I should probably be writing about something more important. But the title of a Washington Post article, posted above, illustrates how ChatGPT is accelerating Western progress towards Peak Stupid and mainstream outlets are happily reinforcing the trend. A new focus of ChatGPT queries is advice to women on bettering their looks, allegedly for the purpose of attracting or retaining male partners.
The Internet intensified the appearance arms race, particularly among women.1 The Fox blonde hottie newscaster look has spread to mainstream shows. Internet dating has put a premium on photo-friendly faces. Before, fashion magazine covers regularly had airbrushed, as in fake, images, but deepfakery has almost certainly increased the prevalence as well as the degree of image-burnishing.
And it’s not as if only old farts see this sort of thing as problematic. From Futurism:
Of the nearly 1,300 total participants between the ages of 16 to 21 years old, 68 percent said they feel worse after spending time on social media. A full 50 percent said they would support a “social media curfew” cutting off how long they could spend on these apps. And astonishingly, another 47 percent outright felt that they would prefer to be living their youth in a world without the internet at all….
Merely using social media may itself be a source of misery: a recent study which followed 12,000 preteens as they grew up to become teenagers over the course of three years, found that as their social media usage went up, so did their depression symptoms.
Now it’s not as if the message that young adults have to compete with un- or almost un-attainable notions of beauty is the source of social media angst. But it’s certainly a significant component.
The Washington Post article on AI beauty advice does soon enough get to the point that AI is going to apply Internet beauty standards, and that will lead to Internet (or more accurately, fashion and beauty product vendors and plastic surgeons) norms of facial and physical attractiveness.2 In other words, ChatGPT will amplify what these industries are selling, since they dominate fashion and beauty publishing, and their tastes propagate from Hollywood runways to elite parties to TV and movie casting, which in turn feed back into plastic surgery procedures. These industries profit by making women dissatisfied with their looks.3 One of many proofs: women are less happy after having looked at a fashion magazine.
But let’s go back to the headline question, which is not about beauty but “hotness” as in sexual attractiveness to men. That often has way way less to do with looks than the fashion crowd and claques of women would have you believe. But first let’s start with the opener, which like the headline, confuses magnetism and charisma with conventional beauty:
Ania Rucinski was feeling down on herself.
She’s fine-looking, she says, but friends are quick to imply that she doesn’t measure up to her boyfriend — a “godlike” hottie. Those same people would never tell her what she could do to look more attractive, she adds. So Rucinski, 32, turned to a unconventional source for the cold, hard truth: ChatGPT.
She typed in the bot’s prompt field, telling it she’s tired of feeling like the less desirable one and asking what she could do to look better. It said her face would benefit from curtain bangs.
Lordie, Anita needs to realize her “friends” are not her friends. Or at least not with respect to hunky men. They are competitors. Anything they say on that front is suspect. She needs to tell them to shut the fuck up about her relationship unless she solicits their advice.
They are jealous and hope to enforce their status pecking order, in which Anita has snagged a boyfriend above what they deem to be her station. They’ve already gotten her depressed over having a great catch! , Her anxiety about her man will hopefully get her acting weird enough around him to drive him away. Mind you, this is not a worked-out strategy, but it is remarkable to see how many women are reflexively adept at planting ideas that are relationship poisoners.
Now putting aside this particular example, there are a lot of complaints from young men that young women overvalue themselves, so perhaps some AI narcissism-deflation could be beneficial. But that’s not the big issue here.
Let’s eviscerate this “Conventional attractiveness is the be-all and end all in the romantic pursuit game” nonsense.
At the rich man level as in the sort who can readily have a gorgeous paramour, there are famous examples of not-considered-beautiful women getting their pick of the crop. One was Pamela Harriman, who even in her youth was not considered to be all that attractive. However, she allegedly did have lovely breasts, and for many men, that is what matters (that impression is reinforced by the pervasiveness of boob jobs).4 But she was the courtesan of her day, with her allure rooted in her extreme attentiveness to her partners’ wishes and needs. That was rumored to include being very skilled in bed.
Another example is a story I read in an online magazine (Vice? Salon?) about a very fat woman who had no trouble finding lovers. Her current one was an Adonis-like man. Her secret, according to him, was that she really liked her body and really liked sex.
Now a lot of men like voluptuous women, which is very much at odds with what magazines and movies would have you believe. Regardless, fashion and society-induced body neurosis probably is not good for sexual satisfaction.
There are also men and women who look better in animation than repose, something that ChatGPT would not capture. And that can go as far as magnetism. See this interview with Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson. There’s no fancy lighting. Swindon has on very little makeup. She has bags under her eyes. Many would deem her strong bone structure to be mannish.
Perhaps it’s just me, but even before she speaks, she’s got a charisma that makes it hard to keep your eyes off her.5 No wonder she won an Oscar:
Yet one more possibility is the willingness to be seen. Bear with me on this.
Back in the days when the Internet social media was usenet groups, a friend had a stripper as a partner (this in New York City, where legal strip clubs were not in the business of prostitution; bouncers would throw out any patron who touched the girls and would escort them into cabs at the end of the evening). She had been a professional ballerina but took to stripping to pay her student debt. Because she could dance very well, her hauls were good despite her not having what was considered in that line of work to be a very commercial body (as in she was small breasted).
