Problematinx

My Idols are Dead and My Enemies are in Power

This week, TikTok’s big sister, Tinx, or Christina Najjar, was canceled for the age-old problem of bad tweets. Tinx had branded herself as a kind of a thinking woman’s influencer. She was a cut above the girls who just post pictures and do day-in-the-life’s that mostly consists of them opening PR packages and going to influencer events. She had a job and friends and an interesting life before the tiktok fame even arrived. Everything else was gravy. Fame on top of existing fortune. Until this week, when plenty of fans turned their back on her because they could not support who she was revealed to be. 

TInx in her signature Rich Mom apparel

However, if you’re like me, this was less a reveal than proof of what I always suspected. Something I, and many others got a read on from her first video. Whether we were exposed to her from her daily vlogs where she ate 3 meals a day at erewhon and talked about her best male friend that she was in love with or her “Rich Mom starter packs” where she broke down the differences between rich moms in every LA neighborhood, we saw this girl for what she was. A rich white woman who was a little frivolous and self absorbed. Her tweets did not surprise me but the reaction to them did. Her fan base felt betrayed and plenty of people waiting in the shadows for her to falter had their knives out for a woman they had long had problems with. 

I personally don't care about the tweets from 2013. I’m not really interested in litigating anyone’s bad tweets from over 5 years ago. That’s the statute of limitations. I’m calling it here. I also don’t really care if anyone was fatphobic in 2013. That’s not my problem. The article that sources the tweets says that she was “particularly cruel for the time” which simply is not true. The tumblr revolution did not hit the mainstream until 2015. People were bad then and they’re still bad now they’re just better at hiding it. It will save us time in the future to assume that almost everybody was fatphobic pre-2015 and unless they actively speak out about fatphobia they’re probably fatphobic now. Anyone can say “body positivity” is a part of their brand but that doesn’t mean anything in any kind of real way for fat people, or anybody really since body positivity has more or less failed as a movement.  

Now that we’ve gotten the most obvious part of the discourse out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff. Tinx being a republican. To me this was also not a surprise. The more we learned from TInx the more it was obvious she came from a very extraordinary world that provided the bases for her knowledge. She was not a spy for the middle class playing in the world of rich people in LA, as she made it seem initially. Tinx gave us information about the wealthy denizens of Brentwood and Malibu like she was passing along classified info. Her fans thought they could trust her because her outward loyalty didn’t seem like it was to the rich people she worked for and hung out with. 

To me though, it was always obvious Tinx was not one of us. She was flaunting her wealth as well as other people’s. I don’t know if her obscene wealth and assumed conservatism was as obvious to the casual observer as it was to me but I know I’m not alone in not being fooled by her bullshit regular girl in LA act. Sure I have the “insider” knowledge of USC girl as to how rich people in LA behave and act. I know the price of an Erewhon smoothie and dinner at Nobu and an Airbnb in Malibu but one does not have to know these things to be suspicious of Tinx. 

I believe that this debacle is happening and was so surprising for so many, (and not, in my mind, what they signed up for when they decided to stan) is because the people of tiktok do not understand signifiers. They do not understand how to do basic analysis of material circumstances to arrive at an assumption of how a person in that situation would behave. We’re not playing in the sandbox of basic stereotypes about people but things to keep in mind when pursuing a relationship, parasocial or otherwise, with someone. They don’t understand that a white person who centers themselves in activist discourse might be a narcissist and not trying to help. They don’t understand that someone from a conservative religion might be a conservative. They certainly don’t understand that most rich people are republicans, especially when they can’t figure out how rich someone is. 

This is why I decided not to invest my time into a woman who’s playing at being relatable while also being idolized. Not that I’m above following a rich influencer for advice to covet their life. I just prefer it when they’re upfront about their wealth and don’t pretend to be some kind of relatable bestie. For future reference this is how I knew Tinx was really wealthy and her everyday life might be a little different from my reality. 

