When Beauty Standards Jumped the Shark

[kimberlysteele]

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. Potatohead 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. Potatohead.  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.  

AI beauty contestant Seren Ay, who can literally become Mrs. Potatohead because she is the figment of some computer geek's wank cache.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I feel blessed by a natural tendancy to adjust my ultimate standard of "beauty" to fit the people in my life towards whom I feel a strongly. I notice that rather than compare others to some external template (not that I am innocent of this, as I do have some tendencies towards vanity), I tend to see beauty in everyone relative to themselves. Two very different people, can both be equally attractive for very different reasons. I often even find myself @ a loss to discern exactly what those reasons actually are.

That doesn't so much apply to myself at all times,however, as I often suffer some level of dismorphia— "I'm not tall enough" or "my nose is not that of a Greek statue" or "Nobody wants someone who's missing a front tooth", etc. My generation is so ill, that it being attractive shouldn't even matter, when nobody ages 30 & down even know how to talk to the person their interested in. & if they do,they're terrified of being labeled as something bad, like a "creep" &/or "whore". It's a disturbing state of affairs, yet I have faith & remain hopeful.

[kimberlysteele]

I was born with the ability to see past physical appearance and sadly that kind of discernment went away with puberty. I am happy to say once I started doing spiritual work every day, it returned full force. A person has to be a bona fide vulgarian with scum-caked teeth, matted hair, mystery-stained clothing and a pronounced stink in order for me to condemn him or her because of his or her appearance. If I am going to condemn someone for the way she looks, it will all be based on not being able to rise to a low bar of hygiene.

I am sad for the youth of today. They truly are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

[(Anonymous)]

Not a beauty thing but I do wonder how my mom's knee replacement is affecting my 2-year-old. When she first saw Grandma using her walker, she laughed because it was unexpected. She then came to understand that's how Grandma gets around.

We've lately been mentioning how Grandma is getting her knee replaced. We've told her: The doctor will cut Grandma's leg open, remove her knee, and put in a new artificial one. "Artificial" means made by "artifice" or skill, so it's something a person made instead of the original knee that Grandma grew. You can't grow a new knee. Artificial ones don't work as well as real ones, so it's better not to need one. But sometimes you do. They will give Grandma special medicine so it doesn't hurt while they're doing it. But afterward it has to heal, and that will take a long time, and it will hurt while that's happening, so we'll have to be gentle with Grandma during that time.

She listens carefully during this explanation but seems weirded out by it.

I do wonder how it will affect her, hearing about something as extreme as a knee replacement at such a young age. That's the first surgery she's heard about in her little life.

[methylethyl]

I do wonder if AI generated superhuman levels of visual attractiveness might end up being a boon to normal human people, in a reactionary kind of way. Sure, none of us real people could possibly measure up. On the other hand, there's bound to be a sort of reverse-current dating market where intelligent, self-aware people who want similar things, will be more easily able to find each other, by the simple expedient of seeking out people who care about appearance in terms of hygeine and neatness... but don't do anything to try and unnaturally enhance it.

No, you can't compete, but... a natural-looking girl may just find that since porn-addled males are so perceptually damaged/stunted/anesthetized they can't even *see* her, then her potential dating market just got insta-filtered down to guys who aren't porn addicts. That can only be a plus, right?

[kimberlysteele]

I think it is most likely a positive thing that your 2 year old is learning early on that knee replacements happen and that she has to be careful and gentle around Grandma. Basically she is being taught (via experience) that even the most beloved people age and die.

[kimberlysteele]

I think that is a really great way of playing the Glad Game and seeing the silver lining to this set of clouds. I did notice during the Plandemic that people began to split off into camps of those who were willing to take charge: growing their own food whenever possible, homeschooling their children, quietly going around the officious compliers, and just all around tuning out the drone of Big Media. The porn-addicted men are going to Darwin Award themselves even if the internet does not taper off and die. And of course the internet is beginning to taper off and die as part of the Everything Collapses package. To be quite frank, porn-addled guys use up all their good sperm on the Ho of Babylon imagery to which they are addicted. No woman can measure up and I think a significant faction of young women are about to stop trying. If we get to a point where attractive (not AI/procedure attractive, but naturally cute and well-adjusted) say "You watch porn? OK, bye. Next!" it will be Game Over for a large faction of porn addicts and would-be Hos of Babylon alike.

