In pursuit of 'Instagram face,' are we losing the imperfections that make us human?

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Something strange is happening to the human face. Plastic surgery in the U.S. is increasingly designed to be invisible, and it's working. Faces are being lifted, filled and reshaped to look naturally youthful and, at the same time, unnatural. My guess today, writer Jia Tolentino, says this new era of cosmetic enhancement is quietly changing the way people think about aging and what we believe a real face should look like. In her latest New Yorker piece, "Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare," Tolentino reports that cosmetic procedures, like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now becoming popular for teenagers, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant uptick of patients under 30. Some are even posting photos online, asking strangers whether a face-lift is their only hope. One influencer got famous by striking his jawline with a hammer as part of the online movement known as looksmaxxing. Other young men followed suit. And artificial intelligence trained on millions of these new faces is generating new beauty standards.

Tolentino argues that what's changing isn't just our appearance. It's our relationship to reality. Her argument is that when every face can be optimized, filtered or surgically refined, the face itself begins to lose its status as evidence of a life lived. She argues that the thing we've long treated as a window into another person is becoming less human and more like a product.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of the essay collection "Trick Mirror." Seven years ago, she coined the phrase Instagram face, capturing the beauty ideal of the social media era. Her new essay asks what that face has become. And, Jia Tolentino, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

JIA TOLENTINO: Thank you so much for having me.

MOSLEY: OK, as I mentioned to you, this piece has hit a nerve, and so much of the reaction is basically, yes, we are seeing this, we are feeling this. What can we actually do about it? And the same thing actually happened seven years ago when you coined this term, Instagram face. And so I thought, before we actually get into your latest piece, remind us what Instagram face is or was.

TOLENTINO: Right. So sometime last decade, if you were on Instagram, you probably noticed that most of the most prominent, most highly visible faces, who generally all belong to white female influencers, they started to kind of converge on a singular face. I remember someone I - a makeup artist described it as a sexy baby tiger. You know, it was the kind of Kim Kardashian looks like Kendall Jenner, looks like Bella Hadid, looks like Emily Ratajkowski. There was this kind of convergence of the face towards a certain mean that seemed to me to be very overtly shaped by the algorithm.

The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to kind of lift your cheeks and plump your lips and, you know, make your eyes bigger and make your chin a little more heart shaped. And, you know, you could press a button, or you could use Facetune, to digitally alter your face to fit this kind of algorithmically approved beauty standard. Like, this was a face that the algorithm liked. If your face looked like this, you would get more views on your pictures. And then, you know, concurrently, there were these technologies - this was kind of the rise of injectables - Botox, filler - these little tweaks that you could do in real life to match the tweaks that you could do digitally. And I wanted to write about it then because it just seemed interesting that faces were becoming the same, that these highly visible faces were becoming the same, and the incentives didn't necessarily seem to be coming from within. They seemed to be coming...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

TOLENTINO: ...From without. And I wondered what is going to happen in the future.

MOSLEY: Right.

TOLENTINO: And now we're kind of living...

MOSLEY: And now we're at the future. Right. So for those who aren't maybe online enough to really pick up the changes over the last seven years, paint a picture for us. What is coming out of this new era on our screens - not just on our screens, too, but also in real life. What are we actually seeing? What does this new aesthetic actually look like?

TOLENTINO: So this began as kind of niche behavior among the professionally beautiful, the wealthy and famous. But the desire trickles down because those faces are necessarily visually overrepresented. And what those women do trickles down into the desire for the general population. And in the nearly, let's say, decade that has elapsed, when I was starting to research this piece, I started just Googling cities in the United States. I started Googling mid-sized cities everywhere outside the coasts to check, you know, how widespread is this behavior actually? There are some proxies - like, the Reddit for r/PlasticSurgery, it has almost as many weekly visitors as the Reddit forum for r/running, you know? So there are some proxies where you can tell this is becoming a quite generalized interest.

If you are on social media, you see the way that people's faces have become uncanny. The foreheads are freezing. The lips are plump. Instagram face has kind of trickled down to the general population. You can get it at your local strip mall basically anywhere you are in the U.S., and people certainly do. And now the faces of the rich and famous and professionally beautiful, now it's changing. Now there's face-lifts. Now there's these invisible face-lifts. There are the flickers of desire in the general population, people being like, well, should I get a face-lift at age 30? This seems to be the next wave of what's happening, that the face-lifts are becoming the kind of soon-to-be-normalized desire.

MOSLEY: Yeah. And the face-lifts themselves are providing a look that maybe is taking us in another direction of trying to look more natural. You mentioned some of those more popular Reddit pages. There are also so many plastic surgeons now who have these accounts that are very popular, showing before and afters of these deep plane face-lifts, which aren't for the faint of heart.

TOLENTINO: Yeah.

MOSLEY: Talk...

TOLENTINO: Something I found...

MOSLEY: You write about this about this. Yeah.

TOLENTINO: Yeah. I find it - you know, it just - it's interesting, right? The Instagram face, the procedures themselves were kind of fundamentally nonviolent, a little needle there, back to the office, right? But people kind of looked obviously altered. If you think about - I mean, the Kardashians are the easiest proxy for this. You could see their faces changing in real time. Kim Kardashian published a selfie book called "Selfish," where you could see how her face had changed. It was - the work was on display, even though the procedures themselves were fairly minor.

The face-lift is interesting because the procedure itself is kind of extraordinarily violent. You're severing all these layers of muscle and fat and fascia. Bridget Reed did a piece for New York magazine where she describes a plastic surgeon lifting the face off of its bones like a Halloween mask and rearranging it. But the results are almost supernatural. You know, there's almost something mystical and gnostic about it, where there's this - they kind of imply this complex secret knowledge. And as you mentioned, there's kind of a cottage industry that has been growing over the last decade, because these things are interesting to look at on screens. We love looking at faces. And we love looking at faces because as I was writing, you know, the face is traditionally how we come to know each other, how we - the first glimpse we have of a person's temperament and soul and life history and disposition.

MOSLEY: Right. I mean, it tells us - it answers so many questions. Also, you can tell if a person is tired. You can tell if they're sick. You can tell their emotions. Do they laugh a lot? - by their laugh lines. It's a marker of allowing us to see if we can even trust a person. I mean, you're basically arguing that we're entering a world where these faces don't communicate because Botox and some of these other treatments freeze the face. We're losing the ability to read one another.

TOLENTINO: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it seems like, you know, like you were saying, there are plastic surgeons on Instagram and TikTok. There are all of these influencers that are just for kind of forensically analyzing what people may and may not have done. We love to look at faces. We're still looking at faces. But increasingly, online, especially if you are a girl or you're a woman, you're in - your feed is likely tailored towards these sort of things. The face is being presented to us as a consumer guide and a disciplinary manual rather than a human repository of disposition and life.

And, you know, I don't think this - in and of itself, I don't think individually, there's anything immoral or wrong about plasticity, about changing your looks. You know, individually, these cases aren't a - are not very interesting to me and not worth, you know, judging on an individual level whatsoever. But it just does seem collectively like that shift has happened, that the face is not something that, especially if you are socialized as a woman, that you're looking at for human information - that you want human information and experience to show on your face. It's really being reconfigured as kind of a - an object that should stand up under digital surveillance.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino. Her new piece, "Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare," is about the rise of undetectable cosmetic surgery, and what it's doing to our grip on reality. We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MARCO BENEVENTO'S "GREENPOINT")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking with Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker. Her latest piece is about the new era of invisible plastic surgery, from six-figure face-lifts to AI-generated faces, and why she says it's eroding our connection to reality.

Aside from the $100,000 face-lifts, what are those who are not in the top brackets doing?

TOLENTINO: It's a lot of injectables, you know? I think there's kind of the nonsurgical face-lift that a lot of people - that's certainly quite popular in the suburbs of Houston, where I grew up, where it's, like, just well-placed Botox and filler to shape. You know, you can put it in your jawline to thin your cheeks. You know, you can kind of lift your brow with Botox. You can kind of plump and reshape your face. People are getting eye-lifts. You know, they're getting blepharoplasties on their upper and lower lids. There's kind of threads you can get in your forehead to lift. There's neck-lifts. There's mini-lipo.

There's all sorts of stuff. There's the realm of just constant facial resurfacing with laser. And - you know, and all of these things - you know, again, it's, like, individually, whatever, right? You know, individually, let people live. However, collectively, it just - what is this reframing the face as?

