Lookism

Femcel logic goes mainstream.

03 Aug

Michelle Santiago Cortés on Netflix's Lookism and breaking beauty taboos.

Looks matter. The industry we literally call “beauty” is worth more than $500 billion. Simply just feeling hot can change the way you think about your day. Of course, some people care about beauty more than others and the numbers say beauty works along a hierarchy. Women are conscripted into beauty consumerism at a young age, now through the masking empowerment of being one’s best self. Widespread eating disorders are sanitized into the language of wellness. To speak more frankly about how looks shape our lives is still taboo–to spend on beauty is normal, to desire beauty is a sickness.

"American women spend an average of 45 minutes grooming each day...affecting both their time and financial resources," reports a 2019 study. It’s mainstream to talk about The Beauty Myth, the inequalities of representation and celebrity beauty standards, and even colorism. But to respond to beauty’s social tyranny with a sort of pragmatic nihilism was largely fringe–until now.

Tunnels of Reddit threads and Discord caves carve through the internet digging out spaces for people, mostly women, to talk about their desire to be beautiful. On r/HowToBeHot, members gather to talk eye distances, color theory, hairline shapes, Kibbe types–you name it. They pour through scientific (and often, pseudoscientific) papers, art history, social critique and any workable tool that can lend itself to the engineering of each member’s most beautiful self. They strive for external beauty (and the kind of internal beauty that can enhance it). The kind of beauty nobody can object to and gets you things. Not just designer bags and trips, but flowers and kind smiles. Second chances and support.

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

  • Angus Cloud dies at 25 (New York Times)

  • A good breakdown of how regional Mexican music went viral (Pitchfork)

  • @xoxopublishinggg, a publishing gossip Instagram account, goes on “indefinite hiatus” (LitHub)

  • A Barbenheimer review (Spike)

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MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

  • A triple-book-review on gender criticism vs. gender abolition (LA Review of Books)

  • So much has been said about Twitter’s rebirth as X: probes into Elon Musk’s love of the letter X (New Yorker), his misguided ambitions to turn X into America’s WeChat or KakaoTalk (New York Times) And what the internet would look like if other media companies rebranded in the same way (Neiman Lab)

  • From our Discord: An American Apparel memoir (WashPo)

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