Women Being Seen: Desire, Dating & the Politics of Beauty

On the alluring, delusional sameness of the front-facing filter.

HI

I am addicted to consuming images of other people and chances are, so are you. In 2023, Gallup polls found that 51% of U.S. teenagers spend over 4 hours a day on social media, scrolling, swiping, comparing, assessing, dissecting, obsessing. On average, U.S. adults clock about 2 hours daily on social media doing the same. As someone who devoted seven years of my career to being a full-time blogger, I’m keenly aware of my swiping addiction and its toll on my brain, my self-esteem, and my ability to sort reality from an Instagram filter.

A few weeks ago, an influencer I follow posted a video about her 11-step nightly skincare routine. In the (seemingly unfiltered) Reel, her skin is taut, plump, and glowing. Should I have an 11-step nightly skincare routine? I gawked. Like me, this woman is in her early forties. Unlike me, she appears not to have the wrinkles I sometimes obsess over, knowing that they diminish my objective attractiveness in a society where hetero-patriarchal beauty standards dictate that women are most desirable when they look eternally 25. Perhaps this woman’s 11-step routine would do for me what (most likely) genes and money did for her?

Sure, I could get Botox or any of the other injectables and treatments that have nearly become de rigueur for women with the money to pay for them. Botox use increased 73% between 2019 and 2022, with injections for people under 19 (yes, 19!) up 9%. 75% of plastic surgeons in the U.S. have seen a “staggering spike” in clients under age 30. “Prejuvenation,” “a preventative treatment for aging,” is all the rage.

But having lived 42 years without dyeing my hair or altering my skin or appearance, I’m reticent to cave to the demands of the male gaze more than I already do as a straight woman. My reticence isn’t just theoretical: I deeply dislike the idea of spending hard-earned money to perpetuate the illusion that I can keep gravity and aging at bay. I don’t want to fuel an economy and society that penalizes women for not wearing makeup, for wrinkles and white hair, for aging.

I’d be remiss not to note that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ 2022 report also showed a 253% rise in men seeking out procedures like fillers and “Brotox” (yep) since 2019. Men face similar pressures to conform to heteronormative standards around body-type, height, and more. Though living under patriarchy is inevitably more brutal for women, the Beauty and Wellness Industrial Complexes are increasingly gender agnostic: they just want our conformity and our money.

Which is to say, it’s not exclusively the male gaze that’s fueling our obsession with “prejuvenation”: It’s also our daily engagement with the algorithm, the businesses that spend money to capture our attention there, the endless scroll of Beauty and Wellness Industrial Complex–content nestled snugly in the palms of our hands. Every day, we spend hours consuming images, training our brains on how we should look, what we should spend money on, how we should conform—a ceaseless accumulation of product and aesthetic trend and desire. As Salty founder Claire Fitzsimmons once said: “The patriarchy is in the algorithms.”

Journalist Jessica DeFino calls this ever-expanding set of expectations about women’s beauty “aesthetic inflation”:

The normalisation of injectables, surgery and extreme skincare routines over the past decade has shifted the baseline standard of beauty for all — aesthetic inflation, if you will — trapping women and gender non-conforming people in a cycle of aesthetic labour they can’t easily escape without facing social, financial and political fallout.

I thought about aesthetic inflation when a 40 year-old female friend recently texted me with a burning question: “Do all people with smooth faces on ig, specifically spurred by seeing [redacted] and [redacted], do they have Botox/other injectables? lol these are the thoughts I have by myself and I finally decided to ask someone.”

Her hesitation to speak openly about aesthetic manipulation speaks volumes. When we invest hours a day looking at and comparing ourselves to other women, many of whom are spending thousands of dollars a year on cosmetic alteration, shouldn’t we at least be able to speak openly about it? If we don’t, we only serve to normalize the illusion that women look a certain way without the “aesthetic labor” DeFino names.

In a recent article on The Cut about the “Forever-35 Face,” the author discusses the impressive “undetectability” of deep-plane face-lifts. One 44 year-old woman shares her inability to assess her peers’ ages: “they…seemed to belong to some glamorous tribe of the nebulously de-aged, appearing somewhere between 35 and 50.” But this mysterious de-aging phenomenon isn’t solely the result of face-lifts, injectables, and other procedures improving over the past decades.

With the advent of Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat’s front-facing “effect” filters, social media users suddenly had the ability to instantaneously modify the way they looked—and to project that modified image to the world. Today, front-facing effects proffer transformation and a “nebulously de-aged” face to anyone, for free, at any time of day or night.

