Earlier this year my roommate was showing me photos of male actors she finds attractive. It’s bad enough that I have prosopagnosia, but even if I didn’t, I feel like they would fall together into this weird, abstract Idea of what an Attractive Man is like, and it makes me feel nothing—not attraction, not distaste, nothing, nothing.
But that’s a mild example. I glimpse makeup tutorials on YouTube and peer at the beautiful people who are admired on Instagram and feel this eerie uncanniness. Do people want their faces to look like poreless plastic? I only remember the “before” pictures in images that depict makeovers and plastic surgeries and transformations, because the “after” is generic and unmemorable. I struggle to find pictures on Pinterest that look like my characters—everyone is perfect, rough edges and distinctive features sanded off, beautiful in the same boring-as-shit, overwhelmingly generic way.
How awful it would be to not be ugly, and to be nothing instead, to be beautiful in a way that blandly checks off a box, evokes nothing, provokes nothing, that has only slight and corporate approved deviations from a featureless Ideal.
But this is also so true in that even sexual images of “perfect” bodies are so desexualized in a way. Bodies are animal, lived-in, worn by living. Skin has spots and scars and stretch marks and wrinkles, humans are mammals, we have hair, we have fat and it means we are soft to hold and touch, we are Creatures, and to be a Creature is to live and adapt and have appetite. How can you detach sex from creatureliness, want, pleasure, the love of pleasure, life and having lived, the possibility of future plasticity, the evidence of time and the promise of more time?
The perfect body is supposed to be that of someone who eats with restrictive and mechanical care, never to excess, never guided by hunger or desire, only by abstract knowledge of the necessity of various nutrients. Never wanting and giving in to want, indulging what the tongue and stomach demand.
—of course that’s not sexy!!!!!! How could such mortal terror of bodily pleasure be sexy????
This approach to eating makes you sexy? Bull fucking shit, an example of a person who has this approach to *sex* would be a literal actual medieval monk, for fuck’s sake, I’m—
—in other words, the perfect, desirable body is not sexy, because it is scarless and unmarked, trained and restricted and denied and starved and plucked and shaved and trimmed to perfection—it is a beauty that communicates precisely the opposite of “I love pleasure and partake in it, I have lived and tried new things, I am open to experiences that will change me, I am confident, I appreciate and trust my animal self, I love to live and to feel and to indulge.” Of course this kind of beauty can’t be horny.
But also?? It is not sexy because it is not…naked. You know…in the way that actual human people are naked. It would be impossible to actually be naked in a world where we were all beautiful like That. Because everyone already knows what the abstract perfected ideal of a naked body looks like, the one we’ve been made to idealize all our lives. We know what the body Should look like in the way we know prayers we were taught as kids.
We’re supposed to want that, but how could you really WANT that. It is flawless and therefore no more real than a porno. Or an ad. After you got your lover’s clothes off you wouldn’t be changed at all; there would be nothing new to experience, nothing important about this moment, nothing that belongs just to you and just to now. It is Perfect and no more real than your obsession with it in your own head. It certainly will not get better with time. Time is not allowed. If you notice the effects of time, you must buy a cream to hide it.
And if you were beautiful like that, you couldn’t disclose anything by undressing. You look like What You Are Supposed To Look Like, and how could anyone forget the ideal that’s been made an obsession branded into their brains? You couldn’t be vulnerable. You couldn’t even be alone with someone or just with yourself without the eyes of the world on you.
Because the Ideal is that you’re fit for public consumption even in your most private and intimate moments, even in the privacy of your bedroom you’re Being according to the Standard. And there’s nothing left that’s just for those you choose to share it with, or just for YOU, it’s all been decided by something outside you.
I was going to say we are expected to be beautiful like angels, not like animals. But this sounds like a kind of hell, doesn’t it?
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