June 2025

Body horror in The Substance19 Images In the latest season of The White Lotus, old girlfriends Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie come together in the series’ signature luxury hotel, this time set on Thailand’s Ko Samui. Their conversation quickly turns to aesthetics, with the group making hyperbolic compliments of one another’s appearances. “No you look amazing,” they bleat. “You look the same as you looked 20 years ago.” “Who’s your doctor?” “To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work,” writes CJ Hauser in her book The Crane Wife. In our era of increasingly normalised ‘tweakments’ and cosmetic work, the expectation to control and mould one’s appearance continues to intensify. This optimisation work, or ‘self-erasure’ (define it as you will), where the...