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Welp, another major female celebrity just copped herself a completely new face. That’s right, thirty-six year old Hollywood crone Emma Stone recently got her face snatched so tight that she’s now twinning with OG Iron Chef chairman Takeshi Kaga. Welcome to Kitchen Stadium: the special mystery ingredient on tonight’s episode is (the divine) feminine insecurity. Allez cuisine!
Any time a young, attractive female celebrity gets noticeable plastic surgery, I see a wave of Substack articles on the topic from women authors. The tone of these pieces is mildly probative, but always polite and measured. They so beautifully skim the surface and touch on broad topics like the pressure women feel to stay young and beautiful in the Information Age, something that resonates with every bitch with a pulse.
My problem with these essays is that while they softly lament the Great Yassification of women, they always stop short of declaring that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Upon close inspection, these pieces really don’t say much at all other than “I feel sad everyone looks the same now.” Oh, well. I get it. I too have engaged in this type of safe discourse. To go further opens you up to angry, defensive comments from hit dogs and allegations of Helen Lovejoy “won’t someone please think of the children!” hand-wringing that no woman wants to be associated with in the days of Cool Girl internet apathy.
But I really don’t care about either of those things, so let me clearly state my thesis: I believe one of the biggest existential threats to modern women is the beauty-industrial complex, that is the vast network of corporations that manufactures and sells us an endless slew of products, services, images and ideologies intended to destroy our self-worth for the benefit of shareholders. Its inky tendrils have slithered into all corners of American culture and wrapped themselves around our minds and bodies. One of its strongest arms is elective cosmetic surgery—something I believe is especially corrosive to women’s mental, financial, spiritual, and bodily health.
I’ve organized my thoughts on this subject into ten parts. It is a 30 minute read but it may very well change your perspective entirely. If I am found dead shortly after publishing this piece, please know that I did NOT kill myself. But only because “cool but rude” Substack juggernaut Freddie deBoer said it was cringe.
Feminine Narcissism and the Infatuation with the “Inferiorized Body”
In the 1970s, feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky coined the term “feminine narcissism” to describe the process whereby women are encouraged, both directly and covertly, to become so excessively preoccupied with their appearance that it leads to a pervasive self-alienation, a sense of shame, and a greater awareness of one’s own “deficient” body. This “inferiorization” is not inherent, but rather is a product of societal pressures, particularly the beauty-industrial complex which glorifies the female body while simultaneously depreciating it, forcing women into a state of perpetual self-scrutiny and control. She writes:
“Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised.”1
The woman so becomes a prisoner of the Panopticon. Because the “gaze” is everywhere all at once, the woman learns to constantly self-monitor and police her own body for any perceived “flaw,” resulting in an intense self-objectification of, and alienation from, her physical being.
Most of Bartky’s essays were written over thirty-five years ago, well before the age of social media and, for want of a more eloquent expression, long before the shit totally hit the fan. Social media simultaneously encourages, rewards, and punishes self-objectifying behavior in women. Its entire purpose is to foster an endless cycle of watching and perceiving; one that constantly besieges the participant with images of her own face and body, and contradictory images of what she is not (the Other). Bartky met her end in 2018 at the ripe age of eighty-one; unfortunately, she was never able to expand her work to address the impact of the internet on this “feminine narcissism” and our infatuation with the inferiorized body. But if she could will her spirit down from the heavens to speak to us for a single moment, I have no doubt what the message would be: log off.
The Inferiorized Woman as Perfect Consumer
On its webpage dedicated to “The Power of Women,” the very cool American Consumer Counsel notes that women account for 80% of consumer purchasing and “are the most powerful consumers on the planet.” The ACC also notes that “Women as consumers are a force to be reckoned with.” Hell yeah, sister [Hulk Hogan voice].
Yes, bitches be shoppin’ so much that Morgan Stanley has decided that it’s no longer “the economy,” it’s the SHEconomy.