[(Anonymous)]

Kids have funny ways of processing new concepts, and no matter how well you explain it, will often come to very weird conclusions that are completely logical but based on incomplete context. You might try asking her what she thinks and just listening, to see if you can get an idea how she's interpreting the info she's got. Also keep half an eye out for if the idea pops up in her pretend play-- that is a key way kids work through new ideas.

eg, my 4yo met a lady at church who has only one arm. We'll call her Maria. He likes Maria because she is nice, but that was the first time he'd encountered someone without the full complement of limbs, and he was weirdly fascinated by it. I had to make sure we learned her name so he'd stop announcing, in church, in a stage whisper: "Mama! The person with one arm and one hand is here!" (Maria thinks this is funny). But that was hardly the end of it, over the next few months I watched him integrating this new thing-- at home, he'd put on his brother's vest, hide one arm inside, and go around seeing what he could do with just one arm. "Like Maria". I bit my tongue a lot in this phase, because I didn't want to make a big deal out of it and then give him the idea that it was bad or freaky or something. And it seems to have worked through his brain now-- one arm is one of the possible configurations. No big deal. Maria got a new haircut. Maria is nice. Maria has one arm. Just one thing among many.

[methylethyl]

Exactly! Bring it on!

From a female perspective... the world is teeming with crappy men. Anything that makes them easier to spot and more likely to stay away from you is a net benefit.

The trick is to not get hung up on blanket general *male attention* as a measure of your personal desirability and self-worth. Actively pursuing it is a mistake, not just because you can't compete with AI (or before that, Cindy Crawford), but because the kind of man who'd make a good husband is looking for more than that. Do you want *attention* or do you want a long term relationship that works?

I never get catcalled. Not even when I was young. But I was attractive to the right guy. And we've been married fifteen years now :)

[kimberlysteele]

"the world is teeming with crappy men" Yes, and the crappiest ones are the cat-callers! I don't think guys do that anymore as a rule, at least they don't in the fancy suburbs of Chicago. This is not for lack of young women wearing skimpy outfits: what we used to call hot pants are normal attire for 13-18 year old girls these days. Maybe they're too woke now.

As someone who got a modicum of male attention, I can reliably say it is extremely overrated and you really are better off working on your personality.

Do you notice many young couples pairing off through your church? Does this happen organically or does the church have a meetup for singles?

[methylethyl]

We don't have a meetup for singles, but it doesn't seem necessary-- we have coffee hour! Which is basically, everybody hangs out for an hour or three after church to eat lunch, socialize, and let the kids play in the churchyard, and the young single people do in fact cluster around the same few tables and chat. We haven't had any of them pair off yet, but it's coming. Dating pool's not *quite* large enough, but they are finding each other on some Orthodox discord chatbox or other-- and then making sometimes quite long treks to visit other parishes and meet IRL. I don't quiz them about their romantic prospects, but given the sheer number of them in the right age group... I'd wager we'll marry the first one off in the next year. They're serious, and they are actively looking for spouses. The young men tolerably often show up with a young lady for one or three services, but so far nothing serious. The strategy with non-orthodox prospects seems to be: bring them to church and if it doesn't scare them off, they can continue to get to know each other?

Right now, the ratio of single women to single men is too low, but I think... hope?... we are starting to see a shift in that. For a while there, it was pretty crazy the number of young men in the inquirers' class, then it shifted to young men + married couples with young kids. We have only just started to see single women trickle in, but I hope it's the beginning of a trend, that we've reached the point in this... movement(?) where we are past the adventurous early-adopter leading edge, and they have paved the way for those who are reticent about, say, being the first person in their peer group to join a church nobody's ever heard of. At this point, people have heard of us, and we're maybe less intimidating/exotic. I *suspect* that means we'll see more unattached women, going forward. It has been an orthodox in-joke for a long time, that men convert to Orthodoxy... and then drag their wives and girlfriends in after them. I have no idea why that's the case, but for whatever reason, I guess we're the masculine Christian denomination? Perhaps it's the beards...
-------

What I wish I'd known when younger was... I was doing it right all along. I thought I was a total loser for never going on dates, and not getting much attention from men. It felt really hopeless, since the broader culture fully endorsed the "Cosmo" model of attractiveness-- who would want the girl who doesn't dress sexy or put out, when there's plenty more who will, right? But that's just what it feels like from the inside. Looking back, it's easy to see that no, *I knew what I wanted*-- a man I could share my true weird self with, and a stable family life-- and I wasn't going to settle for anything less than that, for the very questionable prize of "being with someone" who wasn't aimed in the same direction. And that's a winning strategy, actually. Who knew? Certainly nobody was telling me that at the time!

