Episode 178 - Beauty with Heather Widdows Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink

[00:00:21] David: The podcast where your two favorite philosophers put philosophy in dialogue with everyday life

[00:00:27] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson

[00:00:28] David: And I'm David Pena-Guzman

[00:00:30] Ellie: As always, for an extended ad-free version of this episode, check out Overthink on Substack

[00:00:36] David: Ellie, today we're gonna be talking about beauty, and I want us to begin, uh, by talking about the different ways in which we relate to the beauty ideal. What are some aspects of your routine that fit into this ideal? What do you do to be beautiful?

[00:00:53] Ellie: You ask me, a femme blonde 30-something who lives in Los Angeles. Um, oh, okay. Well, I mean, I know we have limited time, so, uh, let's just say, and let me cover up my face right now. Our recording technology doesn't have the hide self-view option, which I have very publicly promoted in various ways, um, and so I always have to cover myself up when we're recording.

I have to say I'm looking pretty chopped today because I have to be recording on my laptop in my closet with a weird black background due to ongoing construction. So if anybody's watching me on video, yeah, I'm aware there's some frizziness going on, and the under eye bags are under eye bagging. I think this gets us already to, um, some of what we're gonna be talking about today because we live in a society where we're constantly looking at ourselves.

That leads me to some of my practices. All right. In the morning I use a cream cleanser, some sort of probiotic toner that helps me with seborrheic dermatitis, then a regular milky toner, the Hailey Bieber Rhode toner, followed by a hydrating serum, which then in the evenings gets swapped out for a retinol or a, an exfoliating serum, which I switch off nightly.

Then I use moisturizer, and in the morning I follow that with sunscreen, mascara, concealer, and eyebrow, uh, brushing. Sorry, that took me a second. Um, and maybe some additional steps like blush. Then of course there's the hair. Um, I have a lot of hair products that I use. I often blow-dry my hair with the Dyson, which costs an arm and a leg.

I also every night use a microcurrent device for, to like 

get a more snatched jawline. It's like this... You a- okay. You have to put ultrasound gel on your face, like the same, when I, when I went to the hospital to see my sister give birth, they had the same ultrasound gel at the hospital. But I buy it for my face, and it basically, I don't entirely understand it, but it basically zaps your skin to make it stronger or something, and more glowy and snatched.

And then I also do, like, a red light laser, and then occasionally I'll do some, uh, larger things like microneedling, which we'll talk about in our interview with Heather. Those are a few things. There's more, but

[00:03:10] David: Oh my gosh, there's more? Okay, so I wanted to ask you 'cause I was like, "Oh, Ellie's gonna share, then I'll share my routine, and we'll see how they, like, pair up against one another." There is absolutely no comparison, Ellie,

[00:03:21] Ellie: Yeah. Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised. Yeah, and just to give you a hint of what's more, I'm not hiding, like, major stuff that I do. I tried baby Botox two times, and I felt like I looked like Matt Gaetz, so I'm not currently doing that. So I'm not, like, gatekeeping here. But the other things I have in mind are, like, an exfoliating lotion for my arms or occasional balayage, which is like highlights but fancier, regular haircuts, and so on and so forth

[00:03:48] David: Okay, so I don't even know what half of the things that you mentioned are, but

[00:03:52] Ellie: Well, sorry, you were gonna, you were gonna talk about your routine. I'm like, "Let me tell you more about mine."

[00:03:57] David: No, my routine, I think in some ways it's like a clear illustration of how little men work at beautification compared to women. But I do think I do more beautification than the average man. So, you know, I get a haircut every four weeks, max six weeks. So I, I have my guy who is my hairstylist, and I go to that same person and they already know exactly what I like.

I shave every morning, uh, not because I want to have like a clean-cut look in the sense of being hairless, but because I want my beard to be trimmed. So every morning I wake up and I have to shave. I have to tweeze my eyebrows because as I've mentioned before, I have, uh, Frida Kahlo, uh, unibrow, but I cannot pull it off like Frida Kahlo could.

So,

[00:04:40] Ellie: I honestly feel like, you could, but I support your decision to tweeze it

[00:04:44] David: Yeah. So I tweeze my eyebrows. I also have this, like, eye liquid that I drop in my eyes just so I keep my eyes clear. I- that one is semi-cosmetic but semi-medical. Um, so it's, like, borderline between the two. I do have one cream that I apply to my face, and it's an anti-wrinkle cream.

That's, like, honestly the most invasive form of beautification that I do. It's the application of a cream. What else do I do? I sometimes do put, sunscreen on when I go out if it's a sunny day. And

in 

[00:05:18] Ellie: need to be putting it on every day. Just 

because you're brown doesn't mean that you shouldn't be putting on sunscreen

[00:05:23] David: So yeah, honestly, I have been shamed by a number of brown gay men for this in my social circle where they're like, A, uh, you think that you don't need it because you're brown, but that's actually a misconception and you're gonna get skin cancer.

Um, and, and two, you just need it because the sun is taking its toll with the, uh, with the wrinkles. But I think in my case, the most clear practice of beautification is that I go to the gym regularly.

Um, a- and, uh, that I want to include here in discussions of beautification because what's more interesting than what gets included is actually what gets excluded, especially in the case of men and our obsession with our bodies that we try to beat into submission through the use of force and weight, I think, uh, should be read in light of contemporary debates about the beauty industry.

So that's where I'm at,

[00:06:12] Ellie: Okay. 

Okay. 

[00:06:13] David: effort, but some effort.

[00:06:15] Ellie: You didn't mention you also paint your nails. I regularly have to go through our YouTube comments and delete, like, weird homophobic comments about how you shouldn't trust a man who paints his nails.

[00:06:23] David: Oh yeah, I, I stopped that though, 'cause it was too much work.

[00:06:27] Ellie: Oh. Oh my God. 