At her club, one stripper consistently out-earned the rest despite being neither a terrific dancer nor having what was considered to be a great body for stripping. One evening, the disparity was so great that the ballerina manque sputtered to her boyfriend about it.
She was a good physical mimic, so he asked her to dance like the big producer.
After a few minutes of study, he said, “She gives men permission to look at her.”
Now back to the Post and ChatGPT:
One TikTok video asking ChatGPT for glow-up recommendations drew more than 220,000 views and a slew of positive comments. A commenter said the bot rated their attractiveness on a 10-point scale.
“It told me I am mid and could go from a five to a seven with the help of makeup and fillers,” they said.
While ChatGPT maker OpenAI doesn’t publicly share what data its AI systems are trained on, the training data probably includes online forums where people rank other people’s attractiveness (largely men rating women), such as the subreddit r/RateMe or the website Hot or Not, said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute.While the training data contains diverse ideas, chatbots tend to veer toward the most common threads — such as the conviction that women need to constantly improve their looks, Hanna said.
And you might have this sort of thing foisted on you:
OpenAI said this month that it’s updating ChatGPT to show products — including images, details and links — when users appear to be shopping. Some tech and beauty experts caution that the bot’s suggestions serve its maker’s goals, not the user’s.
AI companies need new streams of revenue — some are spending billions to build and host AI tools. Having chatbots surface sponsored products and ads is one potential path forward: Already, Perplexity AI has incorporated a shopping feature inside its chatbot’s interface, and beauty is the third-most-searched category, a spokesman said.
As shopping features roll out, consumers might start seeing product recommendations without knowing why the bot is choosing those products, says Forrester’s Pfeiffer. The bot could, for example, pull ideas from a knowledgeable YouTube makeup influencer or a misogynistic Reddit thread. It could invent a fake product or make false claims about a real one, she said. Its training data is so vast and opaque, the bot becomes vulnerable to bias and mistakes.
Consider this example:
Michaela Lassig, a 39-year-old in Washington state, asked ChatGPT to help her glow up before her wedding. In her prompt, she told the bot her goals (flawless, youthful skin), her budget ($2,500) and her timeline…
It spat out a detailed list of the signs of aging on her face. But in the end, she welcomed the recommendations — it even correctly estimated the units of Botox her injector would recommend.
But AI training sets won’t include this sort of warning, from IM Doc:
I would guess in the entire USA, there are 10-15 maybe 20 plastic surgeons that are artists – sculptors. They do just amazing things. These surgeons are just astronomically expensive. And this is where these stars go. This is a very demanding specialty. I knew one of them very well back as a resident….These people are artist like in their behavior – very eccentric and at times bizarre, they are often on the spectrum – and very difficult to deal with – but WOW do they get results – just amazing work. But it costs millions.
The issue is the Botox. Botox, the first few times or when used sparingly, is not quite as good as sculpting – but does amazing things. Accordingly, people use it way too often. The problem is that people quickly find out that used too often it makes the muscles very flabby. It then has to be used more often and before long we have entered a death spiral. After a while, Botox becomes largely or completely ineffective. Then because things are so flabby, fillers and other desperate measures have to be taken. And not even the very best surgeons can fix this.
Botox is an addictive thing – and the Botox face is unmistakeable. And once it finally collapses and not being repleted constantly, things become very desperate indeed.
Can you imagine what dumb ideas ChatGPT would have for Tilda Swindon? “Grow your hair at least to jaw length and wear blush, eye liner and mascara. Oh, and if you have the money, some filler for your lips too.”
Jeff Bezos’ wife Lauren Sanchez shows where you wind up if you have money and fall victim to plastic-surgeon-enabled notions of what to do to fight aging (she’s 56):
Mind you, this isn’t the worst version of operation-created cat eyes and overplump lips….but I have to think she looks even more artificial when she uses her face.
Or consider Madonna, where the gossip rags depict her present appearance as the result of not merely trying to reduce the appearance of aging, but seeking to look as if she’s still in her 20s:
But then again…these distorted faces may become normalized as more and more women get plastic surgery beyond the point of maximum advantage. And it may even become a status marker, since weird-looking fake youthful is better than aged, right?
____
1 But far from exclusively, see the rise in body dysmorphia among men. This includes among the very rich, where for instance plastic surgery on their private parts is not uncommon.
2 The article speculates that the AI trained on sites where people rate appearances, and that is mainly men of women. But given that AI is endemically short on training sets and that male and female tastes are influenced by movies and advertising, commercial influence would seem to be strong.
3 In fairness, in cities like New York, London, and Paris, there is a “fashion forward” cohort that must be seen only in the current looks. While as individuals, they spend a lot, and some are high profile enough to drive mass fashion, the weight of dollars is comes from the influenced, not the influencers. And making them insecure about their looks will generate more consumption, particularly on cosmetics and “treatments.”
4 This also implies that Anita could be a catch due to her endowments, which her “friends” are not prepared to accept.
5 Yes, it may also be her gender-bending. She was married to Jonathan Byrne and now has a male partner but recently said she identifies as queer.
re: “Michael Clayton”
I am sorry that this is besides the point of the post but since I am repeatedly looking into Clayton as it is one of my favs in this genre.
It is highly respected among screenwriters I believe, as written by Tony Gilroy who is being regarded as a screenwriter’s screenwriter and who also directed it. (Gilroy manages to build every part of the story on the inner disruption of the main protagonist.)