MOSLEY: It's not just our faces either. Our producer Molly points out that BBLs - Brazilian butt-lifts - are being reversed. And people are taking off their nails, and lashes are going out of style. It's kind of turning into the clean-girl aesthetic. Is that sort of under the same phenomenon?

TOLENTINO: One thing that is just kind of blanket-true, will always be true about beauty standards for women, is that they're never static. There's never a final point. Well, at least from the point of view of the industries dictating it, which now include the surveillance technologies of the phone and social media. There is never a fixed point at which contentment is prescribed or incentivized or - you know, or OK-ed. It's - what is prescribed is just a perpetual work, a perpetual outlay of money and time and, most importantly, concern. A sense of the self is something that must always be optimized, perfected, improved.

And, you know, this is - beauty standards have been punitive, disciplinary. They have served the interests of those in power for basically all of human history in every human culture. But there's something interesting about it right now in that it seems more explicitly antihuman right now than ever before. There seem to be something that's dovetailing with the age of AI.

And AI is where the consequences of Instagram face - they are already quite clear, right? The fact that so many of the most visible women on the internet kind of resemble each other, have this look that if you're on Instagram, you can probably close your eyes and summon, you know? The fact that that is kind of what a woman on the internet looks like to the data-scraping engines that are powering AI. You know, The Washington Post did this great investigation a couple of years ago. They asked, you know, AI image-generators, multiple of them, to produce an image of a normal woman. Almost every face that was generated was white, young and beautiful.

MOSLEY: Right.

TOLENTINO: You know? There's already been such a distinct effect, and one wonders. AI is something that I personally, you know, take issue with for the way that it kind of programmatically positions what is specifically human as inferior for being specifically human, for being bounded, for being imperfect. When, in fact, our boundedness, our imperfection, our kind of imminence - that's the best thing about us. That's what makes us actually human. And so the way that all of this is manifesting through the face is really what I wanted to write about.

MOSLEY: I find it interesting. I want to go back a little bit to your Instagram face - some of the things that you found about how these faces are very racialized, but in a way that sort of combines all of these different attributes of every race to make this prototype, this face, and by which AI then uses it to build an AI-generated woman. This woman is white. But remind us what you found back then and what happened to that racial dimension now that we have entered this era of invisible surgery.

TOLENTINO: Yeah. I remember there was something about Instagram face. It was sort of this - what I found to be kind of a rootless exoticism. But it was always on - almost always on a white woman, or it was always most profitable and most visible on a white woman. And there was a way where the face had kind of captured signifiers of other ethnicities, had kind of borrowed this sense of - you know, of something other while always kind of resoundingly serving whiteness itself.

But I talked to a celebrity makeup artist who described it. He said, you know, there's a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African American influence with the lip, a Caucasian nose, a cheek structure that's predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern. And that, you know, 10 years later, has resulted, when you ask AI to generate an image, let's say, of a beautiful woman, they are almost exclusively - yeah - white, thin, young. But they have those features.

And so there's this erasure of other forms of faces, certainly other forms of beauty. There's this near-total erasure, based on what - the AI just scraping Instagram, scraping faces, scraping the kind of racial hierarchies and preferences that are built into every system in our country. It's now - AI thinks and will tell people this is what a normal woman is. This is what a beautiful woman is.

MOSLEY: OK. I've got to tell you something that happened to me. So I downloaded one of those apps that makes your photos look like they were shot on a '90s point-and-shoot. And so when I ran one of my pictures through it, though, it didn't give me the flash effect that I wanted. It handed me back - I'm Black, so it handed me back myself as a white woman with a thinner nose and lighter skin.

And what you're describing is why this happens. So AI has been trained on all of these Instagram faces. But this is scary because, I mean, people are doing this to such a degree. What are you finding about maybe, like, you know, dysmorphia on what someone's face actually looks like? What is that doing to us when we're continually doing this? And then people are posting these things out into the world. I mean, some people are actually blind to it. I was horrified by it, also kind of disappointed 'cause I paid some money for this app, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

TOLENTINO: You should sue them. No. I - that's horrible. That's - I mean, that's horrible. And imagine if you were 16, right? It's crushing to think about. And, you know, to be a teenage girl is a nightmare as it is. You know, we have no end of studies about how any time on visual social media is profoundly destructive to the mental health and confidence and kind of sense of autonomy in young girls and teenagers and young women. But yeah. You see it everywhere. There was a 12-year-old that went viral on TikTok for her antiaging skin routine.