Feel empowered yet? No? That’s because contrary to what your TV tells you America does not run on Dunkin. It runs on fear. Studies have shown that the vast majority of consumer purchases are driven by emotional responses rather necessity, the largest driver being the primal fear of missing out that “taps into our evolutionary need for resource acquisition and social belonging, creating urgency that bypasses rational evaluation.”2 Unsurprisingly, excessive purchasing is also positively linked to anxiety and depression.3
If a happy consumer is indeed a bad consumer, the inferiorized woman is more valuable than gold in today’s America. Once we are infected with the disease (the belief that our bodies are deficient and must be improved), we can be sold the cure. The antidote for our inferiorized bodies is a never-ending slew of cosmetic surgery, makeup, serums, cleansers, pharmaceuticals, moisturizers, spray tans, cosmetic dentistry, hair masques, hair removal, manicures, facials, the list goes on. New (or at least “improved”) products and services are “invented” each and every day to keep the great SHEconomy churning.
Gen Z women are spending massively more on cosmetic products and procedures (including “prejuvenation” procedures) than any previous generation, likely due to social media use and increased depression/anxiety caused in no small part thereby. Despite the occasional anecdotes you’ll hear from people claiming that a nose job or a mommy makeover “fixed them,” empirical evidence suggests that cosmetic work does not improve long-term happiness,4 and that it actually increases symptoms of depression and anxiety.5 And when the consumer fails to find the relief she was deceptively promised, she is simply advised to consume more.
This is how the beauty-industrial complex feasts on the lifeforce of women, including our most vulnerable demographic. Walk into any Sephora; it will be full of literal children. “Pottery Barn Teen” now sells a $199 mini skincare fridge to help our girls store their favorite beauty products. Yes, even their night cream peddled by celebrity dermatologist Dr. Howard Murad, a man who has inflicted so much psychic damage on teenage girls I heard Michigan State University is planning to invite him to step-in for Larry Nassar.
The beauty-industrial complex is also working hard to brainwash women into viewing expensive and extreme beautification procedures as a mere extension of routine female grooming. Fillers, Botox, and and micro-needling are to be treated no differently than a haircut or manicure. Easily accessible GLP-1 drugs can supplement, or simply become part of, our diet and exercise routines.
Chic MediSpas like my neighborhood’s own “PLSTK” now ravage our cities like a locust plague. Because women constitute upwards of 95% of their clientele, it is entirely within our power to snuff out these parasites with the tip of our boot if we so desire. But that would require a radical physical, mental, and spiritual effort. Indeed, it would require us to stay at home and not spend hundreds of dollars to have needles jabbed into our flesh. We are simply not ready for such a challenge.
“PLSTK” (an enterprise so evil vowels asked to be removed from it) specializes in facial harmonization procedures because, well, your natural face is a cacophony of SHIT. They also offer rejuvenation services because your natural face looks so haggard an elderly Appalachian man in overalls is trailing you with a shotgun muttering “time to put’er down.” The list goes on and on: weekly GLP-1 injections, fillers, neurotoxins, PDO thread lifts, Kybella, body contouring, hydrafacial, laser hair removal, laser facials, and more. The roster grows by the day, it seems. Our beautiful, perfect Fantasy Self waiting to break free once we find the right cream, diet, serum, injection, surgeon. A freshwater mirage glimmering in the sweltering desert, just a dune or two away.
Western women have come to enjoy unprecedented liberties over the last century and let me just be the first to say: it’s been awesome. In my thirty-eight years on this earth, however, I’ve seen some truth in Sartre’s statement that for many, radical freedom is not a source of relief but of anguish. At the feet of liberty lay the existential dread of being solely responsible for one’s actions and choices in a world not anchored by any predetermined values or fixed human nature.
It is an uncertain time. I cannot help but feel we’ve reached an inflection point in human history. Some days it feels like we are standing on the precipice of a cliff that we’ve been slowly inching towards since we first perfected the steam engine and spinning jenny nearly three centuries ago. Now, it seems, we can finally see over the edge.
