Shawmila, Pamela Anderson, and Mimetic Desire

On June 21st, 2019, Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello’s single “Senorita” was released. Two months later, the music video had more than 500 million views on YouTube. The video sparked a sea of rumors about a romance between the two singers. And yes, the rumors were shortly confirmed and now it’s official: “Shawmila” was born. For some reasons or another, I find celebrity relationships peculiar (and their nicknames pretty dumb, but bear with me). To start with, I wonder about the role of Rene Girard’s mimetic desire in them. According to the French intellectual, human beings have a tendency to imitate other people’s desires. Put yourself in Camila Cabello’s shoes for a moment. She knows Shawn Mendes has millions of fans, women who would (metaphorically, I hope) die to be with him. If Camila’s mindset works according to Girard’s theory, she imitated that desire and decided it was time to date Shawn. The same would apply the other way around, as Camila is as famous as Shawn. I am sure something like mimetic desire is a big part of many celebrity relationships. I would go for Brangelina (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt) or TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes) as a safe bet, but you follow your heart.

Maybe you do not even have to think about celebrities in order to realize the power of mimetic desire in the shaping of our likes and dislikes. Maybe by doing a little bit of soul searching, you realize you have been a victim of mimetic desire too. Perhaps you started liking someone you didn’t because you discovered that person was liked by others. This demands soul searching because imitating other people’s desires is a process that can happen below the level of consciousness. As you might have guessed by now, mimetic desire is also at the very heart of marketing:

“whenever a product is promoted, some celebrity is used to ‘mediate’ consumers’ desires: in a sense, the celebrity is inviting people to imitate him in his desire of the product. The product is not promoted on the basis of its inherent qualities, but simply because of the fact that some celebrity desires it.” (Andrade, 2019, External Mediation)

Now, mimetic desire seems to be a fact of human psychology. However, it is worth asking if being guided by it is good or not. There are reasons on both sides. On the one hand, the desires of other people can be a good guide for us, especially in an uncertain environment. For example, if you go shopping for a pair of casual shows but there are so many alternatives that the process becomes overwhelming, it is sometimes a good thing to know that, let’s say, the Sketchers GoWalk5 are what most people are buying. Or if you are picking your next read, it is good to have a best-seller book list that you can scan through. In the previous examples, mimicking the desire of others is good in so far as those desires pick up objective, valuable features, of the objects or persons we are considering. The Sketchers GoWalk5 are highly comfortable and that is why so many people desire them; the best-selling books are entertaining and interesting and that is why many are reading them.

So far so good. But there are scenarios where mimicking the desire of others can definitely lead us astray. Let’s discuss the short-lived marriage of Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock. After getting married, the couple got divorced just three months later. Apparently, Kid Rock filed for divorce after watching some scenes he considered inappropriate from the movie Borat, starring Anderson. At the time, Anderson was a popular sex symbol and a woman desired by almost any man in America. Probably, Kid Rock felt like the chosen one when he married Anderson. After all, she was what almost any man on earth would have wanted. However, you do not divorce a person you love after three months over a dumb reason (Anderson is an actress!). In my opinion, one possible interpretation of Kid Rock’s failing is that he did not consult his desires when he married Anderson but mistakenly took other people’s desires as a guide of what he had to do. This is obviously a mistake. And the lesson can be extrapolated to other areas. If, for instance, I know I do not enjoy science fiction books, but almost everyone happens to be reading The Lord of the Rings, it would be better for me just to avoid the book. In a parallel way, if I do not like Sketchers GoWalk 5 style, I should not buy them even if everyone is doing it. In a nutshell, a decision-making process based on mimetic desire is unreliable as far as it goes against your preferences. On the other hand, if you do not your mind set in one direction or another (if you are not sure what book you should read or what sort of sneakers to buy), mimicking others’ desire can be good.

There are some caveats though. First of all, I wonder if mimetic desire allows for conscious control. Can we turn our look inwards and decide whether our desires are authentic or not? Kid Rock married Pam Anderson even though he did not love her. As I said, probably mimetic desire was part of the reason why he did it. But, could he have reflected about his feelings before marrying her? The question is whether Kid Rock could have detached himself from the influence of other people’s desire and dug any inner, authentic, desires up. In other words, faced with other people’s desires, do we stand a chance of taking a step back and decide by ourselves if we really desire what others do or are we helpless victims of what other people want? I hope we are not and, in any case, we should at least give it a try and stop and think by ourselves before pursuing something that is very popular among people.

Secondly, not all desire is on the same plane. Think about Camila Cabello’s desire for Shawn Mendes and contrast it with regular women’s desire. The obvious difference is that even though all of them desire the same person, Camila Cabello knows she could date Shawn Mendes. Other women are aware that their desires, strong as they may be, are bound to go unfulfilled. Because of this, in the case of Camila Cabello, other women are a source of information, not of conflict. The question here is whether you want to promote conflict or not. Does the strength of the desires we mimic change according to the level of conflict we perceive? I lean towards a positive answer to this question. If Shawn Mendes fans had a real chance of dating him, Camila Cabello’s desire for him would have been stronger. When we perceive others’ as a threat to the fulfilment of our desires, they seem to get stronger. Promoting perceptions of scarcity among consumers would be an application by marketers of this same principle. When we want to buy a product many people want, knowing that the product is scarce (e.g. there aren’t many units left) makes it more desirable for us.

So, where do we stand? Mimetic desire is real, so if you want to market something, a good way is to make people aware of the fact that others also have a desire for that. Additionally, marketing would seem to be more effective in those cases where the general perception is that others are a potential threat to the fulfilment of one’s desires. So, for example, if I want to market myself to an employer, it is a good idea to create the perception that other employers want me and that I find the perks of some of those alternative job offers attractive. Or if a woman wants to spark the desire of a guy, she should create the perception that other guys want to date her and that some of those guys have a chance with her. However, I also expressed a word of caution aimed at the consumer. It is a good idea to stop and think if you really want what others want. In some occasions, we should try to preserve our autonomy, not letting other people’s desires drag us around. At the end of the day, it would be smart for both, the selection manager and the guy the woman wants to date, to stop and carefully consider if these sought-after work and partner prospects are what they really need or want. Consumers might do well by adopting a similar attitude toward products.