About five years ago, I started taking screenshots of myself with and without Instagram effects and placing them side-by-side for comparison. I was scared of what I imagined normalized use of these effects might do to beauty standards, and to the way we perceive facial features, faces, and people themselves. Many of the filters featured sliders that would adjust the strength or intensity of the effect, so that, in real time, you could choose how snatched you wanted your jawline, how wide your eyes, how Aryan-narrow your nose, how wrinkle-free your skin.

I was told the effects on TikTok and Snapchat, two apps I don’t use, were even more robust than Instagram’s. What would this do to minds much younger than my own? Would we be able to stand looking at unfiltered faces five or ten years down the road? Would we all begin to suffer from some form of face or body dysmorphia?

While beauty standards for women have shifted continually throughout history, watching their real-time manipulation via social media app was alarming. I began to think about women’s beauty standards in terms of the Overton Window: the range of political ideas acceptable to the mainstream at any given moment. Typically, the Overton Window is used to assess how sociopolitical mores shift over time. But what is beauty, if not a political act? After all, women typically conform to beauty standards as a way to uphold social and financial status given their varying states of inequality and oppression in patriarchal societies.

Was my participation in and addiction to social media actively shifting the Overton Window of hetero-patriarchal beauty standards? Was my perception of beauty, faces, and bodies being distorted by front-facing filters in a way not dissimilar to the effects of pornography on sexual attraction and expectation?

I made a private pledge not to use the front-facing Instagram filters or effects (unless they were obvious and fun, like the kind that makes butterflies flit around your skull). And even more privately, I began to begrudgingly take note of women who regularly used filters. I’m certainly not immune to judging my frown lines, to wishing I looked differently than I do. But stronger than that angst is my fear of a future where use of these effects becomes ubiquitous, where “nebulously de-aged,” “prejuvenated” faces carry more social, financial, and political clout than an unmodified face.

In July 2021, I made a Reel about it. (Watch to the end for my unfiltered face.)

The caption read:

Hey babe! Filters are a tool of patriarchal heterocapitalism, designed to make women look the way cis hetero white men (think they) prefer, so that hetero women of all racial backgrounds think they need to buy products (hello multi billion dollar beauty & wellness industries) in order to conform to a literally non-human beauty standard invented by a bunch of tech bros in Silicon Valley.

What does that look like? Smooth, poreless, wrinkle- and blemish-free skin, blushing cheeks, plump juicy lips, wide doe eyes, light-colored irises, a narrowed nose, and a thinner jawline. These are Aryan / Anglo Saxon ideals of beauty that certainly don’t conform to my Ashkenazi Jewish nose, nor many other parts of my face. They’re also attributes that signal sexual pleasure and youthfulness (often verging on childlike or even infant-esque 😳).

If you follow someone who regularly uses filters, keep in mind you don’t really know what they actually look like. Take account of how that influences your perception of the content they create.

This is not a calling out (wear make-up! have plastic surgery! be free! I’m not trying to tell you how to be). But it *is* a calling in—for women to opt out of an insidious tool created for use on yet another social media platform created by cis het white men. For you to know whose game you’re playing, and choose to walk off the field.

This filter is called baby <3 by Lazy777, and Billie Eilish used it in her Stories today! And of course this one goes out to our hero in dismantling the beauty industrial complex, Jessica DeFino 🙏.

This week, four years after I made the Reel above, I returned to Instagram’s “Trending” effects and created side-by-sides of present-day me with six of the top ten filters the app recommends in Stories. On the left side of each rectangle is the same image of me—no makeup, no filter. On the right: same face, manipulated with one of the filters.

What do you notice? Even in filter 6—arguably the most “natural”—all the manipulations I detail in my previous post remain: nose-narrowing, lip plumping, jaw-line re- or defining, wrinkle erasure. If I used one of these effects regularly on Instagram and one day you caught me sans-effect in the wild, you’d probably recognize me, perhaps with a bit of dismay.

As my friend and cookbook author Gabi Moskowitz aptly noted, “…my first thought is that lady looks like maybe a cousin of my friend Lily who has had a lot of work done.”

But what I find most alarming is the sameness each of the effects introduces: They’re all trending towards one basic type.

Of course, social media isn’t the only place where algorithms prime women to swipe, compare, and perform for men. As someone who’s spent thirteen years on and off the dating apps in search of a good man, I’m keenly aware of how aesthetic inflation, the Overton Window of hetero-patriarchal attractiveness, and front-facing filters influence the world of dating.

In a recent Instagram video exploring aesthetic inflation, Jessica DeFino uses the appearance of women contestants on a reality dating show as a prime example. On the left, some of the contestants from Season 1 of “The Bachelor” in 2002; on the right, some of the contestants from a season that aired in 2020.

screenshot from Jessica DeFino’s Instagram Reel

In the video, DeFino cues for us to notice the amount of aesthetic labor being performed by the women in 2002 versus the women in 2020. I notice something else, too: That uncanny sameness that I mention in the images of my filtered face above.