If you look on nonvisual forms of social media, you know, like on Reddit, you'll - or on Twitter, on any place - you'll find teenagers wondering, you know, should I start getting Botox? I'm 18. Like, I'm starting to see signs of aging. You will have 20-somethings wondering if they should get a face-lift because they think they have jowls. I'm in my late 30s, and I was googling, you know, I'm 37. Should I get a face-lift? Just trying to see what one would see...

MOSLEY: Would come back.

TOLENTINO: ...If one were to google this. And, you know, all - I tried it on my husband's phone. I tried it on my - you know, I tried it on Incognito. And all of the first search results say, you know, probably not a full one, but a mini-one could be good. And the most nay-saying opinion I could find was someone saying, no. Just do Botox instead. Just do Botox and injectables instead. Don't get a - you know, don't get a full. Just mini or Botox.

Basically, if you are a young woman and you are interfacing with the internet, there is essentially no system that will tell you your face is good as it is. And there's no end to the systems that will say, improve it. Perfect it. And there's something interesting happening where young people are getting Botox in their 20s. Like, there was, you know, a recent statistic. There was a 75% increase from 2019 to 2022 in people under the age of 20 getting Botox and filler.

MOSLEY: Stop it (ph).

TOLENTINO: I think there were something like 50,000 injectable procedures performed in 2024 on people age 20 or younger. You know, these are not massive numbers, but that's - you know, it's pretty wild to think about.

MOSLEY: Right. Because - this is interesting that you try to search on other people's phones, including your husband's phone, because I guess you assume that because he's a male, he's part of a different algorithm and it might have a different output for you. So you're basically saying, if you're online, there's kind of no way to get around it.

TOLENTINO: Yeah. There's just - there is nothing online right now that is telling people that what is human is good specifically for being human, right? It's just the drive towards optimization that has - you know, that has encompassed and driven, like, every tech industry, all of Silicon Valley for the past 20 years - it's really - it's come to roost in our faces and bodies and souls. Like, I mean, it feels like what is happening. I mean, the feeling that I had that made me start writing this - it was - I was just like, the face is kind of separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul. And this is being systemically encouraged by kind of any single thing you'll find on the internet.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is Jia Tolentino, staff writer at The New Yorker. Seven years ago, she coined the term Instagram face, capturing the beauty ideal of the social media era. Her latest piece, "Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare," argues that we've entered a new age of cosmetic enhancement - one designed to be invisible, with face-lifts that leave no trace, teenagers asking strangers online if surgery is their only hope and artificial intelligence generating flawless faces that are resetting the beauty standard. Tolentino says what's changing isn't just how we look, it's our relationship to reality itself. She is also the author of the best-selling essay collection "Trick Mirror."

One of the paradoxes at the center of this essay is also that plastic surgery is becoming both detectable and more extreme at the same time, and the Mar-a-Lago face in particular is a good example of this. Can you describe it for us?

TOLENTINO: I feel kind of a fondness for what's called Mar-a-Lago face (laughter) because...

MOSLEY: Yeah?

TOLENTINO: It's - because it's almost, like - it's almost quaint, you know? So Mar-a-Lago face is - if you have observed the faces of the women of the second Trump administration, this is Mar-a-Lago face. It's kind of like Instagram face. It's as if kind of the Kardashian-esque beauty standard of 2016 has ported itself 10 years later to the seat of American power and added quite a lot of makeup to it. Like, it's this - it's what plastic surgery used to be, where it flaunts itself, where kind of flaunts its lack of relationship to human reality, which I find kind of funny and I find almost quaint. And it also - you know, there's a way in which it mirrors the actual political policy of the Trump administration, where power is displayed in, you know, proudly disconnecting from reality altogether. And in that way, Mar-a-Lago...

MOSLEY: So you're saying that these Botox and filler faces and the approach to governing are basically the same gesture.

TOLENTINO: It's saying that what is given, what is human, doesn't matter. I'm going to slash it to bits and, you know, put a - put some gold and lipstick on it and we're going to - you know, it's the equivalent of the Trump ballroom, basically, in human-face form. And, you know, there's also something - it's quite - it's so aggressively female. You know, it's - there's something - this is certainly not a new observation, but it's very interesting to watch, you know, people that are very much against trans healthcare, gender-affirming, you know, medical care display a beauty look that is nothing if not gender-affirming. It's fundamentally gender-affirming surgery, like much plastic surgery is.

