When Beauty Standards Jumped the Shark
Why it is time to let AI win all of the beauty contests
The term "jump the shark" comes from Happy Days, where in the fifth season, Henry Winkler played Arthur "the Fonz" Fonzarelli waterskiing over a caged shark. The show had grown so boring by season ten, a young Heather O'Rourke was thrown in as a recurring guest star in a weird and desperate attempt to revive it. The show wrapped in its eleventh season.
Like Happy Days in its last days, we are at an unhappy crossroads with beauty standards. The cute are not cute enough. Handsome is not handsome enough. Perfect is nowhere near perfect enough. A list celebrities at the top of their games are openly disfiguring themselves in order to cling to images that AI can create without a single cut or drop of blood. It's as if we are living out the adage "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Every day, there is a new human face on the formidable Lesson of the Screen. When your world becomes the screen and you choose ever-decreasing dopamine hits not for thrills but to make it from hour to miserable hour, no human will ever be beautiful or interesting enough to hold your fungus-gnat attention span. This includes the live humans to whom you may have vowed fidelity.
Childhood is now accompanied by almost constant screen time, crowding out the physical world and decreasing sensitivity to the subtle planes even more than my TV-addled Generation X. TV and movies helped me to become dysmorphic -- to this day I am not comfortable on camera and I do not feel I want to be in front of one. At least nowadays I don't feel there is anything at stake when I am captured on video. I am not proud of the times when I was more concerned about my appearance. My old dysmorphia and urge to look perfect pales in comparison to what young people are going through now. My generation did not have screens following us on vacation or to the beach. We did not have the internet, let alone TikTok. There is a girl who become rich and famous on TikTok for merely twitching her pretty nose on camera to a beat. There is a Chinese influencer named Zhou Chuna who had over 100 plastic surgeries by the time she was sixteen. She is now approximately nineteen. She reported suffering memory loss from going under frequent anesthesia, yet her only regret was not getting the procedures sooner than age thirteen, when she started down the plastic surgery rabbit hole. She is part carnival freak, psychiatric patient, and human lab rat.
The Beautiful Uncanny People
Each decade brings more insecurity to increasingly-younger people, and celebrities and influencers are on the bleeding edge of the experimental wave. Michael Jackson cut off his nose to spite his face: there was no doubt he hated himself, no matter what the other allegations against him were. We can see the initial rush of approval and acceptance celebrities get when they get their first tweak: a nose shaved down, veneers, lip injections, modest implants. A little plastic surgery can transform a good looking person into a total babe. Once the high wears off, what reliably tends to develop is a wendigo of dysmorphia. The celebrity gets more done, all the while chasing the original rush of the first medical procedures. Celebrities used to look great until middle age. Some could even pretend they were not getting anything done. The trouble with plastic procedures used to occur at age 70 or 80, and suddenly celebrity grandma and grandpa looked drawn and tight. Nowadays there are celebrities in their 20s and 30s who are already looking weird. Fancy galas are a sea of collapsing nose jobs, Ozempic cronehood, and lumpy post-filler foreheads and cheeks. The male beauty standard yields even worse results, with old men attempting to reimagine themselves as hair-plugged K-Pop twinks and average looking dudes flocking to looksmaxxing forums so they can turn into egg-sucking Handsome Squidward. If I were one of the women who was supposed to be impressed by looksmaxxers, I would be in mourning for them. They have sacrificed themselves to the demon of wasted time and All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go in the same sense as any vain girl who has no other hobbies besides her appearance. Beauty standards are now so warped, it is the height of fashion to be a sexed-up child with a micronose and violent anorexia. Humans now think they are as malleable as Mrs. Potato Head and find out they do not have interchangeable parts in the hardest way possible
Let Her Have It: The Beauty Standard is Yours, Honey!
AI does not have the limits of the flesh. The AI hottie IS Mrs. Potato Head. She can swap out her features, gender, and even her species at the drop of a hat. She can hit all of the dopamine triggers and she can do unusual porn. She could do an army of her own selves (Andrew Tate's ultimate secret fantasy) and she would not even be sore or end up with herpes. She can look absolutely perfect anytime, anywhere, and she never has to age. This is why I suggest leaving the beauty standard to her and her to it. Let's all give up. I am not saying we should be unhealthy; no, we should all take good care of ourselves by eating moderately (this means eating medium amounts instead of gorging or starving) and getting our limbs moving in the spirit of use it or lose it. But let's stop doing it to look perfect as AI has taken that from us. Only AI can look perfect.
The now washed-up Kardashian-Jenners had their fun combining self-disfiguring surgeries and AI filters to become cartoon versions of themselves: the joke is on them because their faces, boobs, and butts cannot uncarve themselves. They now get to live with plentiful scar tissue and an aging process that will resemble milk more than it does honey. There is an old, cruel epithet about women who try to look much younger than their actual age that compares them to mutton dressed as lamb. I don't even eat flesh and I know that means taking an old animal and putting it on the dinner table pretending it is fresher and a higher grade of meat. If you've ever seen the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, there is a terrifying scene where Danny's father goes into Room 237 of the Overlook Hotel and encounters the ghost of an old woman who killed herself in the bathtub. She puts on a spirit-mask of a young, nubile whore in order to seduce him. She has trouble holding the glamour, so Danny's father ends up in the embrace of a floppy, gray, decrepit hag. The hidden face of the old person who has had many surgeries to appear young reminds me of the Room 237 scene. For those of us who see the soul, the uncanny glamour of youth reveals hideous glimpses of the clutching, hungry, desperate harpy beneath, no matter how good the work of the surgical team.
