pursuit of hotness reading list 🔗
on the pursuit of hotness, "thin is in," and the aesthetics of proto-fascism
Note: In addition to monthly essays I like to sprinkle in some pop-up newsletters to share curated recommendations along with a brief note. I care deeply about free access to information so if you see this emoji, 🔗 it means I found a link where you can watch the movie, read the book, or listen to the music for free and maybe even without a login. If you struggle to gain access to anything I mention — especially texts — just DM.
Since 2021, I’ve been noticing (and writing about) how trending reactionary politics are shaping popular attitudes around beauty and aesthetics on the internet. Feelings of self-hate meet the violence of the complete makeover in a frenzied and self-annihilatory pursuit of beauty. When we can’t acquire freedom, or even security, we reach for beauty: The stunted kind that’s grounded in the typically oppressive hierarchies of race, wealth, ability and gender. The conventional kind that validates our homes, choices, partners, children and identities (taste) by cloaking everything we touch in the aesthetic codes of the covetable and aspirational. Any ethical confusion rising from this new shamelessness is further stylized, aestheticized and romanticized. It’s either enshrined in the language of self-love and social mobility, or exalted as trigger-happy hedonism. In both cases, conventional beauty is, once again, being centered and valued as a signifier or moral goodness, wealth, health and value. What is good is beautiful so what is beautiful must be good.
I am thinking about all this once again because Rebecca Jennings recently posted a TikTok of a wellness influencer explaining how she “is more obsessed with how I look than the food that I eat.” Which Jennings aptly summarized as a reinvention of “‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ using tiktok therapy/self-help speak.” While it fell out of style during the 2010’s, the moral and aesthetic defense of conventional beauty standards is back with a vengeance. You’ll find proof of it in the Ozempic craze and the rise of previously niche cosmetic procedures. Reactionary tendencies find their way into the mainstream in times of oppression and precarity.
Consider this recommendation letter an overview of my real-time study into the corners of the internet and messages in pop culture that have been coalescing around the pained pursuit of conventional beauty in the post-lockdown internet. This is a collection of everything I’ve researched and written on the topic. They are in chronological order and I pulled the relevant excerpts and quoted them here for easy skimming. If you click through the links, you will find specific examples, statistics, interviews and more concrete analyses explaining why this cult of beauty is indicative of greater proto-fascist trends in culture and politics.
In the Pursuit of Hotness 🔗
April 14, 2022
How one sub-Reddit community is defining our beauty standards — and then striving for them at all costs.
“It’s very uncool and unfeminist to admit that you changed your appearance so others find you more attractive. Helen offers her recent nose job as an example. Plastic surgery, she says, “is supposed to be something you do for yourself, but there’s the underlying inference of: for myself so I can be perceived better in society.” This sub-Reddit and a spinoff community on Discord (an instant-messaging platform similar to Slack) she’s a part of are some of just a few online pockets where she can admit that.”
Could Thin Be in Again? 🔗
October 27, 2022
On the return of overt and shameless skinny worship taking over TikTok’s beauty and wellness communities.
The truth is our society relied on ableism, fatphobia, and racism to justify the preventable deaths of the pandemic. The Los Angeles Times reported last year that medical fat-shaming increased during the pandemic and got in the way of proper care. It almost makes too much sense that eating disorders got worse during this time. This also happened to be a golden age for fitness: During lockdown, Peloton stocks spiked, and once restrictions let up, people were back in the gym in record numbers. After March 2020, the use of the word fitness was hardly euphemistic: From state abandonment to the anti-vaxxing crusades, enduring the pandemic became a matter of survival of the fittest in the most eugenicist and cruel sense of the word. And who could forget all that talk of the “COVID 15,” as if we were first-year students in a sick undergraduate program? If you are thin in 2022, it means you graduated with honors. If you are thin in 2022, it means your body is productive and valuable and fit, in every sense of the word.
