{"id":628306,"date":"2023-04-12T09:50:14","date_gmt":"2023-04-12T14:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/12\/body-horror-in-the-age-of-instagram-face\/"},"modified":"2023-04-12T09:50:14","modified_gmt":"2023-04-12T14:50:14","slug":"body-horror-in-the-age-of-instagram-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/12\/body-horror-in-the-age-of-instagram-face\/","title":{"rendered":"Body Horror in the Age of Instagram Face"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is probably<\/span> the worst moment in human history to be ugly. Not that looking busted ever\u00a0helped<\/em> anyone; I\u2019m sure the hottest serfs in Prussia got better plots of land and the sexiest Mesopotamians landed extra hunks of goat at the feast. But now, in our overwhelmingly visual and virtual culture, the pressure to appear camera-ready has reached a new level of intensity. Cosmetic procedures are no big deal. Weight loss injections are a\u00a0full-blown fad<\/a>. People meet their partners by taking a glance at their photo and swiping yes or no. A long-running reality show\u2019s whole gimmick is that judges rank musical artists without seeing them, since it\u2019s so obvious to everyone that how we look determines how we\u2019re treated. The shrugging attitude so many people have toward beautifying body modifications have made homeliness feel downright antisocial. If it\u2019s easier than ever to change how you look, well then\u2014why don\u2019t you\u00a0look better<\/em>, huh?<\/p>\n

The dominant beauty ideal of this era is the\u00a0Instagram face<\/a>. Poreless, polished,\u00a0Kardashianesque<\/a>, it is at once almost within reach (give or take several syringes of filler and several thousands of dollars) and completely unattainable (nobody actually looks like they do on the internet, even\u00a0Kim Kardashian<\/a>). Instagram face seems a natural subject for contemporary body horror, in the same way that so many new slasher flicks are now\u00a0set at Airbnbs<\/a>. It\u2019s chilling on a conceptual level\u2014conformity through consumerism, the commodification of self, and all that\u2014but it\u2019s also a forthrightly gory, Cronenbergian undertaking. So many of the procedures, programs, and treatments undertaken to get this look involve needles, blood, hunger, and pain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two recent debut novels have tapped into the Gothic side of beauty and wellness culture, prime examples of a new literary trend: Goopcore body horror. Both stories follow women enthralled by Svengali-like figures who encourage them to take extreme measures to embody beauty standards, with horrific results. Allie Rowbottom\u2019s\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em>, released late last year, imagines a washed-up Instagram influencer in Los Angeles named Anna, who is preparing to undergo an experimental surgery called Aesthetica. She so yearns to return to a more natural form that she is willing to risk her life to recover an earlier version of herself.<\/p>\n

Aesthetica<\/em> opens on Anna in the present day, on the eve of her surgery. In flashbacks, we see how Anna gets her start as a social media star. She meets a slick himbo named Jake, who pays for her breast implants, insists that \u201cbad vibes had the potential to manifest bad realities,\u201d and pressures her into gigs where she\u2019ll be exploited and worse. Rowbottom captures the vapid \u201cDM for collab?\u201d vocabulary of the #spon set, which makes reading\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em> both an authentic and unpleasant aesthetic experience. (A representative excerpt: \u201cHe drove, I sang\u00a0\u2018Vegas Baby\u2019 to the camera, and posted. 200 likes, 427, 600.\u201d Ew!)<\/p>\n

Filtered through Anna\u2019s narrative voice, all the bodies in\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em>\u00a0are appraised harshly, as though un-airbrushed flesh is automatically gross. Before her procedure, she is startled looking at her own \u201cdimples, ripples, reminders of masks and knives and wrist ties.\u201d Her cancer-addled mother Naurene is \u201cyellow as an Easter egg\u201d when she\u2019s in the hospital; her old friend Leah has the \u201cfurred\u201d forearms of an anorexic. She observes a group of strangers and thinks about what she would suggest they do to look better: \u201cRhinoplasty<\/em>, I diagnose when I look at one.\u00a0Brow lift<\/em>, I silently suggest for another.\u00a0Buccal fat pad removal<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the writing reminds me of K. Allado-McDowell\u2019s 2022 novel\u00a0Amor Cringe<\/em><\/a>, which was written with ChatGPT. Like\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em>,\u00a0Amor Cringe<\/em> also focuses on an influencer adrift in Southern California. Both novels use deliberately cringey language to convey the gale-force banality of this lifestyle. While\u00a0Amor Cringe<\/em> reads like a language experiment,\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em> has a heart beneath its layers of hyaluronic acid and silicon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Anna\u2019s relationship with her mother is vexed and tender, as is a friendship she renews with a childhood pal; their disappointment in the lifestyle she\u2019s pursuing underlines how much potential others see in her. She is tethered to her influencer life, but also often more thoughtful than what people see on the screen, and her great error is her inability to see her own capacity for depth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even in dire real-life circumstances, like when she\u2019s visiting her mom in the ICU, Anna cannot help thinking about what\u2019s happening in terms of how it might look on Instagram. In one of the book\u2019s most unsettling scenes, she records herself tending to her ailing mother, hoping she can harvest content from the encounter to make herself more likable; she ends up deleting the video after her mother begins to vomit uncontrollably. There\u2019s nothing supernatural afoot in\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em>, but when Anna slurs \u201cI\u2019m a star\u201d while high on Percocet, staring at her phone, proud of her own worst impulses, it\u2019s as terrifying as any tale of a woman in thrall to wicked powers.<\/p>\n