Many have voiced similar feelings. Yeats warned of the dangers of the Industrial Revolution and withdrew into his mythologies. Bartky wrote of consumerism displacing the family and religion as the chief behavioral regulator in our society. In the late 1970s, British Occultist Peter J. Carroll predicted an impending dark age where “ideas about a person’s place in society, roles, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate;” a period where “lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilization.”6 Climate change, war, artificial intelligence, political extremism, economic scarcity, work that feels dehumanizing, the gamification of dating/mating, and—most importantly—phones that connect us to everything, everywhere in a way that is neither natural nor healthy. I have immense empathy for anyone who feels crushed by the weight of the modern world, especially those who have not yet discovered the necessary coping habits and philosophies.
Much to the delight of corporations everywhere, women are retreating deeper into their bodies more than ever. In her feminist manifesto “The Second Sex,” philosopher Simone de Beauvoir theorized that feminine narcissism is one of the three “bad faith” responses to the anguish of complete freedom in this chaotic world. She wrote that self-objectification provides “an illusion of a fixed identity;” it offers a temporary sense of tranquility and deludes the woman into believing she is alleviated from taking responsibility for the authentic, challenging choices posed by her freedom and subjectivity.7
Unaware that they are being sold a Great Lie, women are led to believe they will find happiness in physical beauty and perfection, that such perfection can be achieved, and perhaps worst of all—that there is much integrity in the mental and physical labor expended in pursuit of it.
Evidence of the Body Cult’s growing foothold is everywhere: the exponential growth of the billion-dollar beauty industry; the proliferation of social media accounts broadcasting the poster’s shopping habits, skincare routines, workouts, make-up looks, daily outfits, and, most importantly, everything she eats and shits out in a day; the popularity of “looksmaxxing,” surgery, and skincare forums that have millions of users; the ubiquity of evil MediSpas that are not just endemic to my beloved New York. For every one article criticizing consumer culture or this terrible beauty-sickness, there seem to be thousands more cultivating it. Nearly all of these are written by women for women. “Wellness culture” receives no pardon. It too is an agent of the beauty-industrial complex, though it disguises itself better than most.
Our bodies have become the altars of a new religion. Our beautification and self-care rituals are sacraments, no different than “the typical obsessive compulsive features of much religious behavior.”8
What is the endgame of all this fanaticism? As Carroll noted, a cult only ends in one of two ways: consumerism or a police raid.9
The Body Cult as Mind Control
To be psychologically oppressed “is to be weighed down in your mind; it is to have a harsh dominion exercised over your own self-esteem.”10 The purpose of psychological oppression is obvious:
“it serves to make the work of domination easier by breaking the spirit of the dominated and rendering them incapable of understanding the nature of those agencies responsible for their subjugation. This allows those who benefit from the established order of things to maintain their ascendency with more appearance of legitimacy and with less acts of overt violence than they might otherwise require.”11
In this way, the Body Cult serves as a targeted form of mind-control. It is a mental sand trap, a hazard carefully constructed to keep women disenfranchised in two primary ways: first, by restricting the most powerful means of modern influence (money); second, by atrophying our mental faculties until we are small-minded, powerless things (terminal SMOL BEAN / tumblr BABY DEER syndrome).
Studies have shown that the self-objectification Bartky described has dire consequences for women. It increases feelings of shame; increases intentions to have cosmetic surgery; exacerbates anxiety regarding appearance and safety (i.e., fear of sexual assault); reduces the experience of “flow” (peak motivational states in which one is fully absorbed in a rewarding activity); decreases awareness of internal bodily states (access to inner physical experiences; e.g., hunger cues or sexual arousal).12 Research has also shown that self-objectification can lead to impaired performance in math, sustained attention and impulse/inhibitory control, and working memory.13
Plainly speaking, it makes you detached, anxious, stupid, and unhappy.
All of these consequences “contribute to the disproportionately high rate among women of three psychological disorders: unipolar depression, sexual dissatisfaction and dysfunctions, and eating disorders.”14
This is not random. It is a system designed to keep women trapped in an eternal hamster wheel of low self-worth and misery; to starve them spiritually while keeping them fat and fed on a diet of beauty gunk, Shein junk, PopSlop, and TikTok. It is a system designed to prevent us from rising above the sea of shit we are born into. From becoming thought leaders. From cultivating healthy relationships. From exceling in academia/our professions. From being happy.
