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"Beauty privilege is very real. None of us are imagining it, and if we aren’t born genetic lottery winners, our only option is to compensate with style, grace, and charm. Of course, none of that shit comes cheap. That’s kind of the whole point. It’s all meant to be aspirational and exclusionary. We’re supposed to feel depressed by our skin, agitated by our bodies, and anxious about our invisibility. That’s the insidious subtlety of social control.
The worst part is that we know in our rational minds that it’s all bullshit, and yet we’re still plagued with self-loathing when we can’t live up to unattainable beauty standards. No matter how much self-acceptance we achieve, we can still look in the mirror and instantly catalog all the things about ourselves that we don’t think measure up. It’s maddening. It makes us feel like hypocrites even though it’s not our hypocrisy."
– The Coquette, Ugly-Sexy: Cool? | Adult Mag (2014)
Oct 2, 2024
Related Recs
@mothersuperior post on latex and the yearndemic reminded me of this essay that I read a few years ago about the commodification and fetishization of the body and how it’s been paralleled with a lack of chemistry and sexuality that we used to see on screen. The title is your tldr: everyone is hot and no one is horny. The sterilization of sexuality and sex is everywhere, past even film. It’s a response to the acceleration of capitalism, war and colonial extraction of the earth. It has crept into the ways we view ourselves, our experience and our bodies.
One thing I took away from this essay is that to align yourself with traditional beauty standards will make you too tired to fuck. Similarly, the whole « working on yourself » grind that I heard on first dates all the time is this strange, individualistic perspective that makes you too exhausted and distracted for the holistic chemistry we desire. We flatten our lives to marketable lines that make us appear attractive - I’m working on myself, I’ve been going to therapy, I have a nice job and apartment. And while people are obviously horny, they don’t know for what - forming our bodies to be better, our minds fixed and correct, we can’t pinpoint what the purpose is cause we’re too fucking exhausted to investigate further than that. Love, desire, and chemistry feel more and more elusive.
For us to morph ourselves into the image of sexiness according to western beauty standards, there is sacrifice (nutrients, your current corporeal form, the ability to be perceived as more than an object, working long hours for your grind) that doesn’t align with sensuality (unless you’re into that). There is no room for the spectrum of sensations you body is capable of feeling. There is no room for desire when we’ve given it all up the capitalist war machine. :p
6d ago
chatted with Sable Yong about scent-based fascism, embracing outer beauty, analyzing artifice, and her fav Bruce Willis flick for this week's newsletter. her new book of essays Die Hot with a Vengeance is quite good <3
Aug 22, 2024
this quote from Jessica DeFino, beauty reporter and more importantly, critic, on the one person from her past that most influenced who she is today (and I really must agree):
"I am going to take the phrase “who you are today” very literally and go with Harry Dean Stanton — specifically, Harry Dean Stanton in conversation with David Lynch; that famous interaction where David Lynch says “How would you describe yourself?” and Harry Dean Stanton says, “As nothing. There is no self,” and they laugh.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the self today for an article I’m writing on beauty as so-called “self-care” and “self-expression.” I bristle when people use these terms because in order for beauty products to be a tool for self-expression, you first must have a self to express, and I get the overwhelming sense that most people saying this don’t know who they are outside of what they buy and apply. Beauty products are more often used to create an image of a self than express an existing self. I don’t know. I’m taking a class on existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir, so that has something to do with it. But the more I think and read about the self, the more I’m convinced there is no essential self, not in any way that matters, and pursuing solidarity with the collective is a more interesting and liberating project than defining the self anyway? So yeah, today, specifically, I am luxuriating in the nothingness of being with Harry Dean Stanton (and Buddha before him)."
Mar 7, 2024
Top Recs from @aubergine
From Haymarket Books: "Now as ever, we recognize the root cause and ongoing perpetrator of violence in Palestine to be Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid, and we stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom."
Nov 14, 2024
Project Gutenberg is a a "community effort to digitize cultural works". It has over 70,000 eBooks, including Moby Dick. This is your sign to finally read Moby Dick!
Nov 14, 2024
You can use just one. You can use all of them and more. Either way, your kitchen will smell amazing.
Oil painting by Kim Smith.
Nov 19, 2024