MOSLEY: So for, like, a Mar-a-Lago woman, she's performing maximal femininity. And for the men...

TOLENTINO: Totally.

MOSLEY: ...Which we're going to get into - this looksmaxxing...

TOLENTINO: (Laughter).

MOSLEY: ...They're kind of surgically building maximal maleness.

TOLENTINO: Totally. Which I...

MOSLEY: It's almost like drag. I mean, it's - in a way...

TOLENTINO: It's - it literally - it's drag, which is why it's always been so funny to me to see Republicans be so against drag and children's exposure to drag and against, again, like, trans-affirming, gender-affirming medical care. Because essentially all plastic surgery - you know, the hair transplants that men are getting in Turkey, you know, the breast implants and nose jobs of, you know, a more innocent time of the '80s and '90s, when those were the only things that - you know, that people maybe got - that's - it's gender-affirming surgery.

MOSLEY: So there is a version of this playing out with the tradwife trend - these influencers who have lots of followers, sometimes millions of followers. They're kind of performing a femininity in another way, too, with their kitchen - standing in their kitchens in these prairie dresses. They're being domestic, they're performing submission. It's femininity content in a way. And how does this kind of fit into what you're describing - this world of face altering?

TOLENTINO: Well, I think that there is - the tradwife thing, you know, there are some very kind of obvious built-in contradictions and paradoxes in it - right? - where the women that are most famous as tradwives, they are not tradwives. They are million-dollar business people, right? They are entrepreneurs. They make more money than their husbands. You know, they're heads of enormous businesses.

And, you know, there's a similar kind of contradiction with the kind of Mar-a-Lago face territory where, let's say, you know, the Trump administration, its point of view on public health is - you know, it's funny to have the beauty look of the second Trump administration be so overtly artificial - one that is only possible with injecting you know, synthetic substances into your face - and at the same time, they're saying raw milk only, you know...

MOSLEY: The Make America Healthy Again movement.

TOLENTINO: ...Be skeptical of your vaccine schedule. Yeah. Like, there's a similar built-in contradiction between the - you know, the aggressively prescribed "naturalness," quote-unquote, and then what the faces look like and what actually has to go into the faces for them to look like that.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jia Tolentino, staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest piece is called "Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare." It's about the new era of undetectable cosmetic surgery and what it's doing to our sense of what's real. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SEFARAD'S "THIRD WORLD LOVE")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today I'm talking with Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker. Her latest piece is about the new era of invisible plastic surgery, from six-figure face-lifts to AI-generated faces, and why she says it's eroding our connection to reality.

We have been more or less talking about women, but I want to bring men into this conversation because some of the strangest reporting in this piece is about young men. There is a 20-year-old influencer who got famous for, among other things, hitting his own jaw with a hammer to look hotter. And what's interesting is I brought this up to my kids, and they were like, oh, yeah. They knew his name right away. So for listeners who...

TOLENTINO: Right.

MOSLEY: ...Have never heard the word looksmaxxing - and this guy - tell us about both. What is looksmaxxing, and who is this guy?

TOLENTINO: Well, if you'll permit me to, again, rewind a little bit to last decade. So looksmaxxing is a fundamentally reactionary anti-feminist ideology that came out of something - these larger political and discursive changes that happened on the internet last decade, right? So if we can, you know, travel our minds through time to, you know, an era where Obama was president, and, you know, there were women's magazines, and there were feminist websites, and Twitter still seemed like a kind of democratizing medium, rather than whatever it is now. And so there were all of these social changes where young women - you know, feminism was ascendant. It was kind of culturally dominant. There was an annoying strain of it that, you know, I'm sure you remember. There were kind of T-shirts that were like, Lord, grant me the confidence of the mediocre white man. You know, there were mugs...

MOSLEY: Yeah. Yeah. I remember them.

TOLENTINO: ...That said male tears. And, you know, this came with, I think, a pretty flippant version of beauty. This also came with the sort of Dove real beauty, where it was like - it was positioned as an issue of feminist importance to make sure all women were beautiful. And I remember being in my 20s and thinking, no, no, no, no, no, no. We should say that beauty matters less, not more.

