A Right to Beauty?

 

A Right to Beauty? 

As I mentioned in Organic Meaning, vulgar (i.e. popular) social constructivism views the human animal and the human culture as things which exist independent of each other; this is opposed to our more Marxist understanding of things, which views human culture as an emergent property of the human animal. I would like to add to this point: popular social constructivism also views the individual as an object wholly separate from culture. The popular liberal understanding of nature insists that individuals can frictionlessly act in ways which contradict social norms. This is sometimes further applied as an obligation to be unfashionable – especially to trans women, and especially to the so-called ‘bricks’ or ‘hons’.

Ugly women on the whole are, in fact, expected to put up with being unfashionable in the name of social progress. It is considered regressive for a woman to get breast implants, even if it makes her very happy. In recent years, I have observed many people voicing their opinions on social media that it is immoral (in a feminist sense) for a woman to get a nose job. Vulgar feminism instead expects these women to (somehow) will themselves into feeling that their bodies express their internal selves, or perhaps into ‘not caring’ what others think.

The problem with this mode of thought is that caring what others think is an intrinsic part of being human, even among those who earnestly believe that they are ‘nonchalant’. Not caring about the opinions of others is, in fact, a form of caring; you may have repositioned your perspective, but you have done so in a way that still exists in relation to other perspectives. There is nothing you can do to escape society.

The commonality in aesthetic characteristics adopted among counterculturalists¹ shows us, in a more concrete way, how our behaviour always exists in relation to the behaviour of others. You may think yourself a cultural rebel for wearing a hat fashioned from a crab carapace, but if you wear it enough people are eventually going to start copying you, and before long a new fashion will have emerged. Soon there will arise a crab-hat community, which will have passionate internal disputes over which forms of crab-hat constitute ‘posing’ compared to more authentic forms. As the Great Marxist Kamala Harris once said: “[Do] you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Counterculture cannot negate culture; it can only ever exist as a form of culture, with its own rules and standards.

The reason why it is impossible to escape fashion, even when we act against fashion, is that fashionability (i.e. the status of being fashionable; the status of aesthetically fitting in) is a human need; we all need to feel beautiful.

I define fashion as a set of aesthetic behaviours common between individuals. It is a fact of the social animal that individuals are psychologically wired to copy one another; this is from where fashion arises. It is common for leftists to reject the concept of fashion by insisting that we ought to simply stop caring about how our appearance compares to the appearances of those around us – yet, this maxim goes against our social nature. Unfortunately for these leftists, not even communism can abolish fashion, much less the unconscious desire to be fashionable.

If our brains are what inherently compel us to copy each other, what happens when we are unable to do so? We suffer. As electronic communication and commodity production come together, forms of distilled, extreme fashions (particularly those pertaining to bodily appearance) enter our consciousness. Comparable to religion and television, social media acts as an opiate for social atomisation by replacing the people who were once in our real lives with images and videos of people who cannot talk back to us. These people often have greater access to tools of fashion which we do not, such as plastic surgery. Nevertheless, our unconscious mind drives us to copy the social behaviour of these strangers – changing our thoughts, our speech patterns, and our aesthetic values.

Academics have been pointing out for many years that those of us who grew up with social media have far poorer estimations of our appearances compared to former generations. What academics have not done, however, is consider the real source of this misery. It is not the fashions themselves, but rather our inability to conform to them which is affecting the mental health of so many young people today. While it seems reasonable that taking a sledgehammer to social media and marketing could make us less conscious of extreme fashions such as underweightness, we have no reason to conclude that humans can become wholly fashion-unconscious. By all means, let us purge the web of social media. But at the same time, why not just make it easier for us all to be fashionable, if we so desire?

As communists, we reject human rights. It is not that we are against the furnishing of individual human needs. On the contrary, our objection to human rights stands on the basis that human rights can never promise to furnish all humans with their needs, even under utopian conditions. Since no two humans are alike, it is impossible to define an exhaustive list of entitlements that can account for the requirements of every current and future human being. This inevitably results in certain needs being legally defined as unnecessary. The communist doctrine responds to this problem in merely one sentence: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Everyone shall contribute whatever labour they can, and in kind everyone shall receive everything that they need. As Marxists, we make no distinction between want and need. A lack of access to our desires can make us mentally unwell. Our needs and our desires are therefore the same thing: prerequisites for good health. Desires are a physiological need.

As I explained in Class Hatred in the Trans Community, non-passing trans women reveal certain contradictions in capitalist society, which is the source of hatred directed towards us from both cis people and other trans people. The inadequacy of human rights is one such contradiction. If human rights furnish us with all our needs, how is it that many trans women suffer under a deprivation of fashionability? The easiest conclusion for non-Marxists is that fashionability is not a physiological need, and that the mental ill health which arises among trans women as a result of our deprivation is in fact a problem that occurs from within. This is often erroneously labelled as narcissism, misogyny, or internalised transphobia, which now transforms the situation into a moral problem: trans women are bad people if they wish to change their bodies in ways that capitalist society doesn’t allow (either via poverty or a lack of medical technology).

Young trans women in particular are being driven insane by this cruelty. Their life’s mission is to find a way to cope with their bodies being permanently changed in ways that they neither wanted nor consented to; this is already something that drives many to suicide, not in the least because the surgeries which can reverse these unwanted changes are priced out of most trans women’s reach. All the while, young trans women are being pulled in all directions by a society that simultaneously expects them to pass as cis, and to ‘not care’ about passing; to be brave martyrs of gender nonconformity, and to be sex objects for men; and all at once to be meek and silent about their suffering, lest they be accused of narcissism. Is it any wonder that the economic and mental health outcomes of trans women are so poor?

The only way trans women can be free of this misery is if society makes aesthetic surgery infinitely available to anyone who asks for it. This shall liberate not just trans women, but all humans. There is nothing wrong with any person changing her body in ways which make her feel more beautiful; the fact that we are often told otherwise is, in truth, an ideological adaptation to scarcity. We presently cannot all be beautiful, therefore we must pretend that being beautiful is not important.

But being beautiful is important. We only have to look at the recent trend of ‘looksmaxxing’ to see that even cisgender men are being driven mad by the contradiction between current fashions and our inability to all follow them. Fashion is a fact of humanity. To deprive someone of the choice to be fashionable, then, is an act of cruelty.

We can build a society that doesn’t encourage us to hit ourselves in the face with hammers. At the same time, we must build a society where we are all free to alter our bodies if they aren’t making us happy. The previous 100 years have proven that human rights & the welfare state cannot build such a world; only a total transformation of the global economy can achieve this. My conclusion here is the reason why I have taken to writing these essays. I don’t want to die in a body that isn’t mine; at the same time, it has become very clear that I will never be able to afford the surgeries I need. Only the communist revolution can set me free. Perhaps, if enough people hear my voice, I might live to see freedom.

Only the communist mode of production can fully empower every human being to oppose or conform to fashions in whichever way brings us joy.

Footnotes

1. Consider how ‘goth’, ‘scene’ and ‘emo’ have all coalesced into subsets of the same thing, commonly referred to as ‘alt’.