In Ling Ling<\/span> Huang\u2019s debut novel\u00a0Natural Beauty<\/em>, out this month, the beauty world\u2019s menace is even more intense. Huang\u2019s narrator is a musical prodigy in New York, raised in poverty by two kind parents who immigrated from China; she is unnamed for most of the book, but eventually adopts the moniker \u201cAnna,\u201d too, after she\u2019s encouraged to pick a name that is easy for white shoppers to pronounce. After her mother and father are severely injured in a car accident, Anna stops studying piano and takes a job in a restaurant to pay her bills. She stumbles upon an opportunity to work at a wellness startup called Holistik, where affluent customers indulge in beautifying treatments like vernix facial wraps, stoma vacuum sealing, and pubic hair transplants, where human pubes are upgraded to mink fur.<\/p>\n

While\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em>\u2019s Anna has the preening, narcissistic Jake as its FaceTuned Mephistopheles,\u00a0Natural Beauty<\/em>\u2019s Anna is lured into the treacherous, gleaming world of Holistik by a preening, narcissistic woman known as Saje. Just as\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em>\u2019s Anna is cajoled into body modifications,\u00a0Natural Beauty<\/em>\u2019s Anna is pressured to use Holistik\u2019s products and procedures, including a number of bizarre and invasive treatments. (On her first day, a team in lab coats subjects her to a full-body scan and brusquely asks if she\u2019s \u201cafraid of worms.\u201d) She starts to look like an entirely different person. Just as\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em>\u2019s Anna is initially enamored with her medspa-assisted looks, Natural Beauty<\/em>\u2019s Anna marvels at what Holistik does for her. \u201cWhatever I have been taking is buffing away the grime of an ordinary existence from the outside in,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, she isn\u2019t ever quite sure what she\u2019s taking. Or how it\u2019s working. Or what the side effects really are.\u00a0Natural Beauty<\/em>\u00a0spirals into a nightmare, complete with unethical animal experimentation, toxic potions, and piles of corpses.<\/p>\n

Like the beauty elixirs Holistik sells, at times the novel seems like it would work better with fewer ingredients. Saje is the company\u2019s public face, but Holistik really belongs to a shadowy man named Victor Carroll. His twin niece and nephew, Helen and Henry, enter Anna\u2019s life at the same time and in an odd way. Anna matches with Henry on a dating app; after they have sex, she then encounters Helen taking a bath in the siblings\u2019 shared apartment. Not only does Helen not mind that this random girl has interrupted her bath after sleeping with her brother, she then decides to be friends with her\u2014and doesn\u2019t bat an eye when it turns out that the random girl also works for her incredibly wealthy and powerful uncle. Henry never emerges as more than an unnecessarily complicated plot device to bring Helen and Anna together; his presence in the novel comes off as a leftover plot point from an earlier draft.<\/p>\n

Quibbles aside,\u00a0Natural Beauty<\/em> is a delightfully baroque grotesque. It can achieve a folkloric power in its creepiest moments\u2014a scary story you\u2019d tell in a posh spa\u2019s sauna instead of around a campfire.<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t the first spooky stories exploring how horrifying our pursuit of beauty can be. (Remember the 1993 major motion picture\u00a0Death Becomes Her<\/em>? An early classic in the Goopcore body horror canon!) But read in tandem,\u00a0Aesthetica<\/em> and\u00a0Natural Beauty<\/em> illuminate just how extravagantly repulsive the \u201cgrime of an ordinary existence,\u201d as\u00a0Natural Beauty<\/em>\u2019s Anna puts it, is right now, so much so that people will ignore all sorts of ethical hideousness in order to appear superficially polished-up. In their finest moments, these books exhume old wisdom for the social media crowd: What makes us feel beautiful should also make us feel afraid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Kate Knibbs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is probably the worst moment in human history to be ugly. Not that looking busted ever\u00a0helped anyone; I\u2019m sure the hottest serfs in Prussia got better plots of land and the sexiest Mesopotamians landed extra hunks of goat at the feast. But now, in our overwhelmingly visual and virtual culture, the pressure to appear<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":628307,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1206,434,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-628306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-horror","category-instagram","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}