[00:06:28] David: been many months,

[00:06:29] Ellie: Oh, okay, okay. I wonder as listeners are hearing this, whether you might find yourself surprised that two philosophy professors are talking openly about these things, or even about some of the contents of the things that we do.

And I think we're gonna come back to the question of choice in our interview with Heather Widdows today, because she has a lot to say about this. But suffice it to say that it's not as simple as you either embrace these things or you reject them, right? We're existing in a very gray area. Did I choose to spend my money on a microcurrent device and a Dyson hairdryer?

Absolutely. But that choice is also happening within a context where youth, a certain kind of beauty, and polished hair are things that women are being judged on. And so before we get into some of the ethical questions around this, I just wanna say, David, one thing that I experience firsthand is the fun and pleasure of this, right?

I think we know, given our areas of expertise, that our feelings of fun and pleasure don't happen in a social vacuum. And that said, like, I love my group chats with my girlfriends where we're like, "Did you try this sunscreen? What about this thing?" And we, like, wanna go to Korea together and try this, like, special facial and that type of thing.

This is girl culture to a T

[00:07:46] David: so it's funny that you say the fun and the, uh, joy of it because I actually experienced when I was a kid some aspects of beauty culture as really annoying because my mom tried to bring me into that girl's, like, chat circle and social circle because she was a beautician. So I am the child of a beautician.

That was my mom's primary job, and so I grew up in this situation where she had her beauty salon in our house, in the front part of our house. So every day I would leave to go to school, and every day I would come back, I would basically, like, pass through her beauty salon and spend time there. And so when I was a kid, I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast, she would use me as her guinea pig for all these treatments, you know, like creams and lotions.

She would give me, like, fancy haircuts. She would give me highlights when I was, like, a really young kid 'cause she thought it was cool. And so I, I saw that sense of, like, the joy and the experimentation and the being with your friends largely through the lens of her relationships with her adult women friends.

And, uh, in a sense, I got an unexpected entry point into that, but that also caused me to not really be that interested in it 'cause I was like, "Oh, this is old news." I was not opposed to it, but I was like, "Oh, this is like mom stuff. This is what my mom does with all her, all her friends," and it's not pushing the boundary.

Uh, you know, so when I was a teenager, I was like, "Oh, my friends are getting highlights. I did that when I was eight." Like, this is not really cool anymore.

[00:09:16] Ellie: That's 

[00:09:16] David: so it, it really depends, I think, on the relationship that you have to beauty, and I think a lot

of that is determined by family dynamics.

[00:09:22] Ellie: Yeah, my mom could not care less. She's had a pixie cut since she was in her 30s, and she, like, does not, she's not into any of this stuff. But I grew up with a closeted gay dad who did my hair every morning before school, and so I feel like that was, it was, like, through bonding with my dad that some of these joys came to be.

And I also think, in a way, my dad was kind of living through the femininity that I got to express because he felt that was so policed and, you know, was a source of bullying for him as a kid, and so he had to completely hide his interest in all of this stuff

[00:09:55] David: Heather Widdows is professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. She specializes in ethics and the philosophy of appearance, including questions of beauty, body modification, and the politics of lookism. She's the author of several books, including The Connected Self: The Ethics and Governance of the Genetic Individual, Global Ethics: An Introduction, and the book that will be the focus of today's conversation, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal

[00:10:23] Ellie: Heather, welcome to Overthink. We're so happy to have you

[00:10:26] Heather: Oh, thank you for having me. Really happy to be with you

[00:10:29] David: Well, we're really excited to talk to you about the details of your views on beautification. I think this is a topic that a lot of people have questions about, and they wanna know what a professional philosopher has to say about our beauty culture and beautification rituals. So I wanna begin by asking you about the status of beauty in our culture, because you point out in your book that we very frequently tend to dismiss beauty as something that is shallow, that is superficial, that is unserious.

But if we pause for a moment to consider the extent to which beauty actually shapes our lives and how far we go in our efforts to attain it, beauty actually turns out to be the opposite of those things. It's very serious. It's very momentous. It's something that alters how we live and how we relate to one another.

So, you know, we judge one another by beauty standards. We spend a lot of money on beautification. Our sense of self-worth is very much tied up with how other people see us. And so you make the argument that in our culture, beauty has become not just an aesthetic value, but what you call an ethical ideal.

Can you tell us what you mean by this?

[00:11:42] Heather: Yes, of course they can. So the argument of the book, the main argument is that beauty has become this ethical ideal, that the moral aspect of beauty engagement and beauty judgment is crucial to understand what's going on, crucial to understand why it's so hard to let it go and why it has such impact on us.

So I don't mean anything super complicated. I mean that it's become something that we value most, often over other things like health or education. It's something that we aspire to. As you said, it drives our day-to-day practices, you know. So we spend a lot of our leisure time trying to improve our bodies by which we think we will improve ourselves.

So it's that connection between the self and the body that is driving the claim that it's an ethical ideal. So kind of when we judge ourselves on our appearance, we're not just judging ourselves for some kind of pragmatic reason. We are making moral judgments, you know. We're judging whether or not you conform to the ideal, and when we fail, we feel like failures, and this is a kind of global failure of the self.

It's not a local failure, right? We don't feel just bad we've done something wrong. We quite literally feel ashamed of ourselves, and that shame goes really deep. Um, shame of something we are, not of something we've done. So that's a kind of very familiar concept. You see it all over beauty talk. It's literally saturated with morality.

So, you know, "I've been good today, I went to the gym," or, "Oh, I ate that naughty piece of cake." And I always have in my head these little pictures of these very naughty little pieces of cake. And I guess the final thing I say is that it's an odd concept in a way for beauty to be an ethical ideal, 'cause we tend to think, especially philosophers tend to think about ethical ideals as all about the character.

So they think of Aristotle's mean, or they think of the good Christian ideal or, or ideals like the military ideal is one that I kind of bring up a lot of, fair play and honor. And all of these ideals believe that if you do it right, if you are truthful enough or love God and your neighbor enough, you will be rewarded in this life or the next.

