bodies bodies bodies

my mother is a hippie and my father hates the government so one thing i missed out on is Barbie. i felt nothing when i watched the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s movie, except mild astonishment. it’s not that i’m immune to beauty standards. i understand what Barbie represents in femininity, docility, blondness, the mashup of hyper-sexualization and extreme innocence that has become a hallmark of mainstream pornography. i just don’t associate any of it specifically with Barbie. i wonder if other children really learned lessons about body image from their dolls, a kind of disordered object attachment theory that has become a cultural truism. i remember primarily learning my lessons about body image from other people.

this isn’t to discount the role that pop culture iconography plays in damaging the boundaries of self-image. but i do think it’s hard to pinpoint a starting place in the feedback loop of abnegation. it’s obvious to point out that the language of self-esteem doesn’t account for your body’s incoherence. to manifest being seen a certain way is not a guarantee of actually being perceived that way out in the world. other people’s perception is slippery. in Aliens and Anorexia, Chris Kraus writes of decades of psychoanalytic work on teenage girls and their eating problems that “all these texts are based on the belief that a well-adjusted, boundaried sense of self is the only worthy female goal … It’s inconceivable that the female subject might ever simply try to step outside her body, because the only thing that’s irreducible, still, in female life is gender.”

in a purely physical sense then, attempting to modify and control your body can be a form of gender affirmation (or a form of gender negation — i went through puberty early and started getting sexual attention from adult men and wanted nothing so much as to transcend my body, which felt mostly incoherent to me, in the style of women saints. but body modification can also be more broadly an attempt to sublimate the ego, something not unrelated to gender but not strictly reducible to gender. it may sound frivolous to ask what body image would look like under socialism, but in reality most people’s relationships with their bodies are intimately bound up with commodification. Simone Weil, philosopher, mystic, and leftwing agitator, famous for extreme fasting, wrote that “all sins are attempts to fill voids.” grace, according to Weil, creates voids, and grace alone can fill them up. everything else is a distraction.

at the subway stop where i get off for work, they have Ozempic ads on the turnstiles. you push and the bar spins, promising that it’s as easy as a weekly shot. what i’ve found disturbing about the slew of Ozempic articles is that none of them really touch upon anything material. the New York Magazine piece was almost like a voyeuristic ad for another rich person practice (i thought it was harmful and silly and am not linking but it’s easy to find). a lot of the coverage feels like a kind of numbers game, hedging their bets as in: at what point does Ozempic become a legitimate medication vs. an eating disorder? what should our bodies look like anyway? who is trustworthy of doctors nutritionists, activists, Gwyneth Paltrow? how many side effects are reasonable in the pursuit of beauty (or at least, in the pursuit of thinness)? Kim K, Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, Barbie, Barbie Kate Moss saying “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels", heroin chic redux.

is this all we have to say about embodiment? all we have to say about food, which gives us sustenance and life? i think part of the issue is that most of these articles have been written by thin, middle-class women torn between horror and envy at this tendency. Jia Tolentino notes quietly partway through her piece for The New Yorker that she is a woman who “wears a size 4.” when i, a thin, middle-class woman, started thinking about writing this essay, i went looking for good writing about body horror to draw upon and found it startling how much of it in the mainstream is for and about women like me and sits somewhere between Ottessa Moshfegh and Uglies.

These are more similar approaches than they might seem. Uglies, a science fiction YA series written by Scott Westerfeld, basically adheres ideologically to the standards of Cold War era speculative fiction, where enforced conformity is the greatest existential threat to humanity. Uglies asks the somewhat provocative question: what would a world look like in which we were all physically the same? if this notion conjures up a specter of replacement theory fantasies and Aryan uniformity, this is not what Westerfeld is after. instead, this is fluff about a world where the government transforms everyone at the age of 16 through mandatory surgery into a “Pretty” so they can all coexist together. the teenage characters rebel because they want to maintain their individuality and fight back against their authoritarian government. it is strange that Uglies does not feel more relevant in an era of Instagram Face, pervasive photo editing, and subtle but widespread cosmetic procedures such as fillers and buccal fat removal. but what seems hollow to me about the series is precisely that there is no sense of commodification attached to the procedure. in a world where your social mobility, health, livelihood, access to partnership, and so on can be so closely tied to your physical appearance in concrete ways, this feels more closely like an anti-vaxx metaphor, a story about the horrifying repression of the welfare state.