…That’s because being thin in 2022 is about being part of a protected class. It’s about looking fit and healthy and rich and virtuous in a time when we’ve all seen what happens if you don’t have wealth or pretty privilege to protect you. It’s a pursuit of thinness out of the fear of being rejected by everyone from doctors to prospective dates. I think it’s a more desperate pursuit than we’ve seen before.
Lookism 🔗
March 8, 2023
By the spring of 2023, the gamified attitude towards beauty previously reglegated to incel and femcel internet cultures had exploded across the mainstream. As memes, overly sentimental personal essays and Netflix animated shows — the desire to be beautiful as a means of social ascension has since become a cornerstone in journeys of “self-healing” and “personal growth.” Then in the summer, Rolling Stone reported that “The Girlies Are Into Phrenology.”
When I wrote about the community last year for The Cut, the subreddit had 12,000 members. Now, it has over 32,000. Spaces like r/HowToBeHot were originally built by femcels, involuntarily celibate women. Across the internet, femcels had adapted (male) incel terminology and reoriented it towards their efforts to understand, dissect, and wield objective beauty. As femcels grew more visible and memed in late 2021, they’ve been chased off of mainstream platforms like Reddit or forced to moderate their message. But their legacies endure, even if r/HowToBeHot now uses the term “GlowUp” in lieu of “looksmaxxing.” The fact remains, that femcels and non-femcels are bonded by an investment in how their looks shape their social value and lovability.
To a particularly dizzy breed of pseudo-femcel, this is all very amusing, politically subversive even. Earlier this summer, Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova tweeted a series of memes that take on the form of BMI Caste Charts and eye color pyramids you’d find up for discussion in real femcel subreddits actually concerned with the information they present, however politically incorrect. It’s very uncool to say you want to be conventionally attractive. But femcels face this taboo, I’ll even say bravely.
…
Lookism is a story about not being beautiful and wanting to be. About the constant math we do, to determine where we stand among our peers. In The Point Magazine’s recent beauty issue, writer Grazie Sophia Christie looks at literary dyads of women —“from Austen to Ferrante” — one hot and one not. “We recognize the ‘winner’ as soon as we read what she looks like,” Christie notes. Writing also that “the great beauty hurts like a splinter but helps us like a measuring stick to understand ourselves.” We become when we recognize ourselves as the not-hot-half.
We are animated by our desire, if not need, to compensate. We compensate by “glowing up” or looksmaxxing, that’s obvious. But we also compensate when we call on our other qualities–our heart, our soul, our mind–to even the scale. This is part of reality’s many cruelties.
Bad Taste 🔗
October 15, 2024
In my last newsletter essay, I wrote about how beauty shows up on the internet: Micro-trends, niche aesthetics, the Girl Internet, girl blogging, beauty communities. They are all reflective of the individual ways in which we each attempt to articulate what beauty is and means to us. In writing this essay I learned about the intimate bond between beauty and fascism. I was thinking about writers like Yukio Mishima1 and Jean Cocteau2, notable aesthetes of questionable politics that are currently enjoying small revivals in the usual subsets of the literary internet. For Mishima and Cocteau, as well as for the looksmaxxers, girlbloggers and aesthetics curators of the Girl Internet, beauty is like a drug. An abusable substance that’s being unduly curbed in a moralistic society. It’s our right to pursue beauty at all costs, they say! This is how we choose to transcend!
The following excerpt explains how the aestheticization of the abject (the disgusting and repulsive) is an extension of a self-annihilatory cult of beauty that dominates online and consumer cultures today. One we all tacitly take par in:
When it comes to internet cultures, reactionary cross-cutting has obliterated any sense of directionality. The countercultures have lost their primary points of reference. What we have now — in the clean girls, bed rotters, deerposters, trad wives, shitposters and even in the depths Manosphere — is a thick haze of synonymous moods. A generalized ache. A blur of malaise. An amorphous mass of feral disaffection and indifference. Layers of irony that cancel each other out.
From this rot, I notice a more overt effort to aestheticize the abject. On my own feeds memes are creepy and gory, I’m seeing a lot of teeth manicures and claw pedicures. Lorde posted herself spitting. It’s all a hum of bed rotting and deerposting. I like all of it. And I need to know I’m not the only one with this instinct to turn these feelings of disgust into something beautiful and ecstatic.
In the book on abjection Julia Kristeva writes about Louis Ferdinand Céline, a novelist whose offensively over-stylized writing is topped only by his vile antisemitism. For Kristeva, his work was “the most daring X-ray of the ‘drive foundations’ of fascism,” intent on capturing “libidinal surplus value” of “horror and suffering.”2 In a similar fashion, I see how the generalized mood of large swaths of the internet trades in the libidinal value of “horror and suffering” through various degrees of aestheticization. Making things beautiful or fuckable in order to live with them.
And while reading Susan Sontag’s description of fascist ideals in art, it was all too easy to think of an internet culture equivalent for each of the traits she listed: “the ideal of life as art, [aestheticization of everything] the cult of beauty [looksmaxxing], the fetishism of courage [contrarian trolling, iconoclastic influencing], the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community [fandoms, mob justice]; the repudiation of the intellect [misinformation, “open the schools!”]; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders) [Stay-At-Home Girlfriends and, once again, trad wives].”3
As fascism tightens its grip on our necks I understand the temptation to play along and pretend it’s all part of a sexy little game. This type of self-alienation, wrote Walter Benjamin, can reach a point where “it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
The aestheticization of the abject in the Girl Internet follows a historically recognizable pattern of turning to beauty, however oppressive, during ugly times of heightened political oppression. Less an archetypical power-user, an offshoot of the girlbloggersphere, the Abject Girlie is the phrase I use to name the hyperfeminine aestheticization of the abject on the internet. In the following images, the abject (crawling animals, rotten nails, “deep-fried” images, and uncanny renderings) is paired with the girly, cute, tender, and saccharine.
My next essay newsletter is about techno-fascist futurism’s use of femininity (Up now: Part I + Part II). I wonder, and am still thinking through, the imaginative limits and possibilities of these depictions of women-as-machines and vice-versa. Building on Andrea Long Chu’s argument that everyone is female, and by extension, everyone online is a girl, can a revitalized cyberfeminism (“mercenaries of slime”) help us think our way through these techno-dystopian times? Or is it indistinguishable from the specified feminization used to market exploitative tech? I hope to have an answer next time I’m in your inbox.
“In Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist, Andrew Rankin sets out to challenge this perception by demonstrating the intelligence and seriousness of Mishima’s work and thought. Each chapter of the book examines one of the central ideas that Mishima develops in his writings: life as art, beauty as evil, culture as myth, eroticism as transgression, the artist as tragic hero, narcissism as the death drive…Mishima is concerned with such problems as the loss of certainties and absolute values that characterizes modernity, and the decline of strong identities in a world of increasing uniformity and globalization. In his cultural criticism Mishima makes an impassioned defense of free speech, and he rails against all forms of authoritarianism and censorship.” from the publisher’s page of Rankin’s book.
“Cocteau was the teenage dandy and poetic prodigy who attended the sickbed of Marcel Proust, was a librettist for Stravinsky and Diaghilev, a novelist and autobiographer, the director of indelibly strange films, a cross-disciplinary queer artist in a lineage that includes Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol, and Derek Jarman. But also: a restless and buzzy frequenter of surfaces, a gadfly whose addictions to style and celebrity mark him out as something like the anti-Duchamp of the twentieth century. […] The spring of 1945—was Cocteau keen to separate his loftily apolitical art from accusations of reaction, and worse? He had made certain unfortunate remarks about the French attitude toward Hitler; during the war, he remained friends with Ernst Jünger and Arno Breker, Hitler’s favored sculptor.” Brian Dillon for 4Columns.
This is such a great concept. Thank you!! I'm clicking on all of these.