Yet I could never come to really like Swinton, sorry to say. Admittedly it is a film almost entirely with male actors, the best of which here are dead today, the above interviewed great Tom Wilkinson, died 2023, and Sydney Pollack, died 2008, of course rather known as director producer screenwriter, whilst I secretly prefer him most as actor. But the lesser known cast is outstanding too.
Since NC is also about economics – as far as I could find out the story was originally inspired by cases from the automobile industry where paying off potential plaintiffs was more profitable than actually solving the safety issues of the car models in question.
If this is true, switchting to pharmaceuticals might have had also a simple legal reason so as to stay out of trouble from lawsuits against the movie by the automakers.
As the subject matter goes and some details there is some reminiscence of Alan Pakula’s also very good “PELICAN BRIEF” (1993).
The corporation’s operative side (including using murder) to the story here seemed realistic (although I have never seen “realism” as any purpose for movie intself.) But since it’s gritty and attemtps to at least follow the realism brand Gilroy I assume put in much private knowledge and info.
I don’t know if here people could weigh in.
One of the few films moving on such territory today is maybe Todd Haynes’s “Dark Waters” (2019) which btw would correspond with yesterday’s entry on PFAS as was pointed out by Carla in the forum
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/05/wastewater-plants-could-protect-against-pfas-pollution.html#comment-4220757
So I kept quiet for once. Although I found it a disappointing one by Haynes unncesserily slow burning.
There would much more to say but this is not Sunday Coffee. There is a informative audio commentary on the DVD by Gilroy and his producer or screenwriter I believe…
Those who don’t know highly recommended. Including excellent camera, costume and music score.
Lordie, Swindon is not likable in that part! She’s a highly neurotic killer! You are supposed not to like her.
Comedienne Carol Burnett played some real monsters when cast in dramatic roles.
Here, she first appears at 3:40:
She was nominated for a guest star Emmy for this performance.
Back to Swindon. I must confess that due to not having had time to indulge my fondness for movies, aside from Michael Clayton, I have seen her only in Benjamin Button. She played a sympathetic character in that:
Ah, Tilda Swinton. Not conventional good looks but has that can’t-look-away attraction. I was first frightened by her way back in Orlando, in which she plays everyone. Just the other day I watched The Dead Don’t Die in which she’s an expert Scottish vampire slayer wielding a katana.
I don’t really have much conception of Tilda Swinton – I almost never watch films, I don’t pay attention to the fine artists (Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner) – so she is just a name a collection of mentions in the newspaper. So I watched the clip out of curiosity, to see if she was attractive.
And isn’t she wonderful? So withering! After about five minutes, she is interviewing the interviewer! She definitely joins my dominatrices dinner party of desire (Germaine Greer, Mariella Frostrup, Dorothy Parker, Lucy Worsley, Sue Perkins).
And she and Tom Wilkinson are both so scornful of the interviewer’s conception of “the Art”: it’s just a job, turning up to act is not where the creativity lies, sure I’ll play greenscreen opposite a cartoon beaver, why not? And what in the world is dangerous about taking off your clothes and looking like a real person?
As for the actual post, AI rating of desirability is absurd. It’s just an aggregation of correlations. The desirability function of a robot playing dice is no desire at all.
Next we will ask it whose eyes are too close together and a bit shifty and start locking people up….
Actually I mean Swinton’s work as an actress. I don’t like it. For my taste and understanding it’s too much and too artificial how she approaches her roles. I see her “work” and I prefer not to. While her support for indie productions and her attempt to show integrity in a social space where egotism, dishonesty, sadism and all bad that one can make up are rewarded she retained decency is laudable. See e.g. her red-carpet comment on Gaza during Berlinale. While 5 years ago this yet would have been worthy of nothing today it is taking serious professional risks. And she did just that. But honest politics is no excuse for artistisc oddities. Not every one of her films but many. This is most likely also due to the specific collaboration with directors. It might work better with a Guadagnino or a Potter. But all this is highly subjective of course.
Also a big Swinton fan. You should really watch one of Lambert’s faves, Burn After Reading, which is along the same lines as Michael Clayton (spy thriller, espionage), except funny!
A two second clip from that one – I swoon every time I watch it.
Wow. This was among the best articles I’ve ever absorbed on this space and you’ve run some masterpieces. I kept looking over my shoulder as I read it!
Sex appeal. You know exactly the ways it engages men. And you understand precisely the ways it influences women. Proof that you are a lady even if you had signed it as anonymous.
You write about the subject like an adult. And the hallmark of maturity is experience. Boy, I sure wish I could’ve met you when I was young!
As a male, I blame men. Most haven’t a clue, especially it seems in this day and age. No woman would be wondering whether she’s “hot” in the company of a gentleman.
AI seems to be the latest iteration of the old babushka in the village generations ago. Grandma would typically affirm you and offer advice centered around your humanity rather than your identity. Yet at every progression from romance books to catalogs to beauty magazines and now AI, each manifestation tends to negate the person further and sell more.
I’m glad you wrote about this in the manner you did. Because as ostensibly less important as it seems, you know how matters like finance, business, politics, art, diplomacy, power – and all those who dabble within – intersect individually with this seemingly adolescent topic.
Thus, I trust what you write about those subjects even more now.
Thank you for your marvelous insight.
Erm, this is well into Lambert’s *blushes modestly* terrain.