[kimberlysteele]

I am certainly interested to hear your reports as the Orthodox church grows in influence and reach. I hope Christian Orthodoxy becomes a major force in the New Religiosity for selfish reasons: I believe Orthodoxy has managed to retain more of the good practices from ancient Christianity than almost any other Christian sect. Just in reverence for saints and preservation of rituals alone it is a refuge for the old ways. When people have access to the old tracks of power, it's much easier for them to get in contact with the Divine than the lonely evolutionary path I have chosen. As it suggests, I am going out on a limb and it can be dangerous. For me, being a loner on the road to soul redemption is appropriate but it is absolutely not so for others seeking God. I might join an Orthodox church someday depending on my time constraints and where I am located. My biggest selfish reason for wanting Orthodoxy and Traditional Catholicism to succeed is the general clean-up effect on the collective astral plane. When people are willing to do legitimate spiritual work that involves humility, Meatworld labor, and temperance, entire islands are created in the Bog of Eternal Astral (and Etheric) Stench in which we find ourselves.

[methylethyl]

:) I think you're onto something there. The energy in the nave, and all the way out into the churchyard, is great. And that's in spite of it being embedded in a truly awful neighborhood.

I'd add the Copts to your list. I think they have preserved a lot of the old stuff, and have a dogged resilience in their faith and practice that is hard to find even in Orthdoox churches-- something about existing under perpetual threat from the dominant culture. Those guys are courageous and faithful in a way we have not had the need for in decades, maybe centuries.

[kimberlysteele]

Lack of persecution is what gave rise to McMansion Christianity. I hope McMansion Christianity dies soon. The trouble is that Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn, and their ilk have gone so far into de facto Satanism, they have marred the legitimacy of the entire Christian religion. Speaking of lack of persecution, there is a whole subculture of pedophilia and LGB debauchery in Catholicism especially. We are long overdue for a legit Christian revival, and not a thinly-disguised Satanic power grab. Of course I could be wrong but I think Christ would shame Joel Osteen or Pope Francis if they were ever in a room together. Like attracts like, so I doubt that meeting will ever happen.

[methylethyl]

A little hardship and persecution would do us a world of good-- historically, we're at the very top of our game when being faithful comes with a nonzero risk of getting burned alive or stoned by mobs in the streets. A shame we can't really hold onto that in times of safety and plenty, for all that I'm glad we aren't subject to it *all* the time. It's never that far away, though. Right now it's the Copts and Nigerians, the faithful in China, the churches in Pakistan. I think things are finally getting better for Christians in Iraq and Syria, but it's only been about ten years since this happened:

https://orthodoxtimes.com/ten-years-after-the-kidnapping-of-the-archbishops-of-aleppo/

We still don't know what happened to them, but we prayed for them, officially, across the whole Antiochian church, for ten years, hoping for their return. They were probably killed, but we may never get the whole story. I think just within the last few months, we reached the ten-year mark and they were dropped from the the official litanies. Which isn't to say we don't pray for them, just that you can only keep special items on the list for so long! Maybe it is time to pray for the repose of their souls, but we can't be sure. I expect eventually someone will have a vision, and the bishops will mull it over and make a call on it.

[(Anonymous)]

She doesn't really answer open-ended questions right now, so I'm not sure what she thinks. She did get extremely interested in the next scraped knee she had. She's been going around saying, "Have a scrape. Blood came out. Made a scab. It's blood. :pointing: See the blood" etc. Thanks for your comment--it made me think to say, "Your knee will heal, a scrape is not the kind of thing to need a knee replacement." After I'd said that on two occasions, she stopped talking about the scrape as much, so I do suspect she was worried about it. Next step: Visiting Grandma at the rehab center!