1. “Reclaim Imperfect Faces”-Sophie Gilbert
In this thought-provoking essay, Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert astutely analyzes how technology has primed our obsession with perfection and ushered in an era of unattainable beauty standards. An ideal companion to New Yorker critic Jia Tolentino’s sharply observed “The Age of Instagram Face,” “Reclaim Imperfect Faces,” laments the loss of flawed beauty in mainstream media. Thanks to fillers, filters and Face-tune, we have a constrictive conception of beauty: plump lips, cat eyes, impossibly contoured cheeks. More and more, we resemble machines: glambots mass produced on an assembly line who all possess the same, single cyborgian face.
To look “imperfect” is seen as a personal, almost moral failing. Reading Gilbert, I’m reminded of the countless cruel comments I read on TikTok daily. Whenever a woman looks remotely her age (has wrinkles and smile lines—in other words—evidence of having lived fully), the mostly Gen Z female commenters berate her brutally (“This, kids, is why you should wear sunscreen!”).
Today our physical forms are “perfectible”: our most optimized self is just a needle and nip tuck away. Plastic surgery—once stigmatized—is now commonplace. On social media, we’re inundated with ads for facelifts, baby botox and other forms of plastic surgery. The worst insult is for someone to say you look “your age.” Flesh and bone women are expected to still possess the smooth, poreless complexion they had when they were 17. Social media applauds Hollywood starlets like Lindsey Lohan and Kris Jenner who’ve seemed to defeat the once invincible signs of mortality. Today, technology can lift and smooth and edit and airbrush any inconvenient hint of humanity.
But what’s lost in our age of pixelated perfection?
Gilbert argues some vital sense of our humanity. Because of artificial intelligence and plastic surgery, we have a distorted perception of what we should look like. Our sagging selves can never compete with Instagram models’ pouty lips and perfectly-proportioned bodies. If we compare ourselves to the inhuman beauty of original Instagram face Kim Kardashian, we’ll always find ourselves wanting.
We forget that beauty, real beauty, is non-conformist, individual, quirky. Beauty—as the British philosopher Alain de Botton once said—is subjective rather than objective, not a universal fact but a matter of personal taste. Just as it’s impossible for art historians to unanimously agree on what constitutes a “good” painting (is it originality of composition? sharpness of lines? playfulness of color?), it’s impossible to decide on a singular basis for desirability. The danger in our time is that technology is steamrolling all signs of unconventional beauty. Human faces have faded into an uncanny kind of uniformity.
2. “What Porn Taught a Generation of Women”- Sophie Gilbert
After reading her incisive Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, I can’t stop reading Sophie Gilbert. In this precursor to her paradigm-shifting book, Gilbert explores how in the 90s and 2000s “sex saturated mainstream culture.” At the turn of the century, porn infiltrated everything from fashion (think Terry Richardson’s porno chic photography) to pop culture (wasn’t the short-skirted Catholic school girl Britney Spears just a poorly disguised troupe from porn?).
If—like me—you grew up during this time, you were much like Regina George’s little sister in Mean Girls: your role models consisted of Kelis singing euphemistically about her “milkshake” and wildly inebriated college girls taking their tops off on Girls Gone Wild.
It’s hard to overstate porn’s influence on culture. As Gilbert observes, porn is a multi-billion dollar industry purportedly “a bigger business than professional football, basketball and baseball put together.”
“What Porn Taught a Generation of Women” traces the history of pornography from its comically dated origins in VHS tapes and local video stores to its rise during the advent of the internet. In the 90s, you no longer had to suffer the humiliation of buying a dirty magazine at a grocery store—you could simply type in “girl on girl” on Porn Hub.
Despite its unprecedented prevalence, porn still exists at society’s underbelly. Lewd videos are generally watched alone in front of the lonely blue light of a computer. Because porn is consumed in private, it’s easy to under estimate its influence on greater culture. But—as Gilbert notes—porn has “changed our culture and, in doing so, has filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason. We are all living in the world porn made.”
What—Gilbert wonders—has porn done to us?
For one, “porn has undeniably changed how people have sex.” Porn has taught men to objectify women, to view us as little more than life size sex dolls, a brainless amalgamation of ass and tits. As porn moved from the fringes to the mainstream, the adult film industry churned out more shocking, extreme content. Much like a heroin addict, a regular consumer of hardcore porn eventually becomes desensitized and needs more intense stimulation to achieve the same levels of satisfaction. Over time, it’s harder and harder to replicate the dopamine-saturated high of that first hit.
The result?
Men seek out more brutal pornography, sometimes porn that once disinterested or even disgusted them.
Aggression, particularly toward women, is commonplace in pornography. According to a 2020 article “A Descriptive Analysis of the Types, Targets, and Relative Frequency of Aggression in Mainstream Pornography,” 45% of Pornhub scenes include some form of physical aggression, the most common being spanking, gagging, slapping, hair pulling and choking. 97% of this aggression is directed towards women; 76% of the aggressors are men.
Is a sexual dynamic of domination and submission inherently bad?
Of course not.
But one has to wonder what constantly consuming this kind of content does to the malleable minds of men.
Porn is a training ground where we learn how to have sex. Predominantly made by men, most porn privileges the male gaze and male gratification. If estimates are true and young boys first view such sexually explicit content at the impressionable age of 12, porn powerfully shapes how these boys will understand sex. Violent porn encourages men to associate sex with violence and lovemaking with degradation. Not to mention that porn that only prioritizes male pleasure teaches men to be unforgivably selfish in bed.
Porn is a stage where each gender learns to perform their prescribed role. While porn instructs men to gratify their most depraved desires without much regard for their sexual partner, porn teaches women to objectify ourselves, to perform for male pleasure. Many women have no concept of what actually pleases them sexually—they only reenact the over-the-top orgasms and other tired troupes they see in pornography.
For both genders, the fantasies of porn make real world sex less satisfying.
“What Porn Taught a Generation of Women” is a must read if you’re concerned about the dire consequences of porn and the many ways culture shapes who we are.
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