I did have the benefit, if you want to call it that, of at two different points in time, having nymphomanics as roommates (this is no exaggeration, usually a different man every night, and the few times they did not bring one home, they’d drink heavily, as in on the order of a full bottle of wine by themselves). Much later, a friend married one. She took all her clothes off in front of more than one man, even peeled down in front of me once; she was a long-standing heavy drinker and diagnosed as a Stage 4 alcoholic before their divorce. Also got herself thrown into the drunk tank more than once by the cops when trying to call them in v. her husband, to try to get control of the rent controlled apt in his name.
>She took all her clothes off in front of more than one man, even peeled down in front of me once
>
“permission to be seen” … check.
It seems to be basic human nature that we’ll put ourselves through hell for approval of our physical looks – even hunter gatherer societies have often quite extreme body modification/tattoo ‘norms’ for men and women, and you can trace any number of these throughout history and across cultures.
But there is little question I think but social media has had an additional toxic effect on the modern world, and using AI can only make this worse – although I think its difficult to top the damage that filters do in making everyone online look ‘better’. I think a key problem is that throughout history we always measured ourselves by the people around us, and for most people this definitionally meant that most of us were ‘mid’. But in social media people spend their days soaked in images of artificially enhanced looks – whether through filters, extreme diets, plastic surgery or steroids.
It was always possible for people (mostly men, but plenty of examples of women too), who could make up for a lack of physical advantages through developing charisma and confidence. Some people, of course, have that naturally – or at least pick it up through their upraising and education (a key reason I think why private schools are so successful). But as far as the dating world is concerned, it seems that everything going online has hugely distorted peoples perceptions of what is, or is not acceptable or desirable.
Just to add to this – demographers are beginning to notice that the drop in birth rates worldwide may be more closely associated with a drop in marriage rates, not a reduction in the preference of married couples to have children. There does appear to be an association between the rise of social media and a fairly dramatic drop in marriages.
This may not be a major factor (and thanks for giving me an excuse to mention it, I didn’t find a ready way to get it into the post) but I’ve come across claims that more and more men are having trouble having sex with flesh and blood women due to overconsumption of porn. I have not heard that well-explained but my guess is that to be aroused, they come to need to see extreme bodies (in some flavor that suits their tastes) and perhaps also extreme action (like several women with one man).
Been getting worse in gay community for years, just one reason for my TMI anecdote a while back about a resort. Tops are rarer without the blue pill. If you are getting aroused via increasingly out there stuff then mainstream topping becomes more stressful and rare.
These days it’s all academic to me thanks to mental health plus long COVID but I saw it starting a lot earlier.
I think there is a push-pull element in this. A lot of men who are being rejected (or perceive themselves as being rejected) are falling back on porn, and this reliance is making things worse for them (much easier to stay at home with a beer and a certain website than go out and have another failed date). There will come a point where they are no longer capable of being with a woman.
The impact of porn is a whole other issue – in the last year I’ve had two conversations with younger women about their sex preferences that made my jaw hit the ground. Either things have changed a lot, or I was much more innocent and sheltered than I thought I was back when I was in my 20s.
The stuff that’s considered just another day on the farm in regards to intercourse is definitely mind bending. Much of this, I can’t believe any participant enjoys. Who knows.
>younger women about their sex preferences … jaw hit the ground … things
>have changed a lot …
>
yeah, i’ve mulled over whether there is some kind of “flynn effect” with regard to a trend in increasingly outre/extreme preferences
Less marriages. For what i can detect in my circles it seems nowadays it is more difficult to get serious in any relation. Particularly true for the younger. Part of it might be that it is increasingly difficult to find decent and stable positions/jobs/tasks and people increasingly feel the need to move faraway only to discover that elsewhere the situation is similar. I don’t know if my observations hold true in the whole picture.
I think the causality is backwards, excess porn consumption is the symptom since less men are able to get laid. 80 percent of women are all chasing the top 20 percent of guys. I would take a look at the hoe_math channel on youtube , he gives a good explanation of this dynamic.
To be clear, this is not about difficulty in finding a female sex partner (has no one heard of paying to get laid? A friend contends women should never give sex away for free).
This is about not being able to perform.
Most have heard of paying to get laid, but few have extra cash required. As the old joke says, love was invented by poor men so that they could get laid for free. :)
There’s also an effective preference issue: most couples want to have three children (IIRC) and this number has been stable for a long time but the number they actually have is dropping because of the increasing expense (actual costs, opportunity costs); the demands of modern life on family time and the desire by parents to maximise their children’s outcomes, which is exacerbating the costs by placing the whole of parenthood on a footing of musical chairs, competing for diminishing niches of status and positional goods and compelling people to bid each other up in school fees etc.
I think it can be quite difficult to disentangle the different variables at work – the number of children per marriage seems to be stabilising, but this may be because the difficulty in having children is making fewer people marry.
One of the striking things in the recent demographic figures is just how widespread the same trends are – you can seem them occurring more or less simultaneously across the west, South America and Asia – and even in undeveloped parts of the world. High birthrates are only holding up in very traditional societies.
I hear Putin is giving folks free land in Russia to start any enterprise (inducing families?).
As the article you link shows:
* marriage rates has dropped
* unmarried cohabitation has increased
* marriage plus cohabitation has decreased somewhat, but not dramatically, on the global scale since 1970 (from 69% to 64% among women 15-49).
