Paige Spiranac scorches influencers for ‘oversexualize’ hypocrisy
Paige Spiranac has taken aim at influencers who tried to bring her down to then only follow in the exact path she has blazed.
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Paige Spiranac hasn’t forgotten the grief she received as a rising golf influencer — and how those who came up after her derisively vowed they wouldn’t “oversexualize” as she did.
Spiranac, 30, briefly competed as a professional before entering her current career, and she has spent much of the past decade building an enormous social media presence and leveraging it for marketing, a podcast and an ambassadorship with the PointsBet sportsbook, the NY Post reports.
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Last year, she was the cover model on Maxim’s “Hot 100” list.
She joined “Straight Fire with Jason McIntyre” this week and was asked if there is a community of influencers or if the women’s golf scene was more of a “mean girls” situation.
“I stick to myself. I’m very introverted. I just kind of keep my head down, do my work, and get done with it. But if any of the young girls reach out to me I am more than willing to give advice,” Spiranac said.
“I think I’m a little bit more guarded because of all of the hate that I have received from women in the industry, so I’m kind of hesitant to reach out or want to collaborate because I’ve been burned in the past, but if any of them reach out I’m always willing to lend a helping hand.”
How has she been burned?
“When I first got into the industry and when I was trying to play professionally a lot of the LPGA players did not like me and were very outspoken towards that, and as well as a lot of influencers who came up behind me, they were saying that they didn’t want to take the path that I was taking, they weren’t going to ‘oversexualize’ themselves, and they turned around and do the exact same thing,” Spiranac revealed.
“Sometimes there’s just not a level of respect for everything that I’ve been through, and if I didn’t do this then they wouldn’t even be doing this now. They wouldn’t even have a job without all the hardships that I’ve faced and the path I paved for them.”
With nearly four million Instagram followers, Spiranac — who describes herself as the “OG Insta golf girl” — has built an online empire that now expands to an exclusive website, OnlyPaige.
And while the “Playing A Round” podcast host is supportive of others’ success, she has noticed carbon copies of her own content elsewhere.
“I will say that I do value creativity and I wish that it wasn’t copied exactly from the exact outfit to how I do my hair, to the captions, to how it’s shot, it would be nice if there was just a little bit of a difference,” Spiranac said.
“I think it’d be actually beneficial for them to be different and not have it be exactly, exactly, exactly the same.”
This article originally appeared on the NY Post and was reproduced with permission.
Originally published as Paige Spiranac scorches influencers for ‘oversexualize’ hypocrisy