The trap looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.

Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy

pop culture has started to reflect the fractures in selfhood that social media creates.

They encourage you to produce yourself as the body that they ide- ally display.”

feedback loop,”

life has become frictionless.”

ut the idea, and the vast majority of the category, belongs to women.

In 1844, “optimize” was used as a verb for the first time, mean- ing “to act like an optimist.”

The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control.

ven in situations like this, in which women’s choices are constrained and dictated both by social expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty _work, which is more rewarding if one is young and rich and con- ventionally attractive to begin with.

he default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beau- tiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could. do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.

Photoshop use in ads and on magazine covers, which on the one - hand instantly exposed the artificiality and dishonesty of the con- temporary beauty standard, and on the other showed enough of a. ' powerful, lingering desire for “real” beauty that it cleared space for ever-heightened expectations.

Under this ethical ideal, women attribute implicit moral value to the day-to-day efforts of improving their looks, and failing to ‘\meet the beauty standard is framed as “not a local or partial fail- ure, but a failure of the self.”

I like trying to look good, but it’s hard to say how much you can genuinely, independently like what amounts to a mandate. In 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote, in The Beauty Myth, about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subju- gation has decreased.

fatalism

enclothed cognition,

permutations

incentive

paradigm

here beauty has historically functioned as a symbol for female worth and morality

Beauty constituted a sort of “third shift,” Wolf wrote—an extra obligation in every possible setting.

this seems to me to be the thing, with barre, that people pay $40 a class for, the investment that always brings back returns.:

Learning how to function more efficiently within an exhausting system:

we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.

marginal utility

ephemeral

beauty is now framed,

It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour workday,

Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.

precarity

But today, in an economy defined by precarity, more of what was merely stupid and adaptive has turned stupid and compulsory.

mechanically effi- cient salad-feeding session, conducted in such a way that one need not take a break from emails—is the good life. It means progress, individuation. It’s what you do when you've gotten ahead a little bit, when you want to get ahead some more. The hamster-wheel aspect has been self-evident for a long time now.

Buchanan described the chopped salad as “the perfect mid-day nutritional replenishment for the mid-level modern knowledge worker”

But the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize.

The chopped salad is engineered. . . to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious atten- tion can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data:

most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetu- ity.

accelerated capitalism.

Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project

It is harder for us to suspect images produced by our peers, and nearly impossible to get us to suspect the images we produce of ourselves, for our own pleasure and benefi

the power of the ideal image never actually wanes.

Everything about this woman has been preemptively controlled to the point that she can afford the im- pression of spontaneity and, more important, the sensation of it— having worked to rid her life of artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree.

meticulous

The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing.

She looks like an Instagram

monetizable

The ideal woman has always been generic.

She looks like an Instagram

monetizable

The ideal woman has always been generic