We should have known fascism was coming for a lot of reasons but also because of everyone being expected to be ~hot~ now
Let me explain
In a piece Sarah Miller wrote for the New Yorker in 2020, she makes the case that the Netflix adaption of “The Queen’s Gambit,” a book I have not read but which is apparently a good book (I also haven’t seen the show…sorry…) suffers from a fatal flaw: the conventional capitalist hotness of the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy as the central character, a character who, it turns out, kind of has at her core the experience of growing up kind of ugly. Anya Taylor-Joy, who resembles an expensive porcelain reindeer come to life, may or may not be the best face to represent the suffering of an orphaned chess prodigy from a traumatic poor background — HMM!!! Interesting!
Obviously there is nothing wrong with casting a hot person (Lord please bless and protect me from the inane “MAINTAINING TRADITIONAL BEAUTY STANDARDS IS ACTUALLY FEMINIST, FOR ME, WITH NO OTHER ADDITIONAL AGENDAS INVOLVED” that became so prevalent in like 2010 or so when makeup companies realized it was time to start using social justice language to sell things). And also, someone might yelp, don’t TRADITIONALLY ATTRACTIVE people suffer even MORE, SOMETIMES? Also, don’t OBJECTIVE BEAUTY STANDARDS NOT EXIST? Look, first of all, we’ve all got trauma, some of us more than others. And second of all, as any female identifying person who grew up in the past 5000 years can tell you, those standards absolutely do exist, and the experience of growing up as someone who is designated as “ugly” or, god forbid, “fat,” is perhaps one of the worst and most widely accepted forms of cultural hazing that exists.
I know this has been said a million times but it’s truly wild to me how accustomed we are to everyone and everything being Traditionally Hot now. Gaze for one moment, if you will, upon the wretched visages of, say, the gentlemen at the heart of the Bee Gees, one of the most successful musical acts of all time who MADE BANK in the grand tradition of white men from England cosplaying as Black men from America. I say this with love and respect (the music holds up): they have little rat faces, and I prefer it that way! And they’re still hot, to be clear (little rat faces can be hot!), and I’m sure they never suffered any of the merest deprivation of people willing to have sex with them. But they are not “Instagram hot,” as most of our entertainers have historically not been traditionally hot in the sense of people who wear clothes in public for money or who pose with gardening gloves in catalogues. They are performers. Their job is to be really good at a thing. Beauty is incidental, and probably related to them being good at the thing.
But the rise of the internet, the spreading of racist and sexist and heteronormative standards of beauty, the proliferation of selfies and attendant filters, the billions of dollars of scientific training that could have gone to curing diseases but instead went to refining new, expensive forms of plastic surgery — the people want what they want. They want people to be HOT. No matter WHAT their job. BE HOT!! And if you can’t for whatever reason, simply starve, spend, and surgery your way there!! This is America, baby!
As others have illucidated better than I, it is also the case that fatphobia, and hatred of bodies that don’t “conform,” in general, has a demonstrated porous border with actual Nazism and eugenicism. And it makes sense, right? The value system is basically about ranking and valuing bodies in terms of a set of quantified characteristics that are determined through some arbitrary system, obviously (shoutout to Stanford University for being founded by eugencists and, accordingly, requiring that applicants submit a full-body photograph with their grades until shockingly recently!). I think it is also the case that an expectation of some kind of beauty monoculture (bring back little ratfaced guys! I’m into them, I can admit it!) is directly related to the expectation of some kind of broader monoculture, one in which performance to a set of highly controlled external values is ranked above all. And as someone who went to middle school in the 2000s and was previously a lifelong member of a cult with extremely high beauty expectations for women, I can also personally report that controlling people by the fear of rejection for not being hot enough is a very effective way to keep people too scared, insecure, and weak to feel like they have power or an inherent right to exist.
I dunno…. I could be wrong about this but as usual, I suspect that I’m not. Sorry!
Edit, January 23, 2024: I have now read the book and can confirm that it is very good and also the main character is definitely not supposed to be played by Anya Taylor-Joy. It is a curse to be correct all the time.