Love them or hate them, the Kardashians are cultural drivers, and a new book releasing tomorrow dissects why.

Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto is written by psychotherapist MJ Corey, who runs the Instagram account, Kardashian Kolloquium. When she discovered the Kardashians while in grad school, Corey was so struck by their content and found it uncanny. Her sister told her to read postmodern theory, and Corey deep-dived into self-study and started documenting it online. Now, she has nearly 50,000 followers, helps run the Kardashian Data Koalition, and has become a premier Kardashian intellectual. 

"Kardashian intellectual" may sound like an oxymoron, but as Dekonstructing the Kardashians demonstrates, it's important for us to examine pop culture. There must be reasons why something is popular, after all. "I don't psychoanalyze the Kardashians, but if anything, they might hold a mirror to the rest of us," Corey said in an interview with Mashable. 

The Kardashians trace culture with their narratives, she said, and it actually began with sex work. 

The infamous sex tape

Cast your memory all the way back to 2007, when Kim Kardashian's sex tape with singer Ray J was leaked. Kim rose to fame, and Keeping Up With the Kardashians (KUWTK) premiered months later. 

There's a current legal battle between Kardashian and Ray J, which may shed new light on why the tape was made and how it was released. But regardless, whereas some may have been embarrassed and shied away from the public eye after such an invasion of privacy, Kim did the opposite. She refused to be ashamed. 

"Why did you make a sex tape?" Kim's sister, Kourtney, asked in the very first episode of KUWTK ahead of an upcoming talk show appearance. 

"Because I was horny and I felt like it," Kim said.

A reason why people are angry at the Kardashians is that they made money from the tape instead of living in shame or disassociating from it, Corey said. 

"People have a different feeling towards female icons that are tragic or humiliated than the ones that are like, 'No, I'm good, I'm gonna make money from it,'" Corey said. "It's another nuance that people have been forced to sit with when it comes to the Kardashians and their relationship to sex — that the tape didn't break them."

And the sex tape was far from the only time the Kardashians associated themselves with sex — and sex work — especially in the early years of their fame. In the first season of KUWTK alone, members of the family: played on a stripper pole, hired a porn performer to babysit the Jenner sisters, participated in a Girls Gone Wild photoshoot, and also shot photos for Playboy. 

When we break down the story of the Kardashians intellectually, Corey said, we look at cultural appropriation of race and ethnicity. But in the beginning, they appropriated sex work, as well. Corey spoke with a sex worker who wanted to remain anonymous, who believed Kim is a sex worker, though Kim would never call it that. In Kim's time in the spotlight, she's stigmatized the profession while fully idealizing, glamorizing, and profiting from sex workers' aesthetics, Corey said.

When researching for this book, "it was impossible to ignore this middle-class woman's fascination with sex work," she said of Kim in the early days of KUWTK.

Kim Kardashian and OnlyFans

Kim K isn't on OnlyFans, but there is a connection between the two. As Corey writes in Dekonstructing the Kardashians: 

"Sexual accessibility is, apparently, most alluring when there's a sense that no woman is profiting from it, which is probably at least one reason why the Kardashians…became more reviled the richer they got, and also why people would one day rag on the sex industry social media website OnlyFans, which came out in 2016 in the thick of Kardashian-driven influencer culture and offered a space for many sex workers to own the means of their production."

There's a larger discourse beyond the Kardashians around OnlyFans, its place in culture, and its influence on women and how they view and potentially commodify their bodies. "I've just noticed in the larger discourse, [shaming] of women who are entrepreneurial on their OnlyFans accounts. There's a similar shaming that people throw at the Kardashians sometimes for making money on their sexuality." 

"And I think that it's threatening to see that women can be independent from men," Corey added.

The difference between Kim Kardashian and the typical OnlyFans model, however, is fame, money, and access. Kim K seemingly gets a pass to post whatever she wants; this is a complaint sex workers and other sex-adjacent Instagram users have told Mashable in recent years. While Kim is boosted in our algorithms, non-famous people are shadowbanned — deprioritized — if not banned entirely. 

How the Kardashians won culture

The influence of the Kar-Jenners is undeniable, and in her book, Corey follows the lineage between a variety of American icons — like the Disney brand and Marilyn Monroe — and what they have in common with the family.

Every icon she references in the book typically evokes anxiety about race, death, or sex. This is even true of Mickey Mouse, who has, for example, sparked conversations about how the Disney mascot is racially coded.

"The Kardashians, in a really high-scale way, and in a way that will ensure their legacy, evoke all of these anxieties that all the other icons that came before also have," Corey said. "It just tells us that there's something about us that craves, that is drawn to it, is agitated by it, and that's why they also are so popular, because they play these things out for us at such scale, so relentlessly."

Because there are so many Kar-Jenners, the machine never stops, Corey continued. The family has become figures of catharsis, or release. There are touchpoints, like the SKIMS pubic hair underwear release last fall, that allow us to ask: How do we feel about that?

We're really trying to figure out what kind of society we want to live in, Corey said, and the Kardashians offer us opportunities to chew on and try to sort it out. Everything they do, at this point, conjures up some discourse — so much so that Corey already wants to write another book.