The Trojan Horse of Choice Feminism
Since women were routinely deprived of autonomy for virtually all of civilized human history, the popularity of ultra-positive “choice feminism”—the belief that any choice a woman makes is inherently empowering—is not surprising. Not only did this view offer restitution for the wrongs of the past, it tantalized us with a unified vision of feminism, one free of sisterly infighting. A pink pussyhat utopia where no one thing could ever be bad for women, just different.
But with time, its shortcomings have become abundantly clear. Choice feminism fails because it prioritizes personal consumer acts over all others by assuming all choices are made with equal freedom and awareness. It also discounts (if not entirely disregards) how heavily our choices are influenced by well-established and inherently exploitative systems.
Most of us have become numb to the degree we are indoctrinated on a daily basis by the beauty-industrial complex. But every once in a while you have a lucid moment, like I did just last month. During my morning run, I was assaulted quite violently by a giant Hailey Beiber advertisement selling me her stupid plastic FACE as much, if not more, than the stupid plastic CHASE SAPPHIRE RESERVE CARD.15 As I stared into her cursed, vacuous Baldwin eyes and overfilled frog lips, a wave of despair washed over me. Even if you log off (something I’ve heard is possible), you can never truly escape this shit. If you think about it—actually think about it—for more than 60 seconds, your spirit will break in half like an expired Twix bar.
At best, choice feminism is misguided and ineffective. At worst, it is a Potemkin village, a clever trick that uses the appearance of “progress” to camouflage its true, more sinister purpose: preserving the consumerist status quo.
There is a shocking dearth of contemporary criticism of the beauty-industrial complex and, more specifically, the deeply troubling normalization of cosmetic surgery/injectables among modern women. I believe this is largely because of choice feminism and its corollaries. Choice feminism works in tandem with adjacent philosophies to form a complex set of “ideologies” which can even sustain internal contradictions: “Live and let live,” “mind your business,” and the especially vile “omg let people enjoy things!” have all seamlessly worked together to fragment our society into a billion individual consumer choices, each equally worthy and unassailable as the next.
The staunch defender of these doctrines is the Nice Girl Gestapo (the “NGG”). While admission is open to all, the prototypical member looks a lot like me: she is young(ish), educated, progressive, and American. In these left-leaning female spaces I have observed intense social-policing from the NGG on any type of remotely critical opinion that is not sugar-coated in some bizarre “<333 aw love ya girlie” saccharine vanilla glaze. They will scold you for being rude, tell you to mind your business, and dismiss your opinions as bigoted and problematic.
“Hating like a man!” is one of my new favorite soft girl insults, which I saw most recently on an Instagram comment on a photo of Miley Cyrus that simply read: “CHOPPED.” But as I ruminated on the exchange and the absolute ghoulish photo of Miley’s face, “CHOPPED” didn’t feel anything like hate to me. Rather, it struck me as nothing more than a public declaration of sanity in the face of psychic terrorism. A lorica prayer muttered by a woman who suddenly found herself staring into the Mouth of Madness.
Like a priest signing the cross in the face of the demonically possessed, she types “CHOPPED” to rebuke the brain worms that have chewed through the frontal lobes of 90% of our female celebrities and rich housewives. Worms that, thanks to trickle-down SHEconomics, are more accessible than ever and have now set their hungry eyes on us lowly proles.
Only weeks ago, I attempted to rebuke the worms here on my perfect little web page. I restacked a well-written yet predictably milquetoast “I Miss Emma Stone’s Old Face :(" article and stated my firm conviction that women who undergo these elective cosmetic procedures are engaging in self-mutilation. I was of course hit with accusations of being mean, classist, transphobic, and, most importantly, bigoted against women who may or may not have had their faces violently ripped off by a disgruntled showbiz chimpanzee (you don’t know anyone’s backstory!).
There was certainly a time in my life when getting smacked with one of these labels would have distressed me, even if it came from a random internet stranger. But these scolds are now hurled so indiscriminately at the first whiff of anything that makes someone “uncomfy” that they have become entirely weightless. If I am ever called such things, I simply recoil in terror as if King Arthur himself is barking “Ni!” at me.
