D R I F T

like… clear skin, clean shaven, manicured faces, an uncomfortably starved physique, and (if a woman) the expectation of elaborate and time consuming makeup for the sole purpose of removing all human flaws, shaved arms and legs, invisible pores, etc etc.

Actors are more physically perfect than ever: impossibly lean, shockingly muscular, with magnificently coiffed hair, high cheekbones, impeccable surgical enhancements, and flawless skin, all displayed in form-fitting superhero costumes with the obligatory shirtless scene thrown in to show off shredded abs and rippling pecs. And this isn’t just the lead and the love interest: supporting characters look this way too, and even villains (frequently clad in monstrous makeup) are still played by conventionally attractive performers. Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland. No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful. And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.

In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russel’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol. And when Isabella Rosselini strips in Blue Velvet, her skin is pale and her body is soft. She looks vulnerable and real. 

[about Poltergeist] The house looks real, too. There are toys and magazines scattered around the floor. There are cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked since the recent move. Framed pictures rest against the wall; the parents haven’t gotten around to mounting them yet. The kitchen counters are cluttered and mealtimes are rambunctious and sloppy, as one expects in a house with three children. They’re building a pool in the backyard, but not for appearances: it’s a place for the kids to swim, for the parents to throw parties, and for the father to reacquaint himself with his love of diving. At the time, this house represented an aspirational ideal of American affluence. Compare this to homes in films now: massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture. Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess.

Kate writes, “The inside of McMansions are designed in order to cram the most ‘features’ inside for the lowest costs.” These features exist to increase the house’s resale value, not to make it a good place to live. No thought is given to the labor needed to clean and maintain these spaces. The master bathroom includes intricate stone surfaces that can only be scrubbed with a toothbrush; the cathedral ceilings in the living room raise the heating and cooling costs to an exorbitant sum; the chandelier in the grand entryway dangles so high that no one can replace the bulbs in it, even with a stepladder.The same fate has befallen our bodies. A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step?

But that’s a mild example. I glimpse makeup tutorials on YouTube and peer at the beautiful people who are admired on Instagram and feel this eerie uncanniness. Do people want their faces to look like poreless plastic? I only remember the “before” pictures in images that depict makeovers and plastic surgeries and transformations, because the “after” is generic and unmemorable. I struggle to find pictures on Pinterest that look like my characters—everyone is perfect, rough edges and distinctive features sanded off, beautiful in the same boring-as-shit, overwhelmingly generic way.

How awful it would be to not be ugly, and to be nothing instead, to be beautiful in a way that blandly checks off a box, evokes nothing, provokes nothing, that has only slight and corporate approved deviations from a featureless Ideal.

But this is also so true in that even sexual images of “perfect” bodies are so desexualized in a way. Bodies are animal, lived-in, worn by living. Skin has spots and scars and stretch marks and wrinkles, humans are mammals, we have hair, we have fat and it means we are soft to hold and touch, we are Creatures, and to be a Creature is to live and adapt and have appetite. How can you detach sex from creatureliness, want, pleasure, the love of pleasure, life and having lived, the possibility of future plasticity, the evidence of time and the promise of more time?

The perfect body is supposed to be that of someone who eats with restrictive and mechanical care, never to excess, never guided by hunger or desire, only by abstract knowledge of the necessity of various nutrients. Never wanting and giving in to want, indulging what the tongue and stomach demand.

Is that—

—of course that’s not sexy!!!!!! How could such mortal terror of bodily pleasure be sexy????

This approach to eating makes you sexy? Bull fucking shit, an example of a person who has this approach to *sex* would be a literal actual medieval monk, for fuck’s sake, I’m—

—in other words, the perfect, desirable body is not sexy, because it is scarless and unmarked, trained and restricted and denied and starved and plucked and shaved and trimmed to perfection—it is a beauty that communicates precisely the opposite of “I love pleasure and partake in it, I have lived and tried new things, I am open to experiences that will change me, I am confident, I appreciate and trust my animal self, I love to live and to feel and to indulge.” Of course this kind of beauty can’t be horny.

But also?? It is not sexy because it is not…naked. You know…in the way that actual human people are naked. It would be impossible to actually be naked in a world where we were all beautiful like That. Because everyone already knows what the abstract perfected ideal of a naked body looks like, the one we’ve been made to idealize all our lives. We know what the body Should look like in the way we know prayers we were taught as kids.

We’re supposed to want that, but how could you really WANT that. It is flawless and therefore no more real than a porno. Or an ