A Right to Beauty?

 

A Right to Beauty? 

Vulgar social constructivism would seem to view the human animal and the human culture as things which exist independent of each other. I contest instead that human culture is an emergent property of the human animal, and this is the foundation of my understanding of the world.

Popular social constructivism also views the individual as an object wholly separate from culture. The vulgar 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 values².

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 orient themselves towards the true origin 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 self-starvation, we have no reason to conclude that humans can ever 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?

I stand in opposition to human rights. It is not that I am against the furnishing of individual human needs. On the contrary, my objection to human rights rests 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. In Capital, Marx makes no distinction between want and need, in the interest of economic analysis. I further propose that a lack of access to our desires can make us mentally unwell. Our needs and our desires are therefore intertwined as prerequisites for good health. Desires are physiological needs³. No human rights convention has managed to account for this.

As I explained in Class Hatred in the Trans Community, non-passing trans women reveal certain contradictions in capitalist society, which is a 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 promise to furnish us with our needs, how is it that many trans women suffer so greatly 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 nonconformity⁴, 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?

Bourgeois legalism alone cannot improve the lot of a working-class trans woman who was forced to undergo male puberty. The only way trans women can be free of this misery is if society renders aesthetic surgery a non-commodity. This shall liberate not just trans women but all humans, for there is nothing intrinsically wrong with modifying the body to make it more beautiful; the fact that we are so often told otherwise is, in truth, an ideological adaptation to scarcity. We presently cannot all be beautiful, therefore we must pretend that being⁵ beautiful is not 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. But if it were possible for any man to look like Clavicular by taking very simple, non-invasive measures, would we still have a problem with looksmaxxing as a concept? Or would we instead think of any man who doesn’t resemble Clavicular as indolent?

I believe we can build a society that doesn’t encourage us to hit ourselves in the face with hammers. At the same time, it is imperative for us to be 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. The abolition of the commodity will at once alter our sense of fashion and enhance our ability to conform to it. Perhaps you disagree; perhaps you love democracy, the nation, and the market. It is my belief that, one day, you too will see the world as I do. It is only a matter of time.

Footnotes

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

2. My position as a trans woman who has existed largely outside of mainstream womanhood is only testament to the fact that aesthetic standards are a product of our surroundings. Many of the things that I think are beautiful on women (often things which I cannot have) are bafflingly despised by cis women, and these features are often the target of aesthetic surgery for cis women. Buccal fat removal, for example, is a masculinising surgery; it’s the absolute opposite of what I’d want done to my face! But 2020s fashion has decided that cis women need to look like the gigachad, for whatever reason.

3. Is my desire to eat a delicious shawarma driven primarily by my need for food, or by my desire to have my tastebuds stimulated by peptides and amino acids? Attempts to make such a distinction is in fact what created the world in which we live (or, more accurately, it’s what justified the world we live in after it was formed). Desire emerges organically from physiological need, yet much of the liberal project has essentially rested on drawing distinctions between physiological needs, nobly enshrined in the holy texts of human rights, and frivolous wants, which we are morally discouraged from seeking out. In a capitalist world that produces far more than it needs, scarcity must be ideologically enforced at every turn with increasingly stupid maxims. I feel like I may be over-explaining my point here, but I can’t help but imagine some annoying liberal reading this and parroting the mantra of, ‘we can’t always have what we want.’ Desire is a function of the human body. Without desire, you would have no drive to eat or sleep, and our species would not reproduce. Let us cast these finger-wagging pencil pushers overboard, and spend the rest of eternity having fun!

4. We need only look to artistic depictions of trans women to see this aspect of liberalism in action. Even the ‘hons’ among us (ඞ) do not resemble the bizarre hirsuitic caricatures that so often grace advocacy webpages and opportunistic advertising campaigns. It is inconceivable for a trans woman to look like a woman (even an ugly or abnormal one)—if she does, it is as if she is no longer trans.

5. There is a slight tension which arises in my usage of ‘to feel beautiful’ and ‘to be beautiful’. I wasn’t able to resolve this in a way that doesn’t compromise the flow of this essay. Feeling and being beautiful are similar but related states of being that can feed into each other, or even stand alone. For example: a person can feel beautiful without being acknowledged as such, and vice versa; a person can be acknowledged as beautiful, and therefore feel beautiful, and vice versa. Likewise, two people with similar identities and bodies might want to do different things with their bodies. The issue with capitalist society is that one person will be able to do what they want, and one won’t. This hurts the one who misses out, and it can also lead to antagonism between the two parties, e.g. ‘Why can’t you just be happy like I can? You’re pathetic and self-obsessed,’ (but of course we all are). The only way to resolve this problem is to make it so that we all have an equal choice to either change our bodies or to keep them as they are. I am not saying that nose jobs will be mandatory under the Bouncy Regime (as funny as that is to imagine), nor am I making any value judgement on particular facial or bodily features. I am well aware that beauty standards change over time, but what people don’t seem to consider is that beauty standards are real things that most people can’t just choose to ignore, and there are objectively measurable benefits to conforming to them, even if we suppose a world without commodities that values butt chins and unibrows. It should be equally easy to either conform or non-conform; non-conformity should not be a consolation prize for people who got the short end of the stick.