For work last week, I got to interview Bekah Martinez of Bachelor fame?!?!?! This was a huge moment for me. I love her as much as you can love someone you don’t know. Of all the former Bachelor cast members, she might be the coolest one with the fewest brain worms. (Another contender: Rachel Lindsay.)
Martinez was on Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s season of The Bachelor, and her whole subplot was that he liked her but she was ultimately too young for him. (She was 22 and he was 36.) The actual problem was that she was too interesting for him. He was basically a bot that said “I love that”; his condo in Scottsdale looked like a stock photography set. His most interesting act was going for a walk.
Bekah said more varied sentences than Arie, and she invented short hair. (She was the first and last woman in Bachelor history to have a pixie cut.)
She also had so much charisma that it was weird. The Bachelor steamrolls the whole concept of love into a tiered bureaucratic system, and steamrolls everyone on its cast into flat paper doll shapes. Not her!
Bekah stayed entertaining after the show, too. Shortly after filming, she was reported missing, then found again on a weed farm. She has said on her (great) podcast, Chatty Broads, that on the farm she got a call from Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss, sort of implicitly asking her to be the Bachelorette. He was calling from his yacht, obviously. She was too broke for phone bills, so she was on the communal farm phone.
She was like “Maybe???”
But then she fell in love with a guy unaffiliated with the Bachelor, and they had two kids in quick succession, and now she’s something incredibly rare: an influencer who influences me! Between her podcast, her weirdly-authentic Instagram stories (on a recent one she scraped a half-dead mouse into a bag while gagging), and quarantine keeping me inside, I have a robust parasocial relationship with her.
I thought I might act weird when I actually got her on the phone, and like casually reference weird deep-cut details about her family I know from following her for years, but I did surprisingly fine! In my own opinion! We focused on how she manages her Instagram ads, and the business side of influencing — that’s most relevant to my work — but there were still some medium-juicy details:
She only posted one ad a month after she left the Bachelor — she wanted people to get to know her before she started selling things.
Most people in Bachelor Nation have the same three agents, which helps explain why they all do ads for the same stuff (Revolve, Boohoo, Vanity Planet, etc.)
This summer, she posted a photo of the thin blue line flag in the toilet. None of her advertisers expressed concern!
[If you want to read the whole work story, it’s here.] [Self-promo, ugh sorry.]
While putting together that story, though, I was thinking about how Bekah has influenced me, and how it’s not just about ads. I mean, I do pay attention to her ads; she has made me much more aware than I normally would be of Thredup, this BondiBoost curling iron, and bacterial vaginosis, though I have not bought any of these things (and BV isn’t for sale).
But there’s something bigger than that going on. The whole reason brands pay for ads in Bekah’s feed is because her followers, such as me, like her life. We’re drawn to it in a certain way. (I hate mice, but I watched Bekah clean up a half-dead one, mangled by her cats?!) We think it’s cozy or entertaining or something — somewhere between a compelling Insta-based reality show, ASMR, and a model of how we should live?
None of this is specific to Bekah, of course. All influencers need to cultivate a level of intimacy and positive feeling with their followers. Otherwise, they don’t have influence. So they end up selling ads, but also themselves (in a not exactly monetary way) as protagonists and lifestyle inspiration.
I think what Bekah has sold me most successfully, in the past few years, is the concept of having kids? As someone who loves to sleep, read and luxuriate in alone time, I’ve always been sort of skeptical of children. (I also feel a little like, how dare I bring a child to life in the gd end times!)
But Bekah makes it seem fun. Not with the photogenic little posts like this one — that’s cute but not real life. (Click through and look in the comments… it’s not even her mailbox.)
It’s more that she clearly gets overwhelmed sometimes, but leans on her boyfriend and her extended family and finds ways to make it work and still get her nails done and record her podcast and dress her kids in funny hats. She hasn’t lost her personality or her mind. She hasn’t turned into a Giving Tree stump of her former self. Her feed makes having kids seem like a bizarre and rewarding challenge that might make me feel more empathetic and connected to other human beings?! What am I saying???
Her story is also a nice counterweight to the writer myth that serious writers live alone in the woods, writing 24/7, and hate frivolity and friends. This is the Walden myth, roasted with incredible precision here, and it deeply annoys me. It encourages people to write boring books about lonely people (we already have My Side of the Mountain — do we need MORE?!) and develop superiority complexes (everyone else is engaged in shallow pursuits… but not me… I’m alone in nature thanks to family money). But clearly I’m susceptible on some level, because when I think about having kids, I think, oh no! My solitude!
But then I think: You can’t write about the world without living in the world, and you can’t say anything insightful about people if you spend your life avoiding getting too close to them (or giving birth to them) because they’re time-consuming.
Also, Bekah seems happy.
I don’t think I’ll have kids soon. I’m single in a pandemic, and not currently in a headspace that’s like “I will have kids or die trying” (though no shade to that headspace!). Still, I’m closer to a pro-kids stance than I was before Bekah had kids, and that’s weird.
I think it’s also the truth about influencers. They influence their followers, and brands try to buy and direct that influence, but no one — not the brands, the influencers, or the followers — can completely control what influence does. It has a life of its own.