In ‘Love Under Capitalism,’ we have a look at how desire, intimacy, and relationships intersect with the logic of capitalism.

Does beauty exist?

It was an issue writ large, albeit implicitly, when the Web woke as much as Nepal’s Miss Universe contestant, Jane Dipika Garrett, sashaying down the runway in a swimsuit – the pageant’s only “plus-size” contestant in its history. She was beautiful. Everyone agreed, nodding along that beauty is more “inclusive” today, mouthing platitudes about “big” being beautiful, not questioning the rhetorical slip of “plus-size” to explain a girl who’s only a bit larger than the typical model. Not acknowledging, even, the way in which “plus” implies a traditional – a variety of points above the usual, the desirable. Selecting to disregard the unattainable proportionality of her body and the right symmetry of her facial expression. But that wasn’t the highlight; as an alternative, it was how she loved herself. Her confidence. That was her beauty.

Garrett can have smashed stereotypes, but her presence is proof of an inviolable truth of self-love capitalism: it goes through an infinite cycle of birth and death, being reborn in subsequent lives as a latest ploy to sell more products. On this instance, Garrett’s participation within the runway is arguably the ultimate type of body positivity capitalism – where the concept of beauty is shoved inward, and consumers are lovingly reassured that the one thing that matters is that they love themselves. And by that, they mean your individual appearance. In late capitalism, the surface is the self; and self-love is beauty. All you’ve to do, with gritted teeth, is imagine in the facility of self-love and confidence to feel beautiful. Brands have long stopped advocating for being beautiful – they know they’ll never truly change how anyone looks. Only how they feel.

It’s the wonder industry’s version of taking the red pill. Beauty is inside, is confidence, is self-love, and here’s a 10-step skincare routine, seventeen different make-up products, double the variety of tutorials, a “size-inclusive” lingerie set, a crop-top that shows off your belly (because you should imagine it’s okay to have one), and hoop earrings to bring definition to a face that has gone above and beyond doing its best, and deserves to be seen. The Paris filter on Instagram applies an additional sheen of buttery softness, because self-love should be perceived by others. It’s the wonder–self-love paradox: love yourself in order that no person else has to like you; but show your self-love off so that everybody does love you. It’s the second step of the method where the cracks begin to point out. Inevitably, not as many individuals like what they see as you anticipated, and a consumer vacuum is created: more products, more optimization, more effort is required to like yourself in order that just the precise number of individuals love you.

Self-love through beauty, in other words, is a more roundabout pursuit of affection from others. As a substitute of Abercrombie and Fitch or Tommy Hilfiger openly promoting themselves for skinny, White, blue-eyed blonde-haired beauties only, we now have Dove and Adidas turning the gaze inward to insist that everyone seems to be equal in beauty so long as they only have a look at themselves. And once the studio lights are turned off, once the photoshoot is wrapped, the models – of all shapes, sizes, colours – step back into the true world, subject to its unequal glances, its disproportionate attention, its cruel, quiet scorn.

Beauty does exist. And it can never allow us to love ourselves.

The downfall of Victoria’s Secret was an opportune moment for a beauty industry reset. Lingerie brands, make-up brands, skin-care brands, and even athleisure brands are actually onto the incontrovertible fact that monetizing unhappiness is not any longer an excellent business strategy. It’s not profitable to sell people unachievable beauty. But dissatisfaction, alternatively. That’s personal. That’s intimate. It’s inside the self. And therein arrived the following phase of late capitalism: convincing consumers that beauty – whatever it might be, nevertheless it might look – was an undefinable, intangible thing. It is not any longer knowable or visible. It’s a high quality, and it exists inside. The solution to reach it’s to dig an entrance to it through our own bodies. It’s to slather ourselves with all the pieces they tell us to; wear what they insist will help us, and set off on a journey into ourselves. The labyrinthine complex of beauty inside ensures we remain stuck there; perpetually trying to find the elusive “X” on the treasure map, a creeping realization dawning on us that it doesn’t exist. We’re trapped inside ourselves trying to find beauty, when beauty was at all times on the surface.

Here’s the opposite paradox of self-love beauty: it doesn’t allow us to flee the centrality of images and appearances in our lives. Just about all influencers, including – perhaps even especially – those who advocate self-love know this. Their business model relies on being visible, on centering appearance, the literal surface, of their online presence. “As social media demanded more images, beauty filters proliferated accordingly,” Charlotte Shane wrote in Wired. Self-love for one’s appearance can never exist so long as beauty exists. They’re mutually exclusive. We exist in digital space provided that we’re visible. We’re loved in digital space provided that we’re beautiful. We are able to insist that we’re, and folks will love our confidence while insisting they think we’re beautiful too. The algorithm rewards all of this. And none of it ever changes what beauty inherently means, has at all times meant: White supremacist, caste-supremacist capitalism.