MOSLEY: Say more about that, because that was the time period when, yes, the Dove commercials were really big. There was sort of the burgeoning body positivity movement.

TOLENTINO: Yeah. And, you know, the body positivity movement, it's - you know, there's - it was wonderful, and it carried these negative consequences, right? Like, was it was incredibly meaningful in that the body positivity movement was trying to say and also to commercialize the idea that any kind of body is gorgeous. And any - you know, all bodies, all skin tones, all levels of physical ability, that there's beauty in every human, which is something that I believe. But underneath it, there was there was a need, you know, to prove that, to render that ideology kind of workable culturally. What had to be attached was that these bodies can be kind of commercially declared beautiful. And that, to me, is where the danger crept in.

It was like, we're going to have to successfully commodify every different kind of body to prove that all bodies are beautiful. And I remember being - I worked for the website, Jezebel, at the time, and I remember feeling like this was a little bit of a trap, like, that we were making it politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, like, in an ad campaign or something, where I actually think the trap for women to begin with is the idea that everyone needs to be beautiful.

MOSLEY: So - right. So looksmaxxing comes from these men's groups on the internet, and they were organized around this conviction that basically women don't have - or don't deserve - equal rights. And this guy in particular that hit his face with the jaw, I mean, where does he - who is he, and where does he come in in all of this?

TOLENTINO: So we're talking about Clavicular, who is a 20-year-old influencer who's gotten very famous for, you know, having done microdoses of meth since he was a teenager to lose weight and on these peptides and hitting his jaw with a hammer to, you know, become more beautiful. But again, yes, he's part of a community called looksmaxxers, which all came up in reaction to the chatter of feminism that was happening last decade, women asserting themselves as people. They're reacting to #MeToo, to women saying, you cannot sexually assault us in the workplace, etc., etc. There was this kind of wave of confidence.

You know, I have two young daughters. Like, girls learn as early as elementary school that they have to be kind of all these things - charming and pert and competent and interesting, and they should try to be pretty in order to evade kind of the male contempt that hangs in the world like a cloud, like atmosphere. For the first time last decade, there was kind of visible female contempt in the air as well. You know, that you could maybe see through those mugs that said male tears, etc. And this tipped, this particular community of men, the kind of men's rights, manosphere people into this reactionary you know, political ideology that held, like, women are subhuman. They are stupid, they're superficial. You know, they are lesser than us. And looksmaxxing came out of this paradigm of men - of the world of dating apps and men for the first time being judged the way that women have historically been judged by men. You know, men's bodies and faces, for the first time, really, I think, through dating app culture, could be dissected, the way that women's looks have always been dissected. And...

MOSLEY: But here, Jia, is the part - OK, so, Jia, here's the part that I'm still trying to wrap my head around with this. So Clavicular is so popular, he gets other guys to also do this thing. They think that, you know, breaking their jaw kind of, like, helps make their jawline stronger and working out a lot and all of that kind of stuff. But for all of this obsession around their looks and being hot, you write that the looksmaxxers don't actually seem interested in sex. And there is a similar phenomenon with young women, too. What is all this beauty for, if not desire?

TOLENTINO: Right. So that's the thing, right? Because looksmaxxing is an ideology that came out of kind of explicitly anti-woman thing, these are ostensibly straight men that are trying to become more beautiful, where, as I write, you know, in my kind of degraded millennial youth, if you wanted to get hotter really fast, you usually were trying to - usually, you were trying to have some sort of fun, exciting new sex, you know, out of it. And that is so conspicuously absent. It is - like you said, it is beauty. It is trying to summon kind of hotness but with almost this unbelievably cold, hateful attitude towards not just the bodies of others, but even your own, right? It's - there's - Eros is totally absent. There's no desire to get closer to the body of another person.

When the looksmaxxers talk about women - who they call foids, short for female humanoids - they want to get hotter so that they can attract women but as a display of dominance and conquest exclusively. Like, any sense that it is pleasurable in and of itself to be with another person, to be intimate with another person, you know, to show yourself to another person and to be seen and to see them, that's so conspicuously absent from the way that they talk about their bodies and the bodies of others. And that, too, is part of the larger sense that, you know, we're decoupling from the physical entirely, which is so strange because we're talking about the face and the body.