There’s a sameness to the way the women from 2020 present themselves, which to my eye reads as a high degree of conformity to spoken and unspoken beauty standards. To me, it looks like evidence that they’re all watching the same make-up tutorials, following the same influencers, using the same front-facing effects on Instagram and TikTok, all seeking the same “nebulously de-aged” face.

This kind of literal and figurative grooming has been happening for centuries, but never have we held such powerful tools of mimetic dissemination in our hands. Our phones and their accompanying algorithms are ready at any given moment to show us how we should look, and we are addicted to their tutelage.

I wonder: Do men notice this sameness in women, and are they being groomed to select for it on dating apps and in real life? Does the Instagramification of women’s faces make them seem less real, less human, easier to double-tap on a screen, easier to swipe away on an app?

Much has been written and ranted about dating apps in recent years: about the gamification of dating, how the apps are designed not to work so that users need to pay-to-play, about the culture of superficiality and transactionality they encourage. I’ve never liked the mindless aesthetic sorting that swipe apps demand, asking that we judge potential partner compatibility by a few static, plausibly manipulated photos.

And I’m continually unnerved by what my dear friend and psychotherapist Dr. Heather Lilleston, Ph.D. calls the “disposability fallacy”: the illusion that no matter how many people we swipe left on—supposedly disappearing them into the virtual garbage chute—there will always be another face, another user profile, waiting for connection. In my extensive online dating experience, and in my research on the subject, both men and women experience this feeling of disposability in online dating. It leads to uneven communication, disinterest, ghosting, despair.

A few weeks ago, my twenty-nine year-old niece made a video on TikTok about hetero-patriarchal beauty standards on Season 9 of Netflix’s reality dating show “Love Is Blind.” Without trying to or desiring the accompanying attention, the off-the-cuff video she recorded (late at night, make-up free, unfiltered, nary a ring-light in sight) garnered 93.6K likes, 2,165 comments, 2,459 saves, and 422 shares. In the video (I won’t be linking; she’s trying to de-viralize her existence), my niece wryly begins: “Joe…very clearly didn’t like Madison only because she wasn’t a size 2. He literally said that.” Her eyebrows raise.

“I believe [Madison]’s a very beautiful woman and in real life I believe he would be punching up by dating her. Like I think she, at least physically, out-matches him. And it just made me start thinking about how insane the beauty standards are for women and not for men. Which—this is not a new thing, obviously.”

My niece goes on: “You could walk outside and there’d be a hundred beautiful women, and you could walk outside at the same time and there’s maybe five beautiful men—and that’s coming from somebody who’s attracted to men. I think dating apps and society in general has made it so there are so many options of beautiful women for men to choose from…and there’s not that many for us [with men]. So [men] get to be so picky about how people look and they get to put down women physically who are stunning and beautiful.”

At this point, I began thinking about one of the recent trends in men’s attractiveness: the “rodent man.” Needless to say, this trend does not involve men spending thousands of dollars on beauty products or injectables.

“It’s not fair,” my niece continues. “I really think it’s awful that men get access to seeing all of these women on dating apps, probably hundreds a day. Beautiful women. It makes them start thinking like Oh yeah, I deserve all of this. I deserve the top of the top. Which, like—people can date whoever they want. I don’t think there should be a standard of beauty for dating, but…there’s too many options I think.”

At first, hundreds of comments flooded in from women thrilled to hear their own thoughts spoken aloud—feelings they’re likely afraid to verbalize. But as the video gained traction, my niece began to notice hateful comments piling up. They skewered everything from her appearance to her intelligence, though the comments about her looks came exclusively from men. Someone even tagged an account that exists for the sole purpose of reposting and making fun of women.

For a week, she went to bed each night scared of what she might wake up to, and spent hours each day deleting angry messages. I asked her if she could take a week off the app, for her sanity.

“I think I should,” she lamented.

But she didn’t. She was too busy tracking, in real-time, what happens when just one woman chooses to name the inequity of beauty standards in our culture. When she decides to express hope for a world where definitions of beauty might be dictated by more than an algorithm that’s designed to uphold the very systems of oppression that got us here in the first place.

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SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

Allie Rowbottom’s novel Aesthetica explores a not-so-distant future where Instagram effect–inspired facial modification is ubiquitous.

To listen.

Speaking of women refusing to conform, have you listened to the new Florence + The Machine album, “Everybody Scream”? Lyrics from “Sympathy Magic”:

I do not find worthiness a virtue
I no longer try to be good
It didn’t keep me safe
Like you told me that it would

STAY SANE

Let’s make a pact: I’ll compare myself to one less face today if you do the same, okay?

xo,

Lily