As modern man emancipates himself even from the ground beneath his feet, stepping forward into that wide-open sky to breach the gap between his feeble form and the unending horizon, he succeeds only in stepping out into a precipice, experiencing the sheer acceleration of his own weight.
What is revealed to him is what he is without support. Man in free-fall, or in a vacuum. Falling or floating. Mere mass. And he must realize, at last, that he cannot fly; that he cannot make a home in the abyss.
But he has not come to this realization yet, as the last few decades show us. And so, the modern emancipatory drive has become post-modern psychological torment.
One example from the realm of pop culture concerns female emancipation. No longer a question of suffrage, the politics of gender have degenerated into a post-political horror show.
I won’t spend time on the problems of prioritizing career over family formation or the universally cringed-at ‘girlboss’ trope.
But I want to suggest that today, female beauty standards are, among a certain sociologically interesting segment of the population, becoming untethered from their object, namely, the much maligned ‘male gaze.’
We sometimes hear that modern, hyper-sexualized pop-cultural feminism is a betrayal of earlier ideals of female empowerment. There is a sense, however, in which they are, in fact, the natural consequence of the feminist vision.
My subject here is that segment of society most able to pursue its fancies and most conditioned by contemporary culture—what we might call the protagonist class or spectacle class, whose cultural norms are widely mocked but also widely imitated.
It is here that we see what happens when feminism finally defeats the ‘male gaze,’ and the female competitive drive succumbs to capitalist greed.
New beauty standards emerge from a mimetic spiral of competition and compulsiveness between hedonistic socialites. Far from responding to male desire, they are conditioned more by the financial interests of surgeons.
The post-ethnic, drag-inspired death mask of plastic surgery and social media filters, with its high cheekbones, sucked-in-mouths, plump-lips and narrow noses, is what happens when straight men are no longer a credible source of authority in society.
