I was listening to a program on NPR hosted by Tonya Mosley. She was interviewing Jia Tolentino, a staff writer for the New Yorker, on an article she wrote called Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare. The program went into totally unanticipated topics that I previously thought had little to do with plastic surgery.
Or maybe I should say plastic surgery has had unanticipated consequences. The technology has become so precise as to be practically undetectable. So, what’s the problem? With such advances, it’s easy to feel even more pressure to work to maximize our appearance and make it conform to what we think other people consider beautiful. And when every face can be “optimized,” it becomes less a window into character and emotion, and more another field of artificiality. It becomes something to buy, not to live our way into. No longer will we see smile and tension lines, or other signs of character and the realities of a lived experience. A dimension of the face as a vehicle of communication will be lost. Instead, another vehicle to hide ourselves from others and from ourselves will be born.
What Tolentino found is that the images people are using to model their appearance on are AI generated. And these images are predominantly of people who are white, young, and based on one idea of what’s beautiful. They are also very much alike to one another. The face is being separated from the person, the person from their humanity or soul.
The program then went on to talk about “Looks Maxxers,” a purported self-improvement or men’s rights movement I had never heard of before, and had trouble understanding. It largely began around 2010, during the “Me-too” movement and the Presidency of Barack Obama. It was a reaction against a perceived rise in prominence of feminism and maybe of African Americans, and diminution of strong white men. This perception tipped these young men into a reactive belief that women are less than men, more superficial, who do not deserve equal rights.
And it’s an attempt to discover and classify the bodily characteristics of successful men to imitate those characteristics. In the “manosphere,” an influencer named Braden Peters became famous for striking his jaw with a hammer, as well as using softer methods like work outs, peptides, supplements, etc. to make his body and face more rugged, more “masculine,” and in his eyes more attractive.
But all these efforts to be attractive are not for sex or even happiness. Tolentino says these men are purportedly heterosexual but show little or no desire to get closer to women. Their purpose is to attract women in order to display power and dominance over them, and to be seen by a virtual, disembodied audience. She called this “eroticized attention;” it’s also attention that could be used to make money in internet forums.
Tolentino’s article and my emotional response to it alerted me to how much I feel the human world is severely straining my ability to understand it and is close to spinning out of control. We might be facing an array of threats way beyond what was faced by any other generation I can think of. The philosopher Noam Chomsky warned that humanity is approaching [or is now in] the most dangerous and critical moment in history. We have a climate emergency, an economy that doesn’t serve most of the people, as well as too many unjustifiable, unbelievably destructive wars. We even have a fairly new technology, AI, that some reputable experts warn has at least a 10% chance of causing the extinction of all humans in the next decade.
And we have a president specializing in undermining every aspect of our lives as part of a human community. I hope I’m not pushing an analogy too far, but I think this administration is causing many of us to feel what’s been called moral injury. I first heard the term used in describing, along with PTSD, part of what many soldiers experience from serving in a war. According to the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse, University, the injury entails damage to one’s conscience from perpetuating, witnessing, or failing to prevent acts that violate one’s conscience. Many feel harmed by a betrayal of core values, of justice, fairness, and loyalty, by our leaders, by other members of our community, or by our own actions or inaction. We know that many of our leaders have failed not only to protect us but even care about us. We feel our very humanity is being threatened.
Even more than ever, and as much as we individually can, we can ask ourselves several questions. Maybe the most important is how can we hold compassion in the face of hate? Instead of sacrificing our empathy, as the “Looks Maxxers” seem to be doing, how do we instead protect and act in accord with it?
Does every generation of people feel an inability to understand or feel empathy for those born in different decades? It certainly seems true here, in the US. When I was a teenager, I felt my parents’ generation didn’t understand me. They couldn’t understand the reality of life for my cohorts and myself and kept wanting me to conform to their images of success and reality, not mine. Is my trouble feeling empathy for or understanding the “Looks Maxxers” anything like what my parents experienced with me?
What might it be like to be part of a generation that grew up with social media and the increasing climate and other previously mentioned threats dominating their world?
I realize quite clearly that this is an extreme and hopefully small-sized movement. But it also shows us things about our world we or I don’t like to see. When we notice a reaction against anyone, or outrage, we can pause and take a breath, so we don’t feel wounded by their wounds or create ones of our own. So, we don’t create a wall to hide behind or hide them behind and think of ourselves as incapable of facing them. We can’t let recognizing the hate and blindness that others carry turn us to blindly hate, or to stand on the sidelines and do nothing. We would then be morally injuring or lying to ourselves. If I can understand them better or at least not dehumanize them, maybe I would then better understand and care for myself, and better work to care for this world that all of us live in.
Our understanding and our care for and love for others, this can be both our greatest joy and gift, or our greatest pain. But it’s this fellow feeling that holds the power to save us.
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