Turner Prize, the painter has warranted attention for taking a photo of a bunch of tradesmen in tracksuits in a McDonald’s queue, with the caption: ‘These guys look like they got 1 GCSE’.
She uploaded the picture as a story to 16,000 Instagram followers, and photographer Rhiannon Harper then uploaded this, along with a picture of Hetty, to Twitter, captioning it: ‘and you look like a spoiled rich girl gentrifying south london’, so far, this post has 18,000 retweets and 73,000 favourites. Commenters flocked to comment on Hetty’s social media accounts, which are now deleted.
Specific elements have combined to make this debacle so huge. Hetty was in McDonald’s on the day that McDonald’s workers elsewhere, but under similar working conditions, took part in a strike for minimum wage and job security.
Also, to many, Hetty and the various publications and brands that have endorsed her over the years (some listed above) represent a wave of gentrifiers who are making London uninhabitable (i.e. unaffordable) for the working classes. The image is pervasive: young middle-class white women creatives sit cross-legged atop the dustbins of happy-yet-impoverished communities, calling like sirens to the property developers and Foxtons marketeers.
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It doesn’t help that Hetty wears clothes that are traditionally associated with the working classes: signet rings and heritage brands like Stone Island and Fred Perry, making them ‘cool’ to the middle classes, helping the brands charge more. Additionally, to anyone post-Brexit wanting to project their horror at an out-of-touch liberal metropolitan elite, here’s the pale canvas.
There’s an article to be written elsewhere about how LGBT artists have a long tradition of co-opting styles which normally marry with machismo-laden heterosexuality; they did it with skinhead, lumberjack beardiness, and most recently ‘scally lad’ aesthetic. There have, however, been enough articles, before and after this incident, about Hetty’s art. It incorporates graffiti and slang elements, in some roundabout way, from the very working classes she was mocking. The Sun found some of the men photographed, got their critiques of Hetty’s artwork, and reported their responses to her photo. Warren Butt, 40, said:
‘I would like an apology. I do not think it's right she can take a picture of us without us knowing and say that. I'm just working - just earning a living for me and my son’. The men’s employer, a scaffolding company released a statement on how proud it is of its workers, adding: ‘Her comments reflect a dying perception about qualifications and skills, demonstrated by the supportive comments on social media.’
Meanwhile, The Daily Mail tracked down Hetty’s dad, who is… a builder. And Hetty’s friends attest that the scaffolders had been rude to staff at McDonald’s, ‘they were very unkind and intimidating…she thought she would take these lads down a peg or two. Sadly it has backfired but she meant well.’
Not only have criticisms levelled Hetty’s way marked her as a privileged and hypocritical appropriator of working class culture who’s got no appreciation for the people who she borrows from, there are comments on her gender, sexuality, face, lips, hair: a lot of things which, unlike her Instagram account, she has no control over.
And this is when the story broadens out. As Jon Ronson wrote in his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?there is no official arbiter of behaviour online, so groups will self-police, rounding on a person who, perhaps subjectively, has done something wrong.
The problem with this is that there are no rules on which transgression will be policed.
In 2014, a picture of me eating a pretty dull pasta salad was taken by a complete stranger and uploaded onto a Facebook group of thousands, a group designed to gameify women eating on tubes. The comments about me were rude, sexualised and humiliating; I was the integral part of a joke that I wasn’t allowed to be in on. Eating in public was my first misstep. But then I wrote about it for The Debrief, and the story got international coverage. I was tweeted all manner of homophobia and sexism, for days, and people literally called me at work to shout at me. These guys weren’t only cross at me putting cold food in my mouth on a near-empty carriage, were they? Eventually, some people I don’t really know staged literal eat-ins on public transport to protest the Facebook group, which, um… still exists.
To this day, I feel iffy about eating in public, but I was sort of hoping that there would be a more pleasant outcome: people learning not to stranger-shame. Lo, now I’m freelance, and people at Hackney Library take their shoes off, and yeah, I’ll film their feet - just their feet, nothing identifying - and upload it to social media. But we all see much worse, like Hetty’s post and the subsequent fallout.