And the military ideal, if you are honorable enough, then you will be respected in this life. And the beauty ideal is no different. People believe that if you are good enough, if you conform enough, if you get beauty right, then you will be delivered the goods of the good life, relationship success, happiness, employment, everything that it promises.

So it's-- even though it's about appearance, the things that it promises are far, far more than you might think at first glance.

[00:14:17] Ellie: Yeah, and I think this really speaks to precisely the fact that beauty is not some superficial concern. Um, and it's one that I think some people are familiar with a version of the idea that beauty is not a superficial concern, but actually has a lot to do with morality. But I think that your view is actually much more original than a more common version of understanding the link between beauty and morality.

So many of us are familiar with the ways that beauty offers material and social rewards. You know, we might have heard the studies which you talk about in your work that conventionally beautiful people have higher employability and salaries. They're treated as being more lovable and memorable. And so many have emphasized how we take beauty as a stand-in for moral goodness, and that that's a pretty messed up view to hold, right?

But I think your view is different because you're not saying that beauty is a stand-in for goodness or taken as a sign of goodness. You're actually saying it is equated with goodness, and that I think is like really the power of this idea that beauty is an ethical or moral ideal. And so I'm curious what you might say to someone who would say, "I don't know if I buy that."

It might be more palatable to just say that beauty is a stand-in for an ethical ideal and not like an ethical ideal itself.

[00:15:35] Heather: No, absolutely. And, and that's a really important point. I think one of the reasons that it's been so hard for people to recognize how the value has changed is that we do have this long-standing connection where beauty is a proxy for or a stand-in for goodness. Um, and so it's kind of like people just say, "Oh, well, you know, that's just more of the st- the same," right?

We've always told those stories to our children, right? The stepmother is ugly, the sisters are ugly, and then, you know, the beast can't be loved and stay a beast. He has to transform back into a prince, which is quite crazy given it's a beast that she fell in love with, and so on, right? 

[00:16:11] Ellie: I have been told that I kind of look like the Beast after he transforms into a human. It's true. Look, look back at

the 90s Disney movie. I like, I casually look like the Beast as a prince.

[00:16:23] Heather: Okay 

[00:16:24] David: have you seen all those TikTok videos of little girls seeing it for the first time and being extremely disappointed when the beast transforms

[00:16:32] Ellie: Yeah, no, I mean, 

[00:16:33] David: character?

[00:16:34] Ellie: he's got nothing on Aladdin or Prince Eric. But yeah, unfortunately I am the Beast as a prince.

[00:16:39] Heather: Right. I am, and that's my task for tonight is to just go back and have a look and see if... So right. So ex- so ex- so exactly. Um, but those, when they were proxies, they were proxies for a character, so there was a beautiful soul that they were supposed to be proxies for. So I don't think that beauty in this instance is functioning as a signifier at all.

Like, we really don't care much about the character that's underlying it. Um, and you can see in some of the kind of ways, So on the one hand, people know it's true that people do get higher salaries and that ugly criminals get harsher sentences. But on the other hand, we don't quite wanna believe this.

So we do two things at once. We absolutely know that what I talk about as lookism, but you could call it appearance discrimination or the halo effect or, or TikTok language, pretty privilege,

[00:17:25] Ellie: Yeah. Yep.

[00:17:26] Heather: everybody knows it's real, but nobody wants to take it seriously, and its impact is in fact as serious as, you know, racist bullying, for instance.

So there's a kind of, there's a strangeness there. But in those instances, often there is a kind of thought that something else is going on. So if you look at the kind of furore, internet furore around, uh, Luigi Mangione, who was the, um, you know, the guy

[00:17:49] Ellie: Oh, David and I are familiar.

[00:17:51] David: Yeah. Ellie was obsessed with him.

[00:17:54] Ellie: I,

[00:17:54] Heather: so what went viral was

[00:17:58] David: Yeah

[00:17:58] Heather: #hotassassin and, you know, there was no question that, you know, people weren't saying, "Oh, he hasn't done it."

They were somehow saying, "Oh, he shouldn't be punished for it." So there's a 

kind of way... Right. So there's this kind of way in which now, um, the, the things that we're supposed to be a pox- proxy for, right? I think often they have disappeared. It's no longer a proxy. It is actually doing the job. And in the book, I talk about the ideal as being like greedy and stealthy.

I think it snuck up on us and one of the reasons it snuck up on us is because it looks a little bit like that long-standing connection, and I think actually what's happening now is completely different

[00:18:34] David: Yeah, and I think the example of, convincing ourselves that somebody is innocent because they are beautiful or that somebody should not face consequences for their behavior because they are good-looking, it just makes me think about the many moral compromises we make in our social life, in our political life, in our individual lives in connection to beauty.

And I think part of that is because when we grow up under a particular beauty regime, we experience that beauty ideal as transhistorical, as objective. This truly is what beauty is. And we know also that that's not the case, right? Beauty ideals are culturally dependent. They change over time, and they change kind of rapidly really if you take a deep historical perspective.

And you point out in your book, well, you outline four different features that are generalizable across most culture, which you identify as, you know, the beauty ideal. Can you tell us what these four features are so that our listeners have a sense of how you are thinking about it, and also explain how those four features are becoming increasingly global in our contemporary world?

[00:19:46] Heather: So a global ideal, I think, and we can come back to this, right? I don't think it's gonna change over time in the same way that past ideals have. So this stra-- I think this is another thing that I think is absolutely transformative and completely different. So the features that I talk about are thinness, firmness, smoothness, and youth.

And I kind of map these globally, right? So obviously I'm a philosopher, right? So I'm never gonna claim to be this like brilliant empirical data person. But what I have become very good at as applied philosopher is using the data of others. So, you know, data from across domains, social science, science, medicine, psychology to track these.

