Abrahamic religions or in Confucianism, did not only provide rationalizations, and thus legitimizations, of gender inequality. What is more, they also facilitated the internalization of gender roles. The message could be: the Holy Father is male, and the Virgin Mary is female— now follow their paths! In this way, gen- der roles were perceived not as mere roles but on a deeper level, as the inescapable and invariable core of one’s being.

In their diary videos, Boho Beautiful display their authenticity through profilicity- based means. They put (staged) authenticity in the service of profilicity

Despite increasingly obvious contradictions, the authenticity discourse not only stubbornly persists but even flourishes in profilicity. It thrives particularly well in the popular literature and professional marketing of “personal branding” or “self-branding.”

Kwame Appiah further explains that a cosmopolitan nation-state that includes people with all kinds of different origins, races, genders, and sexual orientations must also be grounded in “shared practices” similar to those binding religious groups together. These practices, however, are not to be derived from transcendent beliefs (such as a belief in the same God), but from moral values— which is precisely what makes them civil religions and not religious per se

It is just as problematic now to react to the emergence of profilicity with idealized reaffirmations of authenticity as it was problematic in the eighteenth century to react to the emergence of authenticity with idealized reaffirmations of sincerity.

Now that authenticity is on the wane, two closely related reactions are common, particularly among older generations: First, we find it hard to let go. It hurts seeing the values of authenticity recede— values we have cherished and that have guided us throughout our lives. Second, given our nostalgia and our bias in authenticity’s favor, we intuitively reject profilicity.

The trouble is that we’ve tended to emphasize the details of belief over the shared practices and the moral communities that but- tress religious life. Our English word “orthodoxy” comes from a Greek word that means “correct belief.” But there’s a less familiar word, “orthopraxy,” that comes from another Greek word, πράξης (praxis), which means “action.” Orthopraxy is a matter not of believing right but of acting right.

We do not think that the authenticity nostalgia that informs their work is help- ful. Theoretically, it prevents rather than enables a conceptual, or philosophical, critique of the social and psychological factors at work. What is unfolding is not merely a “lack.” Quite to the contrary, we see a whole new identity type fulfilling functions that sincerity and authenticity did in the past. Profilicity curates identity in a complex world where technology has drastically changed the environment within which people must exist, in both body and mind. To understand and cope with this new type of identity curation a new and more complex conceptual frame- work is needed.

Eva Illouz has shown that in current “emotional capitalism,” the public exhibition of feelings and personal preferences can make the self a valuable commodity. For her, this results in a tension: “The technology of the Internet thus positions the self in a contradictory way: it makes one take a deep turn inward, that is, it requires that one focus on one’s self in order to capture and communicate its unique essence, in the form of tastes, opinions, fantasies, and emotional compatibility. On the other hand, the Internet also makes the self a commodity on public display.” Public self-display, as Illouz points out most accurately, is directed toward an “abstract and anonymous audience,” a “general audience of unknown, abstract candidates” or the “generalized and abstract audience” (80– 90). We fully agree and call this audience the “general peer.”