I called up psychotherapist Dr Aaron Balick, author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, to ask him about stranger-shaming, group-policing and online meanness.
Hi Aaron, why do people feel to create a them-and-us set-up in social media posts?
'Our psychology hasn’t changed since hunter gathering times, so social media doesn’t cause an Othering but it enables it in a steroidal kind of way.'
'There are two otherings at work here: Hetty Others the builders, then people Other her. People Other to create identity groups and categories where they feel safe on the inside and put the bad stuff outside. But social media enables us to objectify others easily. When Douglas takes the photo of those builders in McDonald’s she’s having a relationship with herself, her phone and her imagined audience. The Others are so objectified that they’re not full people, so she takes a photo. But then people have done the same to her: people objectify and start trolling without understanding she is a complex person. So low is the level of complexity across social media that nuance is lost.'
Has** Instagram stories given users the misapprehension that their posts are ‘safe’ because they seemingly disappear?**
'On the one hand young people are savvy and know that people can take a grab. But in an impulsive moment when you’re wanting to share something, to create attention and seek validation, that urge supersedes the caution. The online disinhibition effect online is like when you’re drunk. We say things when we’re drunk that we regret, we post things impulsively that we might regret.'
It seems to be there are spaces where shaming is primed to happen, like McDonald’s, or, say, the tube. Do people feel less accountable not only online but in certain physical spaces?
'People have long behaved differently in groups than they behave as individuals. But also, urban environments are unnatural. There’s a justification in ignoring the stimulation brought by cities with millions of people: if we paid attention to everything around us we’d go crazy. At the same time, we become callous to real need. Social media can be seen as a virtual urban environment. You have half the world’s population at your fingertips, and if there’s so many people there we feel we can be a bit more callous.'
Brooklyn Beckham took photos of strangers in his photography book, published by Penguin. Is it ever fair to take photos of strangers in any context?
'It comes down to consent and intent on a basic level, like posting bad pictures of your friends without checking first. And if you’re taking photos to shame people, it’s morally bankrupt.'
**When does punching up become punching down in stories of online retribution? **
'There is very little gain in having these conversations out on forums like Twitter. A famous example of punching up is JK Rowling and Donald Trump, but she has a lot of cultural capital, she does it with class, she doesn’t troll. When it becomes a bandwagon it stops being a dialogue, it’s a group hysteria.'
'People don’t realise, but need to consider, how vulnerable they are when they make their thoughts public. We can tell friends who get our backstory and get it, but when we publish it to 16,000 followers, which only needs to tip over once and is 100,000 onlookers, it’s a dangerous activity. We all need to take a step back and consider our vulnerability.'
**Should social media companies be doing more to be arbiters of online ‘beef’ and how do they go about that, practically? **
'Social media companies have a role but they’re never going to fix it because it’s human nature. There needs to be education in schools starting very young and going beyond sharing information and ‘stranger danger’ into how to be respectful of human beings in a digital context. We don’t get enough of that from an early age: it’s up to education, government, parenting and social media.'
Finally, if our readers wanted one tip on how to use social media better, what would it be?
'Whenever posting anything on social media about someone else, consider what it would be like to be that person before you do it. Make that person a real person in your mind. They’re not an object of your use online, whether they’re wearing bad shoes on the tube or saying something you disagree with.'
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**Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson **
UPDATED 8 September 2017: Hetty Douglas has since published an explanation for her behaviour, detailing the sorts of tweets and impacts her ‘not nice and not clever’ Instagram post provoked. She clarified that she is ‘not posh. I come from an ordinary family in Nottingham. I went to my local comprehensive with lads like the ones in McDonald’s’ Admitting that she ‘acted irresponsibly’ she says that ‘For everyone else this is a cautionary tale: don’t make brash judgements on others, and certainly don’t put them on Instagram.'
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.