Aggressive female voices and different perspectives are important for many reasons, if nothing else than to prevent dangerous echo chambers. You may be inclined to side with the NGG yourself after reading this. Many may leave this essay thinking “she made some salient points, but I simply can’t support an author who negatively comments on women’s faces, even ones pumped full of Big Pharma Goo.” But our temperance has proven useless. This rough beast relies on our politeness and passivity to perpetuate itself and grow stronger. We arm ourselves with flyswatters when what we need are flamethrowers.
In truth, I’ve always hated “be nice!”-ism, particularly the type I constantly see weaponized against other women in online spaces. These women are just turncoats to me. They are the old guard; low-level enforcers of hegemonic masculinity. They are rank-and-file female orcs serving the will of Sauron. And by Sauron, I of course mean the same forces behind the American Consumer Counsel telling women to obey, conform, and CONSUME. And if you feel so compelled to leave a comment here calling me a bitch or a cunt as some have done before, please understand that these words, too, have become lighter than air.
7. Notes on Feminine Duty and Hypocrisy
I was once a troubled young thing, unsure of myself and my place in this strange world. In my early teens I struggled with situational depression and loneliness. During these formative years my mother, having moved in with a new boyfriend some distance away, was not particularly present in my life. We slowly reconnected over the course of my mid- to late 20s and, with patience and understanding, eventually became wonderfully close again.
While she was proud of the woman I had become, she struggled to reconcile our changed dynamic with her memories of me as her baby girl. By twenty-seven I was stable for the first time in my life. I no longer viewed, wanted, or needed her as a source of guidance. This bruised her ego and filled her with a melancholy longing for a “do over” she knew in her heart was not possible. But even if things had been different I’m not sure she had the tools to guide me through adolescence when she was, in many ways, still trapped in adolescence herself.
A casualty of the isolated nuclear family, I had no sisters, close female cousins, aunts, or grandmothers to turn to. My father, an alcoholic who hated himself only slightly less than he hated women and children, was of no use. If that fucker had been on the Titanic he would have kneed toddlers in the face to skip to the front of the lifeboat line and the Unsinkable Molly Brown would have been a popsicle well before dawn.
Like many lonely girls I looked to female musicians to fill the matriarch-sized hole in my heart. I listened to Dolores O’Riordan sing of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I became enamored with the indomitable Sinead O’Connor, a woman who, after protesting the abuses perpetrated and concealed by the Catholic Church, not only endured the harassing jeers of thousands at a BOB DYLAN tribute concert but found the courage to sing in spite of them.16 But most of all I loved Tori Amos, an artist whose discography is littered with songs about female empowerment in an unforgiving world.
You can imagine my surprise when nearly two ago I was confronted with online photos of Tori with the tagline “BOTCHED.” The pictures have mostly been scrubbed from the internet, much like the video of Tyra Banks pretending to be homeless for a day which lives on only in screenshots and the collective shadow memory of millennial girls and gays. The photos of Tori’s new face broke me a bit. I felt as though I had watched the Dalai Llama emerge from the Tsuglagkhang Complex with a head full of hair plugs, toilet bowl veneers, and calf implants. From that day forward, I lost some respect for her as a woman and artist that I have never been able to replenish no matter how many times I listen to Boys for Pele. Yes, I know: celebrities are only human. Kill your idols. A sobering life lesson for young Father_Karine. For so many of us, these idols were all we had.
But there are still glimmers of hope in the darkness. Last week my husband and I had the thrill of sitting at the table adjacent to that of Joel Cohen and Frances McDormand at a restaurant upstate. I couldn’t help but steal glances of her throughout the night. She’s currently sporting a mohawk for some new project and has an undeniable aura about her. Her face, full of wondrous intensity and the evidence of a life well-lived, has apparently never been defiled by a needle. She is one of the few outspoken opponents of cosmetic surgery and procedures like Botox and fillers in Hollywood.
