Thursday, May 27, 2021

A young woman working as a butcher in a Taiwan market inadvertently became a viral star

Vice:

In 2015, then 25-year-old Charlene Zhang was working at her family’s pork stall selling meat when a customer secretly snapped a photo of her. That image was immediately plastered online, with tabloids crowning her Taiwan’s pork princess

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she quickly became one of the most popular Taiwanese livestreamers, and sales skyrocketed. But she was forced to stop when stalkers would show up at the market and try to follow her home. 

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The obsession with Zhang as a beauty icon is not a one-off, but instead part of a larger phenomenon in which photogenic strangers—mostly women—are unknowingly photographed and sexualized online. 

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Women who work at markets are especially vulnerable. “People can just go to the market and find them and take more photos. They can’t refuse. For those girls in the market, they have to just deal with the harassment. They become a landmark,”