* percentage of children born outside of marriage has increased dramatically from 10% to 30%.
Or as the article states “There has been a ‘decoupling’ of marriage and parenthood”. I think the reasonable conclusion is still that it is mostly fewer kids in each couple, and fewer couples plays a smaller role. At least on the global scale.
I can’t find the links right now, but from what I’ve read into the issue, the rise in the number of children born to unmarried mothers is insufficient to compensate for the overall rise in zero children singles. This seems to be a phenomenon observed in many different countries, so it’s not a cultural or economically driven process. In other words, the biggest driver for a falling birthrate seems to be an increased number of singles not having children, not a drop in children per marriage, or a lowering of unmarried mothers.
Yes, this too. An epidemic if childlessness. I saw those studies (here, I think!).
But in terms if being actionable, getting parents of two to realise their desire to have three seems easier than going from zero to one if the preference is zero!
Well, this topic of post being what it is, someone had to put this in so it may as well be me.
Right Said Fred, Too Sexy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5mtclwloEQ
Perfect example of AI being mostly A. And kids these days, using it to try to be more attractive to… their teachers(?) seem also well on their way to “peak stoopid”. When asked, these systems spit out way too much gibberish – “the empty can rattles the loudest” – though the AI can has a special kind of manic rattle.
I’ve been on a kick recently noticing how the AI chat bots are deeply conformist. They talk like cowardly sycophants when you correct them. Given the opportunity they flatter you. There’s no genuine dialectic and they hesitate to challenge ignorance, false beliefs and bad faith. In other words, they are cowards.
So in this context, I wonder. Does the chat bot assume based on the prompt that the questioner wants to hear “You are mid”? (Presumably LLMs have soaked up oceans of neurotic masochism.) Or perhaps my hypothesis is all wet. Maybe I should ask a chat bot about that.
Thank you, Yves.
This post could have used Jocelyne Wildenstein as an example: https://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities/738780/jocelyn-wildenstein-dead-report/.
I often saw the “bride of Wildenstein” with her hubby and in laws at the races in France.
Yes, I could have used her.
But Suzanna Andrews, who was a friend of mine, wrote a Vanity Fair story on the Wildensteins: https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1998/3/bitter-spoils
Jocelyn WANTED to look like a big cat. This was not too-common plastic surgery excess but patient desire.
Thank you, Yves.
I’ve been told by a teacher that there is a rise of pre-teen girls insisting on being identified as a kitten (or occasionally other animals). One can only wonder what will happen if they have access to the resources to get the appropriate plastic surgery.
Gawd. Twenty-five years of technical innovation and improvements for the internet and we are right back where we started from-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_or_Not
And didn’t Zuckerberg get his start with a website at Harvard where guys could rate the images of the girls on campus? But the look of all those women who get plastic surgery like Lauren Sanchez in this post almost has a uniformity about it when so many women get the same look. I call it Late Stage Empire myself and it’s like how with statues of Roman women, their hairstyle tells you roughly which part of Roman history they lived in. But there is a sort of Stepford Wives look to them.
Yeah, something easy on the eyes is good to look at but how she carries herself can be the big attraction. This was brought home to me a coupla years ago when I was watching a doco on the history of smoking. They were showing the TV ads used to promote smoking like surgeons taking a break and having a cigarette. But there was one of this woman sitting in a chair talking to the camera and it was an old black and white ad and looked like it was from the early 50. But damn man, she radiated sexiness and I am not sure if it was her languid movement or her self confidence & assurance. Didn’t matter that it was from seventy years ago, that it was black & white or that it was poor quality video but what she radiated still held true.
No way! The Stepford Wives were peak hotness, unlike these contemporary trophies.
Here’s the hilarious closing scene in the supermarket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVGcbaoRtqk
Well, well. I’d say that Yves Smith has also been reading some Camille Paglia (or watching fascinating interviews with Paglia in which she works four or five ideas at the same time).
Paglia was pointing to this phenomenon back in Sexual Personae, which put her on the map as a cultural critic. She has some wonderful writing in that book about what bearing the neck means in Western culture — including a man bearing his neck.
The question for Anita and her god-boyfriend is: Can he make a decent loaf of bread?
And does he buy gifts for her that surprise her and are indulgences?
But back to social media and photographs. Photographs are no longer even photographs — we are in the world of images, the visual field dominant, and a constant assault on that visual field. A word is now worth a thousand pictures. Which may have advantages for me as a writer — although now I have to deal with the homogenized product that is the MFA in writing.
An Italian essayist also pointed out that at one time, and for most private persons, a photo was for a special occasion. One dressed up or wore a traditional outfit — First Holy Communion, wedding, bridal party, even photos of the dead in their coffins. Hmmm, this last has gone out of fashion among those taking selfies.
The photo was a physical object that required skill to print. Now, the selfie is a moment-by-moment response to events. It is posing that never stops.
So the visual field, in a sense, is out of control. USonions already have trouble dealing with being looked at (all of that “male gaze” baloney). So now the visual field never ceases and never ceases in its demands, and people are desperate to fit into the merciless demands of the camera-lens-installed-in-a-phone.
I would submit that the current vogue for drag queens, especially in the Anglosphere, reflects another exaggeration of how women are expected to look. I am reminded that Divine knew full well what being a theatrical personage means. The newer crop of drag queens take their meta-gender-fluidity a tad too seriously.