In one 2014 interview for the New York Times, McDormand said “I have not mutated myself in any way. Joel and I have this conversation a lot. He literally has to stop me physically from saying something to people — to friends who’ve had work. I’m so full of fear and rage about what they’ve done.”17 Scream it from your lungs, Frances. Shake us. Wake us. We need to hear it. These “enhancements” are absolutely destroying the arts (and our minds & bodies in general), and I firmly believe that Robert Eggers should go to prison for subjecting us all to Nicole Kidman’s frozen, mask-like face in the 11th century epic period drama “The Northman.” Heed my words, Yorgos Lanthimos. I can easily stop myself from watching reality TV trash where a good chunk of the women barely register as human looking to me,18 but this crap is now infiltrating the mainstream and indie film industries so much it churns my stomach.
What duty do we have to each other? I think back to my darkest days and how I yearned for a reassuring voice that said “This is really silly. Dangerous, even. You don’t need to do this.” What hope do women have if we’re not willing to have those conversations? What hope do women have when we refuse to demand accountability from public figures? From our mothers? Our sisters? Our friends?
If my mother ever told me she intended to get “work done,”—as if her loving face was nothing more than a beat-up Chevy—a tiny crack would form in my heart and rend the ventricles apart slowly over the course of several weeks. If it was my daughter instead, I have no doubt that entire process would unfold over mere seconds. If my girlfriends confessed the same to me, I would run through the CliffNotes version of this article. And if all logic and reason failed to sway them, if they were so ensnared in the Great Lie, I would then appeal to their infantile vanity. I would abandon all vestiges of feminine decorum, assume my final form, and scream in their faces that all of these procedures LOOOOOK LIIIIIKE SHIIIIIIIIT immediately before detonating the vest.
Even if you’ve never read a book or been to a museum in your life, you know by now that beauty standards are capricious things. One year big breasts are all the rage, the next the itty bitty titty committee is back in power. I have it on good authority that next year so many female celebrities will have their arms and legs amputated that the Met Gala will look like a bunch of sparkly jellybeans rolling around on a movie theater floor. Today the “luxe lean” Pilates girl body is the gold standard, but tomorrow it may very well be the “I KNOW he ate a cheese!” JERRY triangle.
Yes, we all saw the “How It’s Made” episode where Kim Kardashian got her BBL sucked out by an industrial hoover vacuum and turned into ersatz flan to feed orphans for a tax write-off. We all watched the faces of Jennifer Lawrence and Chrissy Tegan morph into the moon emoji and then shrink back to normal after they got their filler dissolved and pretended like nothing ever happened. But Pepperidge Farm remembers. I at least have some respect for Courtney Cox who, after dissolving her fillers, publicly denounced them for exactly what they always are: “a total waste of time.”19
As Bartky noted, “the disciplinary project of femininity is a ‘setup’: It requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined to some degree to fail.”20 This is also to some extent because with the exception of pure, authentic YOUTH—which can never be replicated no matter how much Madonna bathes in the blood of teenage runaways—the definition of “beautiful” is ever-changing and constantly at odds with itself.
I firmly believe we will look back on the “the filler and facelift era” with all the ignominy of the dust bowl farmers who, hypnotized by the prospect of UNLIMITED WHEAT, over-plowed hundreds of miles of protective native grasslands until their children’s lungs became so blackened with dirt that they could do nothing but impotently weep while their offspring suffocated in their sleep.
And yet there is a more profound futility to these exercises, one that transcends fads, cultures, and time itself. You cannot prevent your own decay. Even those most loyal disciples of the Body Cult will succumb to time. What will you have to show when the well runs dry?
Vengeance gods exist in virtually every religion, their purpose to shower fire and brimstone down on mortals who overstep their bounds. The Greeks, in particular, excelled at punishing hubris like no others. The stories of their mortal victims, now committed to the great library of human knowledge, will long outlive the empires that birthed them. We recall the stories of Narcissus, lured to his death in a reflecting pool by the goddess Nemesis. Of Arachne, transmuted into a spider and condemned to weave forever by Athena. Of Sisyphus, Tantulus, Icarus, Achilles.