MOSLEY: So if it's not for desire, if it's not to attract someone, ultimately, who is it for?

TOLENTINO: Well, increasingly, it seems to be for the disembodied collective, right? It seems to be for the virtual audience. Like, it - there's this - I feel - you know, I feel that I sense a kind of - an eroticization of disembodied-collective attention, like maximal likes, maximal viewers. And, again, for - you know, for young people, that does kind of convert into maximal profit. I mean, Clavicular only became Clavicular because he's doing this all so ostentatiously that people will watch, and he can make tapping himself on the jaw with a hammer on a Twitch stream his full-time job and actually get quite rich because of it. And so there's kind of an eroticization through that almost of capital itself, which is, again, probably the most anti-human thing you could ever eroticize.

MOSLEY: Are there other time periods that rhyme with this time period? I mean, you actually did gesture in your piece to the way that looksmaxxers see race and disability kind of similar to how a eugenist would.

TOLENTINO: Yeah. If you go on the big looksmaxxer forums, you know, they have these message boards with all of these ways that you can improve your faces and bodies, and, you know, they get really arcane. And, you know, it - yeah, it hearkens back...

MOSLEY: Because this is all about, like, face symmetry and all of those types of things. That's what we're talking about.

TOLENTINO: Yeah.

MOSLEY: And bone structure.

TOLENTINO: And looksmaxxing is overtly racist the way that, you know, Instagram face - that was kind of tacitly racist. Looksmaxxers are pretty overtly white supremacist. They pretty overtly see the kind of white male, quote-unquote, "Chad" as kind of the alpha human and non-white males as inferior. And the same with women. You know, it's a reactionary retreat against last decade's idea that what if everyone was worthy? It's a really clear reaction against that and a repudiation of that.

MOSLEY: Let's talk a little bit about who's fighting against this trend, because you mentioned before that you have written for several feminist publications in the past - Jezebel and The Hairpin - those feminist blogs from the 2010s. That whole ecosystem seems to have gone away. So what do you think was lost when those kinds of magazines closed, and what's replaced them?

TOLENTINO: I don't think anything has replaced it, you know? The conspicuous absence of any women's media really, you know, let alone explicitly feminist media, where 10 years ago, there were - you know, there were many websites that were designated explicitly feminist that are basically not functioning or gone now. You can feel the absence of it. You could feel it in the coverage of the Epstein files, of the Platner story, right? There is not a healthy conversation about women's lives and the political dimensions of it and these things. There's really no - there's been no replacement whatsoever.

And I thought about - so I started - I worked at these websites in the 2010s, but when Jezebel launched in 2007, one of their first posts was kind of about this. They offered $10,000 to anyone who could give them a non-retouched photo that had appeared on the cover of a woman's glossy...

MOSLEY: Right.

TOLENTINO: ...Magazine.

MOSLEY: Right.

TOLENTINO: Because they said we are distorting what women actually look like in a way that is disciplinary and punitive and distorting our sense of who we are and what we should be, right? And they got that image. It was a - you know, it was an image of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook. And I thought, you know, 20 years later, how - doesn't that feel wildly quaint to you? I mean, it feels - I found it so almost moving - right? - that we thought that we could still hold the line like this, that we thought that we could push back in this way. And now we're - we are swamped, you know, in a tsunami of unreality.

And I think that right now, you know, it feels almost like I'm making a second-wave argument even in talking to you about this, right? Like, I think what's replaced it is now this idea there's almost no source. It's like when I was saying I Googled, like, should I get a face-lift at - you know, in my 30s, and the most cautionary words I could find were, no, no, no, just do Botox and filler instead, right? There is a real - there's a conspicuous absence of a critical feminist dialogue saying, here are the structural forces, here are the hierarchical, here's the economic - you know, laying out the political dimensions of even something as superficial as what we're doing to our faces. They're real, and I do think they matter.

And there's a - there's an absence of publications. You know, Redbook is itself out of business. All the glossy magazines that Jezebel was protesting in the first place, they don't publish anymore.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino. Her new piece, "Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare," is about the rise of undetectable cosmetic surgery and what it's doing to our grip on reality. We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHUCHO VALDES' "OCHUN")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today I'm talking with Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker. Her latest piece is about the new era of invisible plastic surgery, from six-figure face-lifts to AI-generated faces, and why she says it's eroding our connection to reality.