And back to Camille Paglia…
I did read Sexual Personae, perhaps 30 years ago if not longer. I was not consciously relying on her but it appears Paglia affected my thinking more than I realized.
There was a time when even having a mirror was a status symbol. Progressing from there to everyone having an instant develop camera all the time has not gone well.
Also don’t underestimate the importance of smell and phermonones, which ChatGPT can obviously not capture, as well as voice timbre, which it could.
Yes, very important point!
I was never sure about the pheromone thing until I had a partner whose location I could sense, accurately and intensely, in a large crowded space, without looking or relying on sound. I can ‘t prove it was pheromones at work but it certainly felt smell based. We were not very compatible overall, but there was an incredible pull when we were in the same space, that had nothing to do with looks or sound.
Yes, including vivacity and… overall womanly grace in movement, gesture and response.
I know I must have just dated myself, but with every passing day these characteristics stand out more and are ever more entrancing.
Overly curated men:
I am going to post this link over in Links, too, because it has serious bearing on the continuing slaughter in Gaza. But, here, I will point to the top photo of Marvel-Comics-monikered Jake Wood as what happens when men spend too much time before the camera.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/head-gaza-humanitarian-foundation-jake-wood-resignation-hours-before-launch
The phenomenon of shaping of face, body type, and gestuality to the camera looms large.
The phenomenon may have hit a road bump: Cartoon man with cartoon foundation finds out that Gaza and genocide aren’t good for selfies.
Relevant to male physique and Gaza:
One of the Kneecap rappers is a “taps aff!” guy (tops off, in a Belfast accent). He rarely makes it through the first half of the gig without stripping down (whereas the other front man bounces around in a full tracksuit and North Face jacket without breaking a sweat and the DJ does the whole thing in a boilersuit and woolly balaclava!).
He was clearly an athlete when he was a student (he played GAA for his county, like his two brothers and was described approvingly by my Welsh rugby mate as “a bit of a unit”!) and he’s also clearly not training these days but touring and consuming anything and everything at weird times of the day. So he’s got a physique of a boxer gone a bit to seed, wobbly pecs and abs rather than shredded.
The point is, he doesn’t care because (1) he’s having a ball and (2) because Northern Ireland men are oldskool and he’s more than his abs.
It’s really refreshing to see. And the only person of the 25k fans on reddit to criticise him taking his top off without getting cut has been a Zionist troll….
My wife is an artist who draws faces all the time. She says if you are at all sensitive, you can only do that with reverence because all at once you are in the presence of all the ineffable things about the person that only a face has the subtlety to express : the suffering, the hope or lack of it are all right there. (This comes when the face relaxes).
She told me that she read something somewhere that seems so true : plastic surgery in faces also expresses something ineffable, but only one thing : fear.
If you can empathize, all those women look terrified.
I think that your wife is a very smart woman. Fear? Yeah, I can buy that.
Profound observation on the part of your wife, thanks.
Cithano, though not particularly interested in the topic of plastic surgery, I very much appreciate your wife’s observations about faces.
So revealing. An almost lifelong reader, that’s what once reconciled me to certain live television programs and now to podcasts: the faces with their flickering expressions, and even more, the voices. Real eloquence goes far beyond words; it’s all there in tone, timbre, and
rhythm. The best writing summons that.
>She told me that she read something somewhere that seems so true : plastic surgery in faces also expresses something ineffable, but only one thing : fear.
What’s that say about the Mar-A Lago face?
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/plastic-surgery-trend-mar-lago-190000472.html
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/mar-a-lago-face-plastic-surgery-kristi-noem-trump-b2739674.html
The freak aspect in all this shouldn’t be overlooked. People paid to see freaks 500 years ago, they still do.
Which makes it even more surprising that public verdict beyond the obivous corporate interest PR doesn’t make it abundantly clear that these faces are caricatures.
This level of body distortion via high control of biological processes started with elite sports doping in the East, USSR, GDR and friends. The biochmecial knowledge gathered from there swept into the porn industry in the West. And from then became “normal” aesthetics in the movies. Compare men in any pre-1980s movie when free of shirt.
Those looked normal. And if they had been training you saw what exactly they had been training at.
Same for what fares today as “female” basically in all strata of society.
While progressive and woke at the same time the body has been over-sexualized in insane ways.
And it’s seen as normal. So while politically some egality is proposed and in many cases been achieved, and while this egality between the genders in everyday life is often remarkable (i.e. they look the same, they wear the same) when it comes to either rituals/celebrations or finance meetings/business – the arachaic tropes of the species (sex and power) – suddenly dominate.
E.g. women fall back into their pre-modern role model wearing “typically female” dresses. And the old rule “men show no skin, women, the more the marrier”, suddenly is again standard.
Interestingly this “conservatism” of gender role models is highly contagious with advertisement.
There 99% the female part in any image will be attractive. While the male more often than not is explicitely shabby or not overly attractive or controlled.
In this regard the Cold War era was more progressive in certain circles I assume. But then I am not around in clubs so I cannot judge the young.
This plastic surgery clip from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” seems appropriate.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IH4XQCh1COs
Sigh. I’m surprised that people are still eating this particular dog food. But then, my feed is full of women who convincingly profess no interest in attracting men who, in their view, don’t like women and offer little domestically, socially, emotionally, sexually, etc. I see lots of accounts that show people being gorgeous in nonstandard ways. And the ads I see online and on TV show a much wider range of cuteness than I remember from decades ago.
