This is the kind of ‘beauty’ that becomes a caricature of itself. It’s got nowhere to go. It’s a definition of being beautiful that, among other things, is embedded in being young, and not even the greatest of beauties can be young forever.
And when I walk around Beverly Hills, I can see them: women in their fifties or sixties, brittle-thin, hair dyed and shellacked in place, their faces stretched and freeze-dried. I saw one of the most famous women in the world come into my gym every now and again, with that same preserved ‘look’ from so many years ago – except, now, drained of all the movement and sensuality that made her so magnetic in the first place.
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There is no real sense of personhood in our definition of beauty. Beauty gets abstracted, presented as a set of standards for us to live up to – and those standards change just often enough to keep us off-balance. It’s kind of like a lover who makes us want him all the more because even when you have him, you don’t really have him (or her).
Beauty is static, inanimate and perfect.
Human beings are none of these things.
To meet those standards – to try to meet those standards – we’re encouraged to turn ourselves into objects, distorted versions of youth where our faces used to be.
What the fuck?
We collude in this, we continue to fuel the beauty industry, because on some level we grow up believing that a very singular and narrow definition of beauty will bring us love, and that female sexuality translates to power in the world.
The problem, of course, is that these things aren’t true.