The vengeance gods persist even now in the year of our lord Goldman Sachs. Each year, they select a few women to disfigure through vanity surgery as a lesson to us all. In 2004, it was Tara Reid. In 2007, it was my girl Tori. In 2015, it was ex-supermodel Linda Evangelista whose abdomen was allegedly turned into a lumpy old beanbag by a CoolSculpting® machine.
Out of all the ways to become disfigured in this life, elective CoolSculpting has got to be the most humiliating, second only to “mauled by chihuahua named Taquito” and “mint green Vespa accident.” The most unfortunate part of the Linda Evangelista CoolSculpting debacle for me was actually not the distorted flesh (which actually wasn’t that bad IMO). It was watching the very public and painful unraveling of a woman who, as a model and confirmed high ranking member of the Body Cult, seemed utterly unable to cope with what had happened. If anyone is wondering, the “cure” to botched CoolSculpting is apparently two separate and quite expensive invasive liposuction procedures.
Linda’s story is not unique. One personal anecdote before we go: Last year, a coworker of mine suffered a bout of ptosis after having some Botox injected into her face, something she apparently had done for several years without incident. This time, however, the injections caused her left eyelid to droop so much that she looked like she was suffering a mild stroke. Though I pitied her, I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of her paying $500 to be injected with Big Pharma Goo only to be upsold $200 worth of prescription Upneeq® eyedrops to correct the side effect, which, of course, was properly disclosed in the paperwork.
When her condition only marginally improved over the next few months, I knew for sure: her eye had been quartered, skewered with cocktail picks, and served to the laughing vengeance gods on a shimmering silver platter.
There has been a cheeky little resurgence of films examining “the Woman’s Condition” as of late, but it speaks volumes that the most powerful film in this genre is, in my opinion, the first of its kind.
Based on a novel of the same name by Jean Redon, “Eyes Without A Face” (1960) follows a brilliant plastic surgeon determined to restore the beauty of his daughter Christiane’s disfigured countenance. To accomplish this, he kidnaps young women and holds them hostage at his secluded château in the French countryside where he attempts to graft the victims’ peeled off faces onto that of his daughter. Time and time again the surgery fails, leaving the victims’ flesh to slowly rot off his daughter’s face and condemning her once more to the emotionless mask that hides her mutilated figure.
The film’s denouement is a tragic one, but it does not deny viewers their satisfaction. Following multiple failed face grafts, Christiane suffers a psychotic break from guilt and alienation. After stabbing her father’s assistant, she frees the dogs and doves upon which her father has also been experimenting. Unmoved by her father’s death at the jaws of the abused dogs, she calmly strolls deep into the woods with a single dove perched upon her hand. The film ends there.
Christiane’s oppressor was not a particularly subtle one, just a flesh and blood incarnation of the patriarchy itself. But it’s 2025. What happens when ours is not so obvious? When our villain is not our own father telling us we must be perfect and beautiful, but something more akin to a poisonous, odorless gas? Our own thoughts, the images on our phone/tv/computer, our very culture itself?
To me, the ending represents Christiane’s radical rejection of “civilized” society altogether. As she slowly recedes into the forest, we feel at peace that she is finally free even though she will always remain disfigured.
On my last rewatch, I began to ponder my own relationship to New York, a city I feel has been gripped by consumerism more than it has ever been in my 15+ years of living here. I think about relocating closer to nature, away from the material sensationalism that has such a stranglehold on this place and so many of its denizens. Some Shangri-La far outside the walls of Panopticon, away from the neon glow of the “PLSTK” sign down my block, and, most importantly, out from under the all-seeing eye of the Chase Sapphire Leviathan HAILEY BEIBER.
Anyway, thanks for reading my 7000 word Substack essay on why I am no longer waxing my bush or whatever. If you came here expecting something more lighthearted and not another “mah culture” thinkpiece, rest assured I plan to return to my regularly scheduled “comedy” programming for my next post.
And if this piece did not resonate with you; if it sounded like the ramblings of a mad woman crashing out over some dumb celebrity facelift, please remember: “a reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority.”21
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