“Appearance is essentially the most public a part of the self. It’s our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self,” writes Nancy Etcoff. “This assumption will not be fair, and never how the perfect of all moral worlds would conduct itself. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Beauty has consequences that we cannot erase by denial.” The equation of appearance with the inner self is what the wonder industry truly sells. Beauty as morality. Or, within the absence of it; the pursuit of beauty as morality – the brand new Protestant work ethic, directed inward fairly than applied externally.

It explains why beauty is the brand new frontier for celebrity business. “Most stars, in India no less than, find their voices clipped in terms of political opinions, feminist or Left-wing rebel or the country’s religious divisiveness. Smartly perhaps, they understand that the one thing they’ll change with their influence is the hydration of our skin and hair, the form of our eyeliners, the glitter on our nails, the sneakers we wear,” writes Shefalee Vasudev in Voice of Fashion.

Consider the incontrovertible fact that no brand actually wants you to actually feel beautiful. If everyone seems to be beautiful, in any case, no person is gorgeous. And sweetness ceases to exist. Thereby, the wonder empire falls. The goal is to maintain consumers like hamsters on a wheel, chasing the elusive dangling carrot. The pursuit of self-love through beauty is Sisyphean. It might never be achieved.

Meanwhile, the pursuit to like ourselves distances us from loving others. So long as we pedestalize beauty, chase it, aspire to it, and equate it with loving ourselves, we center it in our perception of others. How much will we truly love others who don’t aspire to beauty in the identical ways? As Audrey Millet writes, “Clothes have grow to be the factors of a system of evaluation of individuals. Style indicates the degree of interest within the human being. This ‘no style, no attention’ approach shows that appearance is the barometer for the treatment of individuals.”

Sociologists Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill, of their book “Confidence Culture,” call confidence a cult. “Somewhat than identifying social issues and dealing collectively to alter them, confidence culture turns away from wider political, economic and social issues and encourages women to show inwards and work on themselves as a way of doing and feeling higher,” Gill explained to Dazed. “Confidence isn’t our goal. It’s the individualistic and psychologised way of understanding it that locates the issue in women themselves fairly than within the systemic injustices of neoliberal capitalism.”

Under the paradigm of beauty-as-confidence: we buy all we can purchase to realize it, and we’re compelled, against our higher judgment, to treat those that can’t with pity or disdain. Capitalism turned beauty into confidence, confidence into self-love, self-love into self-respect, self-respect into morality. And that’s the way it becomes compulsory to strive for beauty at any cost.

The sweetness-as-empowerment industrial complex explains the return of thinness as the best – one which can now be safely claimed as a alternative, as a way for people to feel beautiful from inside, promising not to guage others who don’t seem like they do. It’s the age of Ozempic and glutathione and the explosion of easy, non-invasive cosmetic procedures. Everyone’s taking them, no person’s admitting it, and the sudden shedding of weight and paleness of skin are explained away as simply products of self-love, self-optimization, or higher yet, not explained in any respect. “The history of the human body is marked by many modifications,” Millet writes. “Nonetheless, never before have attempts to change the body been so widespread, nor has the best been so unattainable. The unattainable version of beauty is a relentless source of pressure for many who claim it.”

However the pursuit of beauty begs the query: does real beauty exist? We understand it after we see it, and we also understand the ways wherein White supremacy, caste-supremacy, colonization and racism shaped what we’re purported to find beautiful. It’s old hat. But take away our history, return to the blank slate: what’s beauty? “The human image has been subjected to all manner of manipulation in an try to create a great that doesn’t appear to have a human incarnation,” Etcoff continues, reflecting on how artists, poets, painters, and each manner of expert on the topic could never define what beauty was, apart from what it wasn’t. Even cosmetic surgeons, displaying faces considered to be beautiful, could indicate flaws on essentially the most beautiful of faces. There isn’t an individual on Earth for whom it was unattainable to be more beautiful.

The very fact, then, that the version of beauty we have now to work with is so exclusionary makes it a resource only available to just a few, on the expense of others. Consider the incontrovertible fact that it took the French Revolution to finish the hoarding of flour for aristocrats’ hair care, which had led to food shortage. After we aspire to beauty, we stop caring about others. Beauty is greed, and capital, even whether it is self-love. Self-love defined through beauty isn’t inherently worthy or noble, contrary to what the brands say. It is barely acquired through further capital. And that makes beauty unequal. That makes it worthy of abolition.

Abolishing beauty-capitalism is to ask: will we deserve love – and may we love others – without beauty? The reply, hopefully, is yes. It needs to be.