So thinness then. Thinness has to be in some form, so it's not all the same everywhere. It's not just catwalk thin. It can be thin with curves, it can be athletic, all kinds of different ways. But some features are always thin. So really obviously waist, ankles, and necks can be thin with curves. Sometimes people see this as less demanding, but actually to get the right curves in the right places is pretty hard going.

Firmness of the body connected to those kind of curves, so you can't be wobbly or jiggly. And firmness of the face. Now this is really interesting, especially since Perfect Me, the way this has changed over the last decade and increased social media use, that firmness of the face is, is really dramatic.

Not a wrinkle in sight, the perfect snatched jaw. You know, and hence we've got all these strange practices like mewing happening at the moment to kind of improve your snatched jaw. Um, smoothness. Smoothness connects to firmness. So in Perfect Me, I spent a lot of time on hair removal, and of course, hair removal is much more demanding for some groups than for others.

And body hair is now seen as abnormal, unnatural, dirty, and disgusting even though of course, you know, our bodies actually do grow hair. And smoothness again, like firmness of the face, smoothness is becoming much more demanding since I wrote Perfect Me, and, and so much of, of these trends have been absolutely exacerbated by the pandemic.

[00:21:44] Ellie: Oh yeah. Well, let's come back to that too because I, yeah, I feel like there's a lot to say since you published your book in 2018. Um, yeah.

[00:21:53] Heather: So much. I mean, I, you know, I went back and checked. The, the current book I'm working on is Selfie Culture. I mention selfies twice in Perfect Me, and if you think, like, TikTok was at that point really only inside China, and we thought of Instagram as a community-building site, right? So that's changed.

And so, and so things like luminosity, right? That's the kind of... the, the smoothness feature, right? Faces don't actually glow, right? That's not possible, right? So th- these are very, um, inhuman concepts. And then the final one is youth. Now, youth is one that you might think is part of many beauty ideals, perhaps the only one that's been a global feature until recently.

But I think what youth entails now, and again, this is maybe different from when I wrote Perfect Me because the tech has changed a lot. So, you know, youth isn't... You know, if you think about reproductive success, it's not about just having your own teeth and hair, right? It's, for instance, having things like larger eyes, right?

And that, of course, is also connected to the other images we use. But things like double eyelid surgery is a very popular surgery, so often, um, used with Asian eyes to give the, the curve on the top of the eye if you don't have one, but also used with aging eyes to reduce drooping or did eyes. You know, all of these things are now sins.

[00:23:08] Ellie: Hailey Bieber is suspected to have had upper and lower blepharoplasty according to the things I've seen on social media

[00:23:16] Heather: So many people and, you know, and the bigger brightening eyes when you do it on social media, it's at a click of a button, you get those big bright eyes, the right eyes that you couldn't fit in your face and so on. And, and again, we're talking about this being global. So for women, these ideals are global.

There's nothing that tracks for men except tallness. So there's something quite different happening 

with men. But once it becomes global, then it normalizes and homogenizes and the global really, really matters. I mean, we've had some really horrific demanding beauty practices in the past, but they were always beauty practices.

And what a global ideal does is it turns beauty practices into health and hygiene practices. So the example I use when I'm teaching is things like foot binding or corset wearing. So you know that tiny lotus little perfect bound foot was horrifically demanding, but nobody could think it was natural. But when everybody does it, when it becomes global, then it becomes natural.

So the, the resources of resistance for things like corset wearing or foot binding within society, only a small number of women did this. You had obvious other people not doing it and between societies, but when it becomes required, everyone has to do it and then it becomes just normal like body hair removal just becomes normal and it's dirty to have it or white teeth, you know, become normal.

So yellow teeth are dirty and where do we end up? Wrinkles are abnormal in many places now

[00:24:44] David: Well, actually this process of naturalization of practices that we all recognize are not natural makes me think about the relationship between beauty and health. Because I could imagine somebody looking at these four criteria that you just laid out and saying, "Well, thinness, firmness, smoothness, youth, those seem to track health, not necessarily beauty."

But that's not your view. On your view, these are really ways of thinking about beauty that are becoming, uh, universalized under our way of thinking about what beauty is. And so can you explain to us why the idea that this could track health, which I could imagine somebody like an evolutionary psychologist, taking this position, why on your view they would be wrong to think that?

[00:25:35] Heather: Yeah. So I think they'd be wrong for, for very many reasons, right? One is just that the kind of ideal we're promoting s- is not very healthy, right? So it's this kind of, you know, very thin in, in some places in women often means that you're not menstruating. The kind of need to have invasive surgery often.

So thin with curves, you either have to do body work in extreme ways or you have to have implants on an otherwise thin frame. If you look at men, it's really pronounced that the kind of bodies we are, um, aspiring to often require steroid use. a reproductive doctor that I, that I've known for-- well, I've known since I was at school, actually, told me recently that he is seeing men now in his clinics having issues with conceiving with their partners, and often it's connected to, , the kind of drugs that they're taking.

So they look incredibly virile, right? 'Cause they've got this, what looks to be the ideal, and people associate that with health and virility. But they're not willing to stop the drugs to actually make themselves virile. So they're-- so, yeah. And we see 

this all the time

[00:26:40] Ellie: the main looksmaxer, has talked about how he's sterile because of all the drugs he's taking

[00:26:45] Heather: Yeah, and women, you know, uh, y- the thin that we aspire to doesn't make you healthy. So we're not actually manifesting something healthy, and, and really oddly, we're also not manifesting something touchable, right? So it's a very visual ideal, right? So it's about how you look. It's not about how you are with another person.

There's something that's quite isolating and inhuman about what's going on. Um, so we've s- we know that lots of young people are having less sex. I think that one of the reasons that we're having less sex is, , because it's about how you look all the time, not how you feel, right? So you have to be looking sexy, not actually feeling sexy and engaging when it...

So there's something that's, like, absolutely f- if you're an evolutionary perspective coming at this, this is not healthy. 

This is not gonna work.