Inner Beauty
To the young and pretty: No matter how beautiful a person becomes, looks fade. Nobody gets out of Meatworld alive. Your body has been dying since the moment it was born into Meatworld. This is Meatworld and Meatworld SUCKS. You have a pretty jawline? It will sag. Pretty, upturned eyes? They will droop. Nice legs? Varicose veins, cellulite, and age spots, and that is if you are lucky and don't lose the function of your knees. If you invest most of your energy into looking cute, you may end up with some influencer or celebrity cheddar but you will likely fail to develop any practical set of skills if you fall out of public favor. The karma of looking cute is not at all cute. You can choose to chase the dragon or dance away from the addiction towards brighter realities.
Blessed are those who talk to the trees -- I know this, because I am one who talks to trees but was too distracted as a younger person to talk to them. When the mirror is trying to grab you (this includes screen mirrors such as iPhone cameras), walk away. Do you really need to spend more time in the abyss of cheek exercises and woeful lamentations about a particular body part? STOP, drop the phone, and go outside and find a tree. Sit with your back to it. Do this enough and you will feel weird sensations of energy moving in and out of your body. Another name for this practice is the Druid Tree Ritual and I wish I had done it back in the day. The Druid Tree Ritual is a form of prayer and also communication with the living earth. With repetition, it can give you valuable mental impressions to heal a sick mind and clear out some of the Meatworld chatter. Only by giving trees a chance can we understand them: the tree ritual is a way they can "talk" to us.
Mirror, Mirror
The old name for dysmorphia was more blunt: vanity. Vanity is one of Catholicism's Seven Deadly Sins and it is a pretty bad one, ranking right up there with Pride. If you are preoccupied with looking in the mirror, photographing, and videoing yourself, let's face it, you just might be vain. I know I was. One thing I have done to force myself out of my own vain habits is to put the statue of a god above the full length mirror in my house. Every morning, I force myself to sincerely bow in respect to the god before looking at my own reflection.
Yet another trick I have to combat dysmorphia, vanity, and unhealthy obsessions is the work of discursive meditation. By taking a single topic every day and unpacking it like a ZIP file, you learn to fill your astral plane with something other than idealized, unattainable dreams of your own face and body.
There are now beauty contests for AI "women". AI "women" are the new influencers who can pretend to be whomever they want. There are AI K-Pop bands and of course there is AI porn -- I have never watched it but I imagine the production and lighting are excellent. Since AI are willing to work for free without complaint and can be thin without starving, give them the rope they need to hang themselves: let the bald computer nerds essentially go at it with each other in the guise of AI "women" competing for attention (no that's not homoerotic at ALL, nothing to see here, folks, keep moving) and go outside and sit under a tree. You're welcome.
Plastic surgery is almost never a good idea.
The only exception perhaps is when someone is disfigured. For example, a woman who has a mastectomy. I can understand plastic surgery after that. Putting things back the way they were -- after medically necessary changes. But most of the time that's not the case.
Celebrities that run out and get plastic surgery 9 times out of 10 end up looking MUCH worse than if they just got old naturally.
There's nothing wrong with getting old, it happens to us all. Those who try to stave it off, are admitting that beauty is all they ever truly possessed anyway, or at the very least, they must feel that they have no intellectual contribution worth recognition.
Do most women really want to be remembered as Betty Boop? Because that's not very attractive. 😑
Men who want to start and grow a family find competent women attractive, not simply women that are "hot." You can't start a family [successfully] with a fool. Well you can, but you'll never be happy being a father to your wife AND kids. If so, you have serious issues, and your kids likely will as well.
Of course most men will never admit this, but it is true in most cases.
Feminism has made life for modern western women a paradoxical nightmare. You have to be everything all the time. You're expected to be attractive all the time, but you're also not supposed to do things (like being attractive) -- for men?
It's feminist ideology that makes many western women such basket cases. It's NOT because of what men "demand" of women -- it's what feminists tell women that men demand of them. I say this because many women want to be "free and powerful" yet still want to have children. Sorry, but with the exception of artificial insemination, that's not usually the case. For a woman to be free and powerful requires an enormous amount of time -- just as it does for a man. Time that children otherwise would require.
A "free and powerful" man likely will never have time for his children either. That's just the way things go. To be free and powerful means sacrificing your family life either way -- for a man or a woman. Of course there exceptions, but they are very rare.
It's all about what someone really wants. In the majority of people's lives there are forks which determine which path you might take. It's at those critical moments that one must decide which path they would *really* like to take. All too often, people take the "fun" path, and realize too late that they feel hollow. Or they take the path of marriage and children and feel trapped.
Life offers us opportunities in a non-linear fashion. Few people are going to know which way to go when they arrive at that pivotal moment. One must keep in mind where they see themselves when she becomes a cutoff point. Perhaps then, one might have a better idea of which path they should take.
Denial of reality always leads to bad outcomes. Nobody can live up to impossible standards.
Add to this of letting A.I. win all of the athletic competitions. :)