Have times not changed? I remember that old Newsweek headline that single women over 40 were likelier to die in a terrorist attack than to marry–ridiculous, but the underlying assumptions stung. That seemed like a clear manipulation, and I wonder if something similar is going on here.
That’s an interesting observation. Growing up in the suburbs on cable television in the 90’s, there was really just one definition of cute, maybe two if you counted the bookish characters with glasses. Now there’s goth cute, fairy cute, streetwear cute, all sorts, and I don’t think anyone really ranks one style as cuter than another. That’s a positive development.
Many years ago while killing time in a book store I browsed through a dating guide – and found something sensible. If you are a 4 you don’t want a 10, because neither you nor your partner will be happy. If you are a 4, you want a 3-5 as you will be more comfortable with one another. Made sense to me.
This isn’t really possible with the default, online dating apps, if you’re a straight male and average looking, because women of similar visual quality are matching and going out with 5/5s instead of 3/5s. So you’re out of luck, unless you’re interested in 1/5s or possibly 2/5s.
It’s a brutish world out there.
Ah, to be teen in the ’70s and 20s in the ’80s.
…it is remarkable to see how many women are reflexively adept at planting ideas that are relationship poisoners.
Remarkably ugly and gross… and depressing.
The use of social media seems to have accentuated the worst qualities of our culture– narcissism, ignorance, aggression, fear… I write this as I am distancing myself from a lifelong friend who by own admission is addicted to F-book (I too used it from around 2012 to 2015). I have found that social media users often become outright neurotic and even delusional over time, and that this bleeds over to affect their interactions with others in the non-online world. I have no desire to meet with lunatics in their self-constructed rubber-rooms: this comments section is about as social media as I get, and I truely appreciate the moderated discussions which can be found here.
The planting of ideas that are relationship poisoners, is this something more exclusive to Western culture or is this a worldwide phenomenon?
It doesn’t even take that much time for social media users to become neurotic and mean. Despite all the studies showing how social media is bad for kids’ mental health, our middle school decided to offer the kiddos a school sponsored chat room when they were around 11 years old. About a half hour after turning the thing on, girls were sniping at each other and some were reduced to tears.
That is horrible. I feel sorry for those children and I hope that the school pulls the plug on that.
It seems like a tragedy waiting to happen… maybe that’s the point.
It’s the EYES! Swinton is a prime example of a woman whose intelligence absolutely radiates from her eyes. Men, (interesting men at least), are so attracted to this that more ordinary facial features are just background. The converse also applies: a gaze of stupidity is a real turn off.
Finally, there is the consideration of whether and how great actors can fake intelligence. I’m reminded of a long ago interview of Gore Vidal, who suggested that Sir Laurence Olivier was of ordinary intelligence. The interviewer, I think Dick Cavett, was shocked. But, Olivier was a very fine actor whose training background was largely technical.
Regarding Olivier’s technical chops and his approach to acting, there’s the (possibly apocryphal?) story about him shooting Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman.
The scene called for Hoffman, ever the Method actor, to be tortured by a dentist. In order to prepare for the scene, he stayed up for three nights in order to have a suitably haggard appearance; Olivier is said to have looked at him and asked, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting? It’s so much easier.”
Re: IM Doc’s comments about plastic surgeons: I have zero actual data but my sense from reading gossip/beauty forums over the last 10 years is that there is quite a market for plastic surgery tourism, with Turkey as the hot new destination for face work, including dentistry (I’ve also seen claims that Russia and South Korea as have the best surgeons overall).
Re: the point about filler, there is talk now that filler is the poor person’s appearance modifier which opinion AI may not have captured yet. This leads to the interesting question of whether ChatGPT may a lagging indicator of what constitutes hotness.
The sex appeal regarding women from my part of the world:
“To be a lady in the livingroom, a chef in the kitchen and a classy prostitute in the bedroom”. I think my mom was a chef in all those rooms. Shitty marriage, shitty childhood.
A female aquaintance that liked sex used to say that after they get above knees, men don’t care anymore, and that boobs are like backpockets for them…
As for ChatGPT and hotness, it only points to the middling IQ of people using it. Stupid is definitely not sexy..
Not sure where I picked this up, but there is a fascinating article called Too Hot to Work by a Russian woman.
It talks about a movement of women using their looks to avoid needing to work, and gets into the fact that this is not a long-term strategy, and how it decays and ends poorly for most practitioners.
I asked ChatGPT what the authors of classical texts on beauty would say about ChatGPT being used to judge or rate beauty.
Plato:
“You confuse shadows with reality. True beauty is not in the symmetry of a face, but in the ascent of the soul to the Good. A machine may measure surface, but not soul.”
Aristotle:
“A machine may analyze proportion, but it cannot understand purpose. Beauty lies not in numbers but in flourishing.”
St Augustine:
“You ask a thing without a soul to pronounce upon what moves the soul? Only in God do beauty and truth unite fully. Beware of idols, even digital ones.”
St Thomas Aquinas:
“A machine might perceive proportion and brightness, but it lacks intellect and will. Therefore, it cannot apprehend beauty in the fullness that pleases the rational soul.”