[00:27:37] David: yeah, it's something that we've mentioned also at, at some other point in the podcast, is that this focus on visuality actually makes sex unsexy for a lot of people because it's kind of hard to be sexy in this visual way when you're having sex, right? Like, nobody can look like their Instagram filter or like they do on their dating profile pictures when they're rolling around in the sheets.

And so there is this way in which this desire for sex and sexiness is a self-destroying prophecy 'cause it means you actually have to stay away from the thing

[00:28:09] Heather: Right. Fundamentally unsexy, 'cause sex is messy, it's noisy, it's funny, and it's fundamentally about communication. Sex is fundamentally about communication. This ideal is not. It is about being observed. So I kind of think that the healthy body and the beautiful body and the sexy body, these three things are all coming apart, right?

So I think that they used to converge, , and what was beautiful was also what was healthy, was also what was sexy, and I, I really think that they're splitting and the healthy body is no longer the beautiful body. But even the sexy body and the-- like, people are less concerned about people finding them a- actually attractive, as in actually wanting to have a relationship with them, and much more concerned with are they conforming to the ideal?

[00:28:58] Ellie: Absolutely. And you've given us now a really nice account of, you know, the basic contours of your view in Perfect Me. I wanna turn now to thinking about the current moment and what your arguments have to say about it. Because like we mentioned before, since you published this book in 2018, what you call lookism has only increased, I would say maybe even exponentially.

And I live in Los Angeles, I see this everywhere. You know, there are all these conversations around the normalization of certain practices, and so I wanna get into some of that too. But I'd like to start by picking up on the looksmaxing community among men. Because one of the things that really interested me about your book is that you notice that the beauty ideal is increasingly expected of men, and you predict that this trend will intensify.

Well, it turns out that you were right. In the years since 2018, we've seen the rise of the looksmaxing movement, and so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it

[00:29:57] Heather: Yeah. I mean, I don't, I didn't wanna be right, but it turns out that I ... So it's fascinating what's happened to men over the last decade. So when I published Perfect Me, I would have put money on the fact that that older demographic of men would never be subject to the beauty ideal,

[00:30:13] Ellie: Oh, you thought it was just gonna be younger men

[00:30:15] Heather: I thought as the younger men grew up, then it would expand, and I thought it would expand from the demographics where it currently is to more demographics.

But I thought that older men would just continue to live as they were and probably die not caring about how they look. The majority of them, I mean, not, not maybe people in the beauty business. But then the pandemic came and men, powerful, rich men that previously had maybe looked at themselves in the mirror for five minutes to, you know, sort their tie out and maybe, , after they'd been to the bathroom, but basically did not look at themselves, they suddenly spent hours and hours on Zoom and Skype and Teams, and cosmetic surgeons tell us that that demographic is now going for treatments and tweakments in a way that, you know.

So it's like it's totally fallen on men, and therefore that's made it much more acceptable amongst men. And then that younger generation, oh my goodness, those looksmaxxing generation, on them it falls really, really hard. So, um, you know, again, caveat, there is no global feature for men, but on those groups where it now falls, it's falling almost as heavily as it does with women.

They are obsessed with appearance, um, their own appearance and women's appearance. They obsessively track and share workout stats, and they rank themselves on various scales, different scales, but one is the PSL scale. So that stands for pickup artist hate, slut hate, and lookism. So I'm glad that lookism is getting out there in one way or another, but I wish it wasn't that.

And then you're 

all the way from-- I know. 

[00:31:48] Ellie: you mean by it.

[00:31:49] Heather: no. Oh, but all the way from kind of good-looking men at the top, alphas and chads, to subhumans at the bottom, and there's this really, um, strong belief that most men don't make the grade, right? So it's really important to recognize in these communities, right?

They have this eighty/twenty rule that's almost like a gospel. It's like a creed that eighty percent of women will only, only and exclusively only go with the top twenty percent of men. So then looksmaxxing is, is so dominant. So there's a really strange way that these are quite women-hating communities at the same time as nearly all of their sense of self is about picking up those women.

And so they have these strange blue pill and red pill ideologies. So when you wake up, you realize that appearance is the dominant value. Those that don't, right, they're still asleep. They still think that appearance doesn't matter that much. So it's, it's an absolute fascinating change. So when, when they tell somebody, "Oh, you're a blue piller," they're insulting them, right?

That's applied to men who believe in romantic concepts like love, who wrongly think that personality matters when all that matters is looks So we're really moving. It's almost more than the way the beauty ideal has fallen on women because they recognize it in a way that it's still sort of women know it and they will talk about it amongst themselves, but it hasn't been kind of brought out into the debate in the way the looksmaxing communities really bring it out

[00:33:17] David: So what I really like about thinking about the role the beauty ideal is playing increasingly among men is that it also helps us problematize this very old stereotype that it's women alone who care about their visual appearance for others, because that's a view that a lot of men hold about women, even those men who are deeply obsessed about their image, uh, more and more.

So for instance, I just saw an article that the Korea Times ran about how there is this crisis in the South Korean military because all these young men who go to the military and suddenly have a lot more disposable income are going to get procedures like eyelid surgeries or rhinoplasties on the weekend, you know, when they're off from their job, and then they don't realize the recovery times, and then they have to come back and tell their commanders, like, "I can't do my military service because I'm recovering."

And to the point that it's actually causing an issue with their military readiness and preparation. Uh, so I mean, in a way, great that the beauty industry is the one that's taking down the military industrial complex. Um, but just, like, how pervasive it actually is among men, not to mention all the hair transplant procedures

[00:34:26] Ellie: Well, and especially Korea. Korea is the epicenter of all of this

[00:34:29] David: Yeah. And, uh, so I also wanna ask you about not just about men or women, but our relationship to these beauty norms because we've established by now that beauty norms change with time, but the beauty norms that predominate in the societies that we are born into do exercise like an almost gravitational pull over our minds.