Both you and I are parents navigating this world for our children. You mentioned your children earlier. And you also wrote in your piece how Kylie Jenner - who is famous for, among other things, altering her face - says she'd be heartbroken if her daughter got surgery as a teenager. And I'm just wondering, when you look at your kids, what do you see coming for them and what is your plan to navigate it?

TOLENTINO: Let me illustrate this with an anecdote. So a few months ago, my 5-year-old daughter had seen a friend that, you know, had been handed a phone at drop-off or had been handed a phone at pickup or something. She was like, Mom, when can I get a phone? And my husband was walking through the hallway, and I - he just started laughing. And my daughter was like, why did he laugh? And he was like, 'cause I know that - how much that broke her heart. And she was like, well, Mom, why did that break your heart? And I was like, how do I explain this to a 5-year-old?

And what I said to her is - I was like, you - your imagination, your sense of freedom, your sense of what's possible is the most beautiful thing about you, and as soon as you get a phone, all of that will start to shrink. All of that will become endangered. The most wonderful things about you will be captured and rendered inadequate by the phone. And I think that's true, you know, with - I think that will be true with her - inevitably, her relationship to her physical self. She'll find herself perfect and amazing until she sees the things on the screen that start to tell her, you know, you can find fault. And you can improve. And I - you know, I guess I think about my own behavior as the only thing I can really control, you know? I guess I want her to see me valorizing the human and valorizing, you know, the actual human and not trying to improve and protect and beautify myself and my life in a way that - where it seems like that's a priority.

MOSLEY: How do you do that? Because, I mean, you write that the beauty ideal is basically a mark of obedience. And then you admit, on many days, you still want it. You want to be seen as conventionally attractive. And I'm not going to lie. Even at my big old age, I want it, too. So how do you...

TOLENTINO: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Even resist something that you still want?

TOLENTINO: Yeah. I think that's the question, right? I think that's the question that this - that I hope that this piece raises, right? And it's a larger question. It doesn't just have to do with beauty. How do we look at a world where the incentives are so antihuman? And how do we deal with it? How do we live within it? And how do we - where do we hold our ground?

And I think the answer is specific to every person. But I think specifically with me, I wrote about optimization in my book in 2017. And after I wrote about it, it became clear that I could feel a difference within myself. I could feel a difference from wanting to perpetually improve and perfect versus trying to take care.

And I think just on a personal level, that's the division I'm trying to draw for myself, right? That I can enjoy going to yoga, trying to get stronger. You know, I mean, I dye my hair blonde. You know, I wear makeup every day. Like, I have no cred as, you know, a second-wave radical that's resisting this altogether. And, you know, I don't think it's wrong to want to be beautiful. And there's - one of the reasons - I think there's a pleasure. From a young age, we probably also understood there's kind of a pleasure in seeing, like, what could I be?

MOSLEY: Yeah.

TOLENTINO: Like, girls are lovely. Girls want to self-improve.

MOSLEY: It's a rite of passage.

TOLENTINO: The way that - and the way that that gets captured by these systems is almost what I want to - you know, what I feel the desire to protect in my daughter. How do we separate the desire to kind of make something of yourself from the desire that will lead you straight to capture in all of these systems? And I think for me, you know, I just never want her to see me becoming deranged by this, becoming actually captured by it. I think she will see me her whole life, you know, responding to it...

MOSLEY: Trying to resist it.

TOLENTINO: ...Living within the system, you know. But I never want her to think - I never want her to see within me that the purpose of being a woman is to be as beautiful as possible all the time, you know, and to never look old, to never change, to always look like I did when I was 26. I never want her to see those incentives that exist on the internet be written on my actual activities in life. And I hope I can hold myself to that for her sake, you know?

MOSLEY: Jia Tolentino, thank you so much for this conversation.

TOLENTINO: Thank you so much for having me.

MOSLEY: Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her new piece is called "Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, the creator of the Netflix series "Beef," Lee Sung Jin. His second season about rage, class and blackmail at a country club just earned 16 Emmy nominations. He spent two decades writing for other people's shows before he started telling stories from his own life. I hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF ART PEPPER'S "THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU")

MOSLEY: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.

With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF ART PEPPER'S "THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU")

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.