we have arrived with a thud in the Artificial Age

who and what is 'real' anymore and what happens when we can't tell the difference

Reverse by Jenny Saville

I wrote the following half-asleep last night in my notes app. Most of it was illegible and way angrier than this and I wasn’t going to post it because why fucking bother but also I want to bother. I think maybe it’s okay to sometimes bother. To say the thing out loud that no one wants to say. The truth is, I hate that so many women are fucking with their faces and their bodies because even though it has nothing to do with me it has everything to do with EVERYONE because WE ALL live in the forest. We are raising our daughters in the forest. And I can see, just like you can, what all this carving is doing to the wood.

Maybe it’s all the Lauren Sanchez shit my algo is feeding me but last night I had a dream that everyone I knew had these huge cartoonish lips and no one could talk coherently out of them. Worse, no one seemed to really care that they were saying nothing with these giant artificial mouths and I woke up sweating like I was in a sitcom…

But awake it’s not so different, is it? The face of the modern woman has become a puzzle to be studied and solved. Like WORDLE but with procedures. You have six chances to guess what she’s had done.

We have gone backwards in so many ways that it feels impossible to even shape a commentary around it. Like an oil spill that cannot be cleaned up and now we all must swim in it and pretend that it’s safe because the alternative is to acknowledge that we’re fucked.

Every day I see more and more women normalizing body dysmorphia as self-care — lying to their bodies so that their bodies can cover for the things women are not supposed to know about themselves.

And yes, it’s all connected.

Because it isn’t just the body. It’s never JUST ABOUT THE BODY. It is about the absorption and justification of an unwillingness to evolve — a conservative value dressed up as a modern one.

And there is no better way to distract potentially powerful women from the rise in fascism and the flaws inherent in a system that enables it than to remind her at every turn that she is unfinished, unworthy and lacks power should her face show emotion and her body, experience.

And it isn’t just our bodies…

Our stories have also become puzzles to decipher. Between the scrutiny directed at an m-dash and the authors we are now reading with elevated eyebrows, wondering if she actually wrote this or ran her work through a “Patti Smith: Just Kids” AI filter after taking the advice on what to write about from Chat GBT.

Pardon the em-dash but no-one-fuckin-knows.

Suddenly everyone is trying to prove that they’re real and that might be the most depressing part of all.

Because sometimes you can’t tell who or what is real or generated by something artificial. By group think disguised as community with easy access to body modifiers. Here’s a before and after picture. If you like what you see, use my discount code.

I have brought this up before and been told it does not and should not matter — because her body her choice — but when choice becomes a wave of pressure on women and it is your job to raise three of them into adulthood, I cannot, as a mother, shrug off the trends.

I can no longer simply scroll past.