this dissonance is clearest in the fact that Uglies is ostensibly post-racial. or at least that it doesn’t do much to question its racial beauty hierarchy. in his book, The Biopolitics of Beauty, about the “Right to Beauty” movement in Brazil, anthropologist Alvaro Jarrín describes the expansion of cosmetic surgery into Brazilian public hospitals as an arm of the state’s eugenicist vision. but for many of the people he interviews, free access to plastic surgery instead feels like a tool for social mobility, a liberating possibility to conform to the rigid beauty standards required to access success in Brazil’s middle class. what’s tricky about beauty, Jarrín points out, is that it’s purely relational, produced in social interactions (whatever the evolutionary psychologists would have you believe). “It is this very relationality that makes beauty feel like a ‘dictatorship’— a system of social relations that impose an aesthetic hierarchy and threaten those who dare disobey with social death.”

in Marx’s description of commodity fetishism, he writes that a table is ostensibly just a carved up piece of wood, but as soon as it “steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.” It attains currency, becomes valuable, desirable. if we think of beauty as similarly produced by fetishism, it is trickier to define utilitarian forms of physical self-improvement. beauty is a vanishing point. in her book Stranger Faces, Namwali Serpell writes about the strangeness of Michael Jackson’s changing face, and about our obsession with the static appearance of celebrities. “Perhaps outrageously,” she writes, “I’m tempted to ask: what if we thought of Jackson’s addiction to plastic surgery—which killed him insofar as it made him addicted to the painkillers he overdosed on—not as self-loathing body modification, but as a form of artistic practice? This does not make it, nor him, more forgivable. But it shifts the lens through which we view his face.”

to understand body modification solely as a form of conformity is perhaps to misunderstand it. fetishism runs deeper than that. when cosmetic surgery is “botched” or enters an uncanny valley point, it often becomes a source of public mockery rather than a form of currency. many celebrities (and many regular people) still staunchly deny getting cosmetic surgery even when the evidence is there. it is fashionable for women to claim they lose weight effortlessly or through “self-care”, eating clean, wellness, going to bed early. the moment in which body modification serves the aims of the state is precisely that in which it resists fantasy, imagination, individuality, self-expression, effortlessness.

individualizing or exceptionalizing Ozempic use doesn’t help us understand it as a commodity. and doesn’t help us understand in turn how it can contribute to the commodification and ruination of our bodies. this isn’t just true for skinny people using Ozempic to be skinnier. its widespread description as a miracle drug for weight loss, when it is in fact a miracle drug for diabetes, also suggests a biopolitical vision at root: a world in which thinness is prized over everything else, in which food is dispensable, in which fat people don’t exist anymore. a lot of the critique of Ozempic has focused on its inaccessibility, prohibitively high costs, and the supply shortages that contribute to rationing. but if Ozempic was widely and freely available as a weight loss drug, who would really benefit in the end other than drug companies?

i saw a TikTok about intuitive eating, where the creator @notwildin describes it as a funny concept on its face: what is intuitive eating anyway? but then they go on to describe grieving for the world that we could have inherited, one without colonialism, without white supremacy, without patriarchy, without the violent disposession of our bodies. our inability to enjoy, hedonistically, sensual pleasures, food, sex, rest, and so on, is a kind of theft, something that has been taken from us. what a sad world where intuitive eating is literally a way of granting yourself permission for enjoyment.

i’ve been trying unsuccessfully to watch Succession, a show i’ve increasingly lost my patience with. instead, i watched the Paolo Sorrentino film, The Hand of God, which i liked much more than i expected but which is also extremely sad and sometimes grating and longer, in my opinion, than it should have been. it’s spring in New York, weather for being outside, and oversized sweater/white vest weather. all i’ve really wanted to rewatch is Bones and All, a movie about eating and eating and eating until you are sated.