And so I wanna ask you about to what extent we can think about the world of beauty through the lens of individual choice. So to what extent am I freely choosing to undergo a beautification ritual, you know, let's say when I get up in the morning and I apply anti-wrinkle cream or when I do my hair or when I go shopping for beautiful clothes, or can we say that this is the result of false consciousness?

Or do we say that the pervasiveness and the power of the beauty ideal means that we need to rethink what we mean by choice in the first place? And so I, I wanna hear your thoughts about this because, of course, we make decisions to undergo a lot of beautification processes, but it's not a choice that is made in a vacuum.

[00:35:43] Ellie: And I just wanna add to this, Heather, you might be aware of this given, uh, your expertise, but this has been really a resurgent topic online recently in the wake of a viral article on Substack about, called, like, Everybody's Getting Botox Now. And I've seen numerous YouTube essays by feminist, uh, critics online kind of addressing this, and a real resurgence of the question of choice feminism.

And I'm just seeing all this stuff and I'm like, "Uh, you know whose perspective we need on this? Heather Widdows."

[00:36:11] Heather: Thank you. That's so nice of you. Um, I think it won't surprise you, right? So I've, I've got a chapter in the book called I'm Doing It for Me. I think very little of this is choice, right? So of course, we are making choices, but in really constrained contexts. So I actually have a paper that I wrote after Perfect Me, just addressing the false consciousness claim 'cause I, I just do not think it's false consciousness.

I don't think it's false consciousness for many reasons, one of which is that there are benefits, right? Lookism is real, as we've talked about, but it is not-- they do not deliver the things that they think it'll deliver. So it's not irrational to care about one's appearance, but it will not deliver all of that package, the goods to the goods life.

So it is irrational to over care about it. But the other argument that I make in that paper that's not in Perfect Me is that I think telling people what to do or not to do with their bodies is just absolutely wrong, right? We should not be worrying about the choices that people make because these are nearly always wholly constrained by the communities that they are in, right?

So I constantly like saying it's, you know, it's much easier for a professor of philosophy not to wear makeup, possibly even required, than it is for a bar worker or a retail worker. And usually, those critiques just do not take account of the positions of privileges that people are in. It's so widespread to care about, um, how you look, right?

Body image anxiety really is that, you know, everybody says, "Oh, things are epidemic and existential crisis," right? But things are at epidemic levels when it comes to body image. So some pre-pandemic figures in the UK, over a third of men and women report being anxious and depressed because of their body image.

So that's pre-pandemic, and it's the UK, right? So the UK is not as body conscious as the US, not as body conscious as Korea or Brazil. So I imagine it's higher elsewhere. And one in eight have suicidal thoughts based on their appearance. All right? And one in six have suicidal thoughts based on being in extreme debt.

We tend to take extreme debt seriously. We haven't taken body image very seriously. So there, there is a choice, but hugely constrained, right? I also think it's just unethical to blame people for what they do, right? We've just talked about how overwhelmingly demanding this is. If you focus on who does it, who's had Botox, who's not had Botox, right?

One thing that, uh, you're not recognizing the pressures in the communities, but you're also putting all the attention back on the body, right? So that it stops you doing the kind of things that might help us reduce the power of the ideal. Because instead of focusing on how we reduce the demands, we just start looking at each other's bodies even more.

We're already looking too much at each other's bodies. So you know, my line on that, it was-- I came out quite hard in Perfect Me. In the last ten years, I've gone harder and harder and harder, right? We don't body shame. It's just another form of body shaming. Divides women against each other. It's, it's, it's really unhelpful, and I go as far to say in that paper, unethical.

Just don't do it

[00:39:02] Ellie: And so what might you say to, let's say a feminist, I've heard a couple of takes on this recently in the discourse that I mentioned around everybody's getting Botox now, saying that if you get Botox or if you, like, get breast implants, say, then you are contributing to the normalization of this and that therefore that's unethical.

Like, I just want to hear how might you directly address that approach, which I do think we see, see all over the place still today, even though it's something that feminists have been arguing about for decades.

[00:39:34] Heather: Right. Well, I think I would say, right for a start, of course, we're all contributing, right? If everybody stopped doing it all at once, then of course it would stop. But we're not in that position, and for all the reasons we've talked about, the ideal has a lot of power over us. Uh, one of the reasons it's so hard to give up is because it is a moral ideal, so people are quite literally ashamed of themselves.

When people give up, people talk about it as being like grief because you're not just giving up on, you know, not having a wrinkle-free face. None of these things are, are sold like that. You're giving up on that kind of imagined self, that perfect you that, that you think will have all these other things.

It's very, very complicated. So for people who don't engage and find it easy not to engage, they're just not falling under the ideal in that way, and they're failing to take account of the way that people do. They're probably protected by their communities that don't have those values. So in the book, I track various understandings of normal.

So I talk about, you know, exactly trying to divide what practices would be okay and what wouldn't, and I look at risk, I look at harm, I look at the time it takes, I look at whether somebody else is involved, and there are always counter examples. And it turns out the only thing that is always true is normal is what you do, what you want to do, and what your peer group do.

So when we do those things, it's just like, "Oh, I'm lucky enough not to be in that peer group." And then if you look at the way beauty's changed over time, so you know, it used to be the case that, that women who, you know, dyed their hair, "You're a bottle blonde", right? Or if you wore makeup and very many of these women that are talking, right, they will have their teeth straightened and whitened, and they don't think that that is for appearance, even though it has very little to do with functioning, right?

So I'm, I'm deeply critical of this. I, I kind of think it's a complete failure, and it doesn't work, right? So just-- like, let's just be pragmatic. It doesn't work. We've been spending fifty years saying, "Oh, just don't do this. Oh, just don't wear makeup. Oh, just..." Uh, and all the time, every time women have more money, they don't engage in beauty less, they engage in it more.

And it's so different, right? At the time we were first making those claims, I've got a lot of sympathy with those second-wave feminists, but they were not talking about beauty in a vacuum. They were talking about employment rights. They were talking about access to being equal with men in all kinds of ways, and they saw beauty as something that women did privately.

