Body Image, Vanity, and Self-Objectification

In a wonderful interview by Ezra Klein of the great Zadie Smith, Zadie Smith says something I found very insightful. She is discussing how women go through stages of life and how acute the loss of beauty is to women, and then she says (and I paraphrase), “In my generation, men have gone through a cultural metamorphosis where body image has become a heightened experience. I worry that the curse placed on women has also been placed on men.” Smith is pointing out that self-objectification, seeing oneself as a decoration to be possessed and observed by others, is deeply dehumanizing.

This is a belief I have held for over 40 years. I have four adult daughters, and I have tried, quite unsuccessfully, to teach them, “Do not objectify yourself with regard to body aesthetics.” With my two sons, I assumed the threat of such self-objectification was less likely, and, again, I was to some extent wrong.

Self-Objectification

Another conviction I have is that Marx was a terrible political economist, BUT Marx was a darn good sociologist. One of Marx’s ideas was the idea of alienation. Marx rightly observed that a society marinated in the idea that success and purpose are deeply defined in economic terms leads to people seeing themselves as a commodity with a certain level of earning power. Human beings become reduced to economic machines. In a world of competition and a systemic-induced scarcity, the self-alienating power of scarcity becomes evermore acute. Couple this materialistic recipe with patriarchy, and the result is that men are reduced to their earning potential and women are reduced to their fleeting beauty.

MAGA and Gender

Every MAGA person I know is driven both consciously and unconsciously by some deep-seated gender insecurity. The foundational commitment to traditional patriarchy and its insidious bedfellow, misogyny, is a self-objectifying curse on steroids. Though what follows is quite anecdotal, I do believe these anecdotes are revealing of the MAGA obsession with the mythical gender norms of a bygone era.

The most MAGA person I know often says, “My biggest regret is that I didn’t join the military after high school.”

The fetishization of violence is strong with this one.

This same man said to me once, “I like to do man-things. Hunt. Shoot guns. Drive cars off-road.” He surrounds himself with all the stereotypical symbols of masculinity: guns, big trucks, etc. He also maintains stereotypical misogynistic views of women. This man has all the stereotypical traits of MAGA masculinity: erectile dysfunction, alcoholism, anger management problems, conspiratorial thinking, racism, generalized moral weakness, and a toxic mix of low self-awareness and low self-esteem.

His psychological make-up reminds me of the correlation between extreme homophobia and closeted homosexuality, which brings me to the strange concoction of conservative values and lip filler.

The MAGA Face (here)

Just this morning, my wife and I found ourselves laughing uproariously as we read an article about the White House Vanity Fair photo shoot. In brutal “own the gender traditionalists” fashion, photographer Christopher Anderson shares that the most beauty-conscious participant in the photoshoot was hyper-misogynist Stephen Miller. The curse laid upon pre-feminist women is a central feature of the self-consciousness of America’s most overt fascist. The recent expansion of self-objectification with respect to fleeting beauty is most acutely internalized by the man who seeks to bring America back to the good ol’ days of the 1890s, an era when women had yet to obtain the right to vote. The critic of decadence is himself drowning in a key feature of decadent superficiality.

Christopher Anderson’s ultra-realistic photography also revealed White House press secretary’s recent encounter with a plastic surgeon. This “traditional values meet the housewives of South Beach” moment is like the Mona Lisa of MAGA, a profoundly revealing portrait of the inner life of MAGA narcissism.

The middle schoolers have taken over the free world.

Recently, I have been working on a more academic-minded piece on the link between fascism and gender insecurity. Fortunately, reality is stranger than fiction, and MAGA gender insecurity is more self-revealing than any essay could possibly give insight.