Some Scattered Observations About Aging, Beauty, Women, Etc
The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter... See more
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
These anxieties reminded me of what Naomi Klein once called “the typical beauty myth double bind.” Here’s how she described it: “No matter what a woman’s appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize—as her personal problem—observations she makes about aspects of the beauty myth in society.” That is,... See more
#215: Do you think of yourself as beautiful?
Beauty, or our idea of it, is always rooted in deep desires, capitulations, and pathologies. It makes certain things so obvious. How we spend the present trying to secure the future, and thus squander what’s in front of us. How we fail to appreciate what we may later understand as an experience of unbelievable plenty: unlined skin, spare time on
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