Well, that's not true. Women have won education rights, employment rights. We haven't stopped doing beauty, and in fact, , it often helps in the public sphere. So women who wear lipstick to work are, are judged as more competent and cleverer, right? It's, it's absolutely crazy that, that people will still say these things without ever holding a mirror up to themselves about where they're standing in relation to this.

[00:42:19] David: Heather, this makes me wonder about how we interpret the relationship between the self and the various beautification practices that the self does. Because a common line of thinking is that, and this is related to what Ellie just said, is that when we perform beautification rituals on ourselves, it's largely because we have internalized that judging, critical perspective of the other, ?

We start, in a sense, judging ourselves based on the way other people judge us, and so it's what is sometimes called, uh, self-objectification. And, uh, in your book, you have a really wonderful discussion of objectification and self-objectification, and you make the argument that even though the term objectification is often associated with negative things, nobody wants to be objectified.

You know, we have this idea that we shouldn't objectify ourselves. You point out that not all objectification is problematic, and not all objectification is sexual, and that's also true in the world of beauty practices. So when I, for example, put makeup or when I do my nails or when I get a manicure, in a sense it is true that I am objectifying myself, but you point out that that need not be sexual or harmful or negative.

And I think this is a counterintuitive argument, but a really good argument in your book. Can you explain to us what it means to be objectified, whether by oneself or by another, especially in the context of beauty, in such a way that it is not sexually, has nothing to do with sexual appeal and attraction, and in such a way that it's not necessarily a problem?

[00:44:05] Heather: So the example I use in the book that I think-- 'cause as you say, it's really counterintuitive. I think the example I-- that makes it clearest is the child in her mother's high heels or putting on lipstick, right? A small child. She is not sexually in any way objectifying herself sexually. She's not interested in sexual desire.

She's purely playing at what it might mean to be a grown-up, right? And part of it is about recognizing that we are bodies as well as minds. So philosophers have been very bad at this, right? They have tended to think that, that who we are is our mind or our character as if the body didn't exist. So part of what I'm trying to do is recognize that embodiment matters.

So if we're only body, that's a problem. But we are also body, and we do interact with other people and ourselves through our body, and that includes how we look. So in the book, I talk about beauty objectification as being without sexual threat and without sexual desire. I think a lot of the work around objectification and the harms of it are actually about the catcall example.

They're about being threatened, and they're about being reduced to being only desirable. I think when we do beauty objectification, part of what we're doing is playing with that imagined self, that, that self that's gonna get all the goods of the good life, and that is therefore identity and image creating.

So that's where I was in Perfect Me. I'm now more confused um, because, um, in selfie culture, we objectify ourselves all the time if what we mean by that is turning ourselves into an image. And we can hardly imagine how to be without those images now. And I'm not just talking about people putting a selfie on Instagram to look a certain way, often a perfect way.

I'm talking about how we do almost every bit of relationship. So, you know, now parents with young children, you know, when they've been to the park or to the fair or something or on holiday, they use the images of themselves there to communicate and remind themselves of the day they've had. My daughter says that Instagram is sort of her friends' photo albums, um, and they take them all the time.

So when I was growing up, photos-- well, film was expensive. We didn't have that. So I am beginning to really wonder about what the critique in objectification is. So we say objectification, we're condemning somebody, we mean something really bad. But I think we need to go back and think really hard about what are the harms of objectification when we take them away from sexual threat

[00:46:36] Ellie: Yeah. And you know, I couldn't agree with you more that objectification is not intrinsically bad. This is something we've talked about. I have an article about even sexual objectification not necessarily being bad, and in my forthcoming book there's a chapter on the self as object as well. And so I'm with you on that.

I have thoughts on how this relates to the self, but that is maybe for another time

[00:46:59] Heather: I'm looking forward to that chapter.

[00:47:01] Ellie: Thank you.

[00:47:02] Heather: I'm looking forward to the book, but I'm really looking forward to that chapter.

[00:47:06] Ellie: Thank you. No, I think there's good resources in phenomenology for kind of helping us think through this in a way that's not like drawing on mind-body dualism. But for now, I wanna get personal, because as our listeners know, I live in Los Angeles. This is, uh, you know, I mentioned that Korea is y- the, the sort of epicenter of beauty culture in its own way, and definitely in the US, LA is as well.

And I myself definitely have conversations constantly with other women friends about the sorts of procedures that we're interested in, the skincare things that we're doing. I have a whole special group chat where we share the, what we're interested in. When Korean skincare first got really popular around 2017, I went all in.

I was doing my 12-step skincare routine. Now I've winnowed that down a bit, but especially as I've aged into the second half of my 30s, have gotten more interested in more expensive, and some would say, more extreme practices. So I don't just like have my multi-step skincare routine. I also have started getting more regular facials.

I have done, uh, microneedling. Just in a couple of days after this recording, I'm doing this thing, microneedling plus PRP, platelet-rich plasma, where I am spending a hefty chunk of my own hard-earned money as a college professor going to an aesthetician and getting a bunch of needles poked into my face to extract the plasma and get it re-injected into my face so that I glow a little bit more.

So there you've got like the youth and smoothness ideals that we were talking about 

[00:48:42] David: Some faces do really glow

[00:48:44] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:48:45] David: after plasma replacement procedures.

[00:48:48] Heather: They don't emit light, but they 

are more glowy.

[00:48:52] Ellie: Yeah, yeah.

[00:48:53] Heather: They don't literally emit 

light. 

[00:48:55] Ellie: glow. Yeah, yeah, fair. Fair. Um, I don't know. We'll s- we'll see though. Maybe I'll, maybe we'll get, I'll

[00:49:00] Heather: You can send me a picture. 

[00:49:01] Ellie: in a few years. But I'm very open with my students when I teach philosophy of gender about my own, you know, imbrication in these practices that we might see as anti-feminist.