One: Tinx started her platform by giving us the Rich Mom starter packs for LA. This means Tinx spends a lot of her time with Rich People in LA. You do not need to live in LA or spend a lot of time with rich people to know they are often superficial, shallow, conservative, and fatphobic. One need only watch one episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It’s by no means a documentary of the everyday lives of rich people, but it does get at some very basic truths. To hobnob with them frequently you either work for them or work with them. To work for them is to grow to resent them, especially if you’re making minimum wage. To work with them is to learn to live like them and admire them. If we did not know Tinx had also come from money, at the very least we could assume that she probably held some similar beliefs. 

Second: But we do know Tinx comes from money. Tinx has shared with us her life story. She was raised in London by American parents and spent her life in boarding school. She is both bicoastal and international. Two things that require a lot of money. Especially, a lot of family money if one is doing it from a young age. After boarding school, she went to Stanford, where a lot of rich people go to school. She moves between California and New York and California again between the 9 years since she graduated to end up in LA. All of those things cost a lot of money and she was employed the whole time. So she had good bicoastal jobs on top of the family money getting her to the good schools that got her those bicoastal jobs. 

Third: This is the one that is most obvious and does not require any kind of worldliness or understanding of Los Angeles, or money, or rich people. Tinx got her start during the pandemic. This is not unique but what is unique is that in the spring and summer of 2020, when most people were still stuck in their homes, she made her name vlogging day-in-the-lifes. She was BRAZENLY jotting all over Los Angeles. Sure by July, a lot of us were forming pods and going to get little treats in addition to our grocery runs. Many people ate outdoors at restaurants and a lot of people were forced to go back to work at these places. There was a lot of debate about who was worse in these scenarios, the people doing it and talking about or the people doing it and not talking about, which I’m not interested in litigating two years later, but the people doing it and talking about it obviously felt no guilt. Guilt is not a useful indicator to the people who got covid during that time, but it was a useful indicator of the type of people who talked about going out. Clearly Tinx was not following CDC guidelines and was talking openly about not following CDC guidelines. We know how she felt about covid. She made her name during covid, not following covid restrictions. It is not rocket science to figure out what she believes. 

Now, if you weren’t surprised by all of this I think you were aversive to Tinx the same way I was. You dislike for reasons that were evident beyond the money and the conservatism. You saw what she was selling and you weren’t interested in buying. Tinx is one step above the average influencer because she’s smart and likes to talk. The key though is that she’s also pretty. But that’s it. Her content is not more thought provoking or world better than the average influencer. It’s not more fun or necessarily insightful. It just seems that way because she leads with her thoughts rather than her body. 

I also believe that anyone who makes their platform telling girls it's ok to not have a boyfriend or a husband by a certain age is preying on insecurity. Obviously the whole internet is preying on our insecurity but I just think all of that is a load of bullshit. t’s so much easier to quiet the concern about not having a boyfriend when you’re talking about anything else. So when all Tinx talks about is being ok with not having a boyfriend, she is only feeding into that mindset of needing to have a boyfriend. The only community she created was not one of confident independent women who could take or leave a boyfriend but a positive feedback loop of constant reassurance. An endless refrain  I’m-ok-you’re-ok where at the end of the day everyone still just wanted a boyfriend. 

Tinx points to a larger problem in the world of influencers right now. Influencers target women specifically. They exist to get women to feel insecure and then buy things. On Instagram, these people are mostly their photos. They build their names on their bodies. On tiktok, they have the ability to be more than that. They can talk about anything. That app has birthed many weird and wonderful “influencers” who have a lot of fun and are getting a lot of praise by more traditional media outlets. But as time goes on, the oddities are getting less attention and we’re trending back towards Instagram. Women like Tinx are getting catapulted to the spotlight more and more. We lose the people who were able to grow a platform talking about birding and stamp collecting and screen printing and whatever niche viewpoint and are left with skinny white women who only give bad dating advice, which is only one mental rung above just posting instagram pics of your hot body. 

The worst part of this is that it probably doesn’t matter. Tinx will either bounce back and continue to make her content or she will be replaced by someone nearly identical but a little bit worse. We will be shocked when the next girl leans conservative despite all obvious warning signs. The cycle will continue and we will find new girls to repeat “if he wanted to he would” and pick a boring signature cocktail that her legions of acolytes will order all summer long. Tide goes in, tide goes out and all the rest of us can do is watch.