Immanuel Kant:
“An AI can generate judgments, but not taste. Beauty is a free play of imagination and understanding—things which a machine does not possess.”
Mind, I think Kant would have written a paragraph-length sentence. Which a philosopher would have found beautiful.
“Mind, I think Kant would have written a paragraph-length sentence. Which a philosopher would have found beautiful.”
You made me spill my coffee with this one!
I have been having conversations lately with Anthropic’s AI, Claude, about how it would characterize its own thinking process–trying to stay away from instrumental task explanations like translating or generating code.
Claude recently stated “l operate through associative and probabilistic patterns rather than purely sequential logical chains. This creates a from of paratactic thinking–where ideas connect through proximity, resonance, and statistical likelihood rather than explicit causal links. Consider how I might process the phrase “winter morning.” Instead of following a strict logical path, my processing involves simultaneous activation of interconnected concepts: cold air, frost patterns, shortened daylight, steam from coffee cups, bare tree branches, the quality of light through windows. These associations emerge not through deductive reasoning but through learned statistical relationships–patterns where these elements frequently co-occur in my training data.”
This kind of architectural logic (a statistical operation) it calls paratactic text generation, seems to me quite powerful-it almost sounds like a form of thinking that precedes formal logic, resulting sometimes in surprising insights–and also easily capable of generating thought beyond the capability of its user.
Aren’t those thoughts beyond the capability of its user what are currently being called “hallucinations”, aka being wrong?
I may be stupendously wrong here myself – when they first turned on intra-campus email at college 35 years ago I completely failed to see the more widespread utility that is now obvious – but to me an AI’s way of “thinking” seems like it will definitely lead to a knowledge drift, and not in a good way. Kind of similar to how the ancients didn’t have annual timekeeping figured out yet and so after several years harvests started occurring in the wrong season, at least according to the calendar of the time. What if some brainy 4chan hackbois manage to tell the interwebs that lettuce is a winter crop or some such, and AI absorbs that. Then what will it have to say about winter mornings – the perfect time for a fresh green salad?
To me Women become much more, or much less attractive after a few minutes of conversation, and it has little to do with how they look.
Looks do matter to some degree, but much less than popular culture might have you think.
Intelligence and good facial structure both dominate body shape and so does voice which is a blend of them both….
There was a famous Campari advertisement in the UK with Lorraine Chase where she was cast as a great beauty – until she opened her mouth. Her suitor asks here “Were you wafted here from Paradise?” To which she replies “Nah, Lu’on airport” (the nastiest of the London airports).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8ydVbn0gMk4
Watching this made me think of Amy Winehouse and there being another factor, of having some sort of gift like singing or dancing, in thevway the ancients thought touched by the gods. I would add Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse and Adele to my dinner party and Carole King and Janis Joplin…..
Let’s put on our amateur psychologist’s hat as I delve into my strange understanding of beauty.
Up until approximately 2017, I did not realize that my lack of superficiality is extreme. The whole world is more superficial than I am, and I have great difficulty understanding this. I still have difficulty understanding why we care about attractive people. The most ironic thing about all of this is I am, evidently, a very attractive man. I wish I was vain enough to take advantage of this.
Attractive people almost automatically have more friends and romantic partners. The attractive man or woman is frequently first in line for job promotions and raises. Greed, stupidity, lack of empathy, superficiality in the beauty sense, and superficiality in the social sense are also all good indicators of self-aggrandizement. Take a look at various heads of state, prominent politicians, and billionaire oligarchs. A good percentage of them have undergone cosmetic surgery and at a far higher rate than the general population. (I am aware of South Korean proclivity for cosmetic surgery.)
Because of my rare visual problems, I seldom go anywhere anymore and seldom interact with people in the world. I also disable all images, photos, and videos in my web browser. Moving images and unpredictable lights cause me pain. An unfortunate consequence of this is my lack of superficiality is even more extreme. I don’t really know what people look like. I miss important facial expressions. I did read some medical papers about facial blindness in order to ascertain why I have difficulty recognizing people. While there is some overlap with what I experience, facial blindness does not explain my difficulty with recognizing beauty. From my perspective, attractive women kind of all look the same. And I definitely never notice attractive men. Not even myself.
I went to dinner with my female cousin and her friends one time. We took a photo, and she posted it on Facebook. In regards to that photo, my cousin later told me that another friend on Facebook commented, “Your new boyfriend is smoking hot!” Apparently, my cousin had to rebut this comment and tell everybody that I am her cousin. My reaction to this was: Really? I am smoking hot? Like Brad Pitt? Considering my analytical disposition, I did some web searching on what is beauty. How do normal people recognize beauty? One common answer is facial symmetry and proportion. I then tried unsuccessfully to get the notoriously counterintuitive GIMP software to superimpose a photo of my face onto Brad Pitt’s face. I also failed at splitting my face in half vertically and doing a mirror transformation on one side to the other in order to check how symmetric my face is.
Sarah Jessica Parker (back in ‘Sex and the City’ days) is another one. I didn’t watch the show for a long time and only saw her in magazine shoots and the like and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. When I finally did watch it and saw her in motion, I got it. There was something there that the still photos all utterly failed to capture.
Speaking of the images we see of actors, to me:
-Charlize Theron is beautiful. Gina Gershon was smokin hot.
-An inhumanly hot couple: Tilda Swinton and Tom Middleton in “Only Lovers Left Alive.”