Um, and I think that's, y- this takes us back to our point earlier that it's, like, not a simple question of choice. And I will say part of my interest in some of these more expensive practices started with having to see my face on video all the time. I mean, not just on Zoom, as you mentioned earlier, but also because we have a podcast.

I- if people are watching on video right now, I have a pretty janky background because I had to record in my closet due to some sound issues. But you know, w- I do also have more highly produced videos where the lights are a little brighter. And so I guess I'm curious, I was thinking about this a lot when I was reading your book because you talk about the increasing normalization of what might seem to be more extreme practices.

And if you had told me 10 years ago that I would be spending a chunk of my hard-earned money to get platelet-rich plasma injected into my face, I would've been shocked. But by the standards of a lot of my peers here in Los Angeles, I'm doing the absolute minimum. You know? Like fillers and Kybella and, like, large amounts of Botox.

Th- these are things that are just, like, constantly being talked about in Los Angeles where I live, and I see the other women that I go to the gym with and I'm like, "Oh wow, you could tell me they were 25 or you could tell me they were 55," and I kind of have no idea. So I'm curious, what are you noticing about the rise of extreme practices of beautification in our current moment?

And if the solution is not to say we should all abstain from this and judge people who don't, then how might we respond to it?

[00:50:48] Heather: So first of all, I hope that I've made you feel a bit more guilt-free about this, right? 'Cause you've just described,

it being perfectly connected to the community you live in and what's normal in your, the community that you live in, and this is absolutely the case. And what I find is that people do what is normal, and that, that tracks...

Like, so I was a, I'd spent, you know, a very many decades of my life working in global justice before I moved into beauty. And I, at the outset, I was feeling a little bit like, oh, it's a bit trivial. All the things that I now think are rubbish. But I was at a global justice conference, and I was talking to a development ethicist, and he was telling me that people were swapping their antiretrovirals for skin lightening cream, right?

So this is not a, a kind of, you know, no matter... This is why it's global. Wherever you are, you do what you can afford and what is normal in that space, unless you're within one of these very protected communities, and those protected communities are getting smaller and smaller. So loads and loads of academics who you would think if, to present, if, you know, are not engaged, they suddenly confess all kinds of things to me.

So lots more people engaged than think so.

[00:51:57] Ellie: Can I just say on that, Heather, when I first went to this esthetician that I go to, I told her, "I don't wanna look like I have a frozen face. I'm a college professor." And she was like, "So is my mother-in-law. You wanna see a picture of her? You'd never know." And I was like, "Okay." It was like a trust-building moment.

[00:52:11] Heather: Absolutely. And you said though that you're honest with your students, right? So what is... So the global ideal for the features is global, but whether people talk about it and the reasons that justify it are completely different. So a really stark example I track in the book is the difference between the US and very many places in Europe, and especially the UK, 'cause in the UK we have a, a national health service, right?

So there's this extreme guilt about having any kind of thing that's not kind of necessary for functioning because health is all about need. Whereas in many parts of the US people are like, "I can afford it. I'm, I c- I did it. I'm doing this for me." It's like, so that's really, really interesting. So in terms of, um, how extreme, so I, I can only see this rising.

It's been rising for the whole time that I've been working on this. I can only see that happening more and more. The tech is making it possible to do things that we didn't use to do. So some of the care of appearance has been something we've always cared about, so we are adorning. Human beings have always painted themselves and their environments, right?

This is part of the kind of beings we are, and now the tech has changed the amount of things that we can do. But if we don't wanna live in a world where we all have to do extraordinarily demanding things just to look normal, then we do think about how to push back. Just telling people not to do it and condemning them when they do, right, that definitely hasn't worked.

I think we need to look at the beauty ideal. So one of the things that I've been absolutely focusing on is stopping body shaming, right? And that's body shaming for, for anything, for engaging in beauty practices, for letting yourself go, for being too fat, too thin. So I have the, this, um, everyday lookism campaign where people upload their stories.

So I was totally naive. I thought kind of like everyday sexism, it would, it would just take off. Of course, it didn't take off at all because everybody's ashamed of their bodies, and when somebody says something nasty about how you look, it cuts really deep. So lots of journalists massively interested, but those stories we had to make it anonymous, couldn't be done on social media.

Uh, gradually the stories trickled in. There's hundreds and hundreds of stories, but they're all heartbreaking. But together they tell a, a big picture. So think- thinking about how we stop body shaming, I've done work with various bullying charities, and actually you can stop body shaming in a school really fast.

Like, you make it zero tolerance for lookist comments in the same way you do for racist comments, and that, that suddenly works. It doesn't mean that people are, are not still worrying about their appearance, but it takes away the fear that their appearance will be called out. So there are things that we can do.

And also, like if you just... the um, this is clearly just having its zeitgeist. So, so if you look at the media, right? If we think that matters, like the Hulu series, The Beauty, or Demi Moore's The Substance, right? We all know that this is out there and we, and we know that we'll do almost anything for it, including risk our lives.

Um, so we're starting- To have those conversations about why is it that this is what we're defining human beings as? So starting there, starting by talking about it, starting by not condemning people and, and definitely whatever else we do, don't tell our children that it's what's on the inside that counts because we're lying to them

[00:55:28] David: Mm. That's really good place for us to begin as a society and a great place for us to end as podcasters in this conversation. Heather, thank you so much for your time. We highly recommend your book to our listeners. So for those of you interested, the book is Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal by Heather Widdows

[00:55:48] Heather: And it's got a beautiful cover too.

[00:55:50] Ellie: Oh, I love the cover. Thank you so much, Heather. It's been such a

[00:55:55] Heather: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you

[00:56:01] David: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our Substack for extended ad-free episodes, community chats, and additional Overthink content. To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one-time tax-deductible donations, go to overthinkpodcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube as well as TikTok and Instagram at overthink_pod. We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor Aaron Morgan, production assistants Ila Assegaf and Xavier Callan, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.