I’m not self-optimizing anymore
In fact, I’m determined to get worse
This week, I learned that I need to wrap my face in shapewear. I already need to be taping my mouth shut; eating more protein; taking more supplements; wearing a weighted vest on my walks; lifting more; doing Pilates; running less; putting spring water on my face in the mornings, running faster; using lasers on my face; getting Botox, lip filler, chemical peels, hydrafacials and wellness shots. And my dentist thinks I need braces. Every woman on my Instagram is trying to sell me on lymphatic drainage and hip bones. They tell me that to look like them, I need to give up booze, give up THC, give up carbs, give up cheese. The Washington Post says I’m peeing incorrectly, so I need to fix that.
According to the internet, everyone seems to be self-optimizing, looksmaxxing, doing thought work, getting into therapy, doing self-help, journaling, taking up needlework or gardening, churning butter, and making candles.
It’s enough to make a woman want to start smoking cigarettes.
It’s not that I don’t engage in self-improvement or beauty standards. I get a little Botox, I buy mascara, and I love a new face cream that promises to change my life. It’s not perfect. It’s a system I see and grapple with every day, but one that still crushes me with ageism and the expectation of the performance of femininity.
This capitalistic deluge of tools and products to help women look hotter and more desirable is occurring as our government is taking away the right to abortion, birth control, SNAP benefits, Medicaid, and the free expression of our gender and sexuality. All the things that would actually keep us healthy. But instead, we have uncompounded GLP-1s and TikTok influencers endorsing protein matcha powder.
According to one 2019 study, “American women spend an average of 45 minutes grooming each day and make up 80-90% of the $115 billion industry for beauty products, affecting both their time and financial resources.”
This gendered issue is getting more expensive and impacting younger people. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reported in 2022 that nearly 75% of facial plastic surgeons had seen an increase in the number of patients under 30 requesting cosmetic surgery or injectables. The American Med Spa Association made a similar observation in 2024, adding that Gen Z and millennials are the generations most interested in injectables. And comparatively, “...adults 55+ are the least interested in non-surgical cosmetic treatments.”
Right now, beauty is marketed as “wellness,” and “wellness” is marketed as morality. The Venn diagram between the three feels like one big circle. And this is because these are things marketed to women.
We are not a society that trusts women. This is evidenced by the fact that our health care rights are being stripped away, along with our right to fully participate in society. Our country is run by men and women who are telling women to stay out of the workforce and replacing our autonomy with policing our bathrooms, which no one was asking for. Even the hang-wringing discourse over Gen Z’s Botox or asking how Nicole Kidman could do that to her face is implicitly assigning moral value to women’s choices. Expecting any one woman to perfectly navigate the cultures of consumption, beauty, and wellness while still having a career shows again that women cannot win in this system.
And we deserve empathy, not concern-trolling for how imperfectly we navigate this world. It feels like every day, our culture is unearthing some past crime of criticism committed against a woman in the public eye, with no thought about the crimes being committed now.
Anyway, I certainly don’t remember any moral panics about men taking creatine and testosterone.
Also, our cultural criticism always seems to focus on the individuals, rather than the companies and individuals who profit from our lack of healthcare and childcare. And no, childcare isn’t a different issue, because I would have fewer bags under my eyes if I had childcare during the summer and wasn’t working on this newsletter at 9 p.m.
There is no amount of hot you can be that will protect you from misogyny. Taking supplements will not prevent you from getting cancer or dying alone.
We’ve been here before. Products for women soared in the post-WWII era, as women were forced out of work and back into the home. Looking beautiful and feminine and running a household became not just a full-time job, but a kind of science. Sociologists like Willard Waller believed women had gotten out of hand during the war, and society needed to reset. Waller claimed it was a woman's new patriotic duty to be "blissfully domestic" in her new office, the home.
These arguments sound like they could have come out of the mouth of the current vice president or any trad wife with blond children and a couple thousand followers on Instagram.
Products that promise to constrain, restrict, refine, contort, and shape us into more desirable versions of ourselves are not self-care — they’re promising us beauty and with that beauty an easier and healthier life. They’re also draining time and financial resources. And I am not here to argue that the time and resources should go to something better. I’m saying it's our time and our resources, and we should be allowed to be frivolous and waste them in irresponsible ways. Not all of our choices should have to carry the moral weight of the world.
Also, these products don’t work. Because there is no amount of hot you can be that will protect you from misogyny. Taking supplements will not prevent you from getting cancer or dying alone.
And yet, we persist, slathering in creams, wrapping our faces like ninjas, covering ourselves in red lights, like evil Christmas trees, just for a chance to hold on to beauty and life and a little longer, in a world determined to take both away.
Other links
Tressie McMillan Cottom on the modern temperance movement.
- answers the question about “giving up” vs. accepting your face.
- writes that the Disney story about love and marriage that the internet is selling is a hell that women fought for generations to escape.
And
reminds us that beauty standards won’t save us.
This whole industry is so strange, considering we know the best way for a woman to optimize her life is by picking up a copy of This American Ex-Wife. Available wherever fine books are sold.
The number of men (mostly) who get sucked into buying the latest guaranteed-to-lower-your-score golf aid may be similar to the number of women (mostly) rushing to buy the latest miracle solution to wrinkles - the power of advertising knows no gender. The difference, as you point out, is in the breadth of products being pushed for women, and the reaction of society when women do (or don't, for that matter) succumb to the pressure to try to make themselves "better." Hooray for non-self-optimization, and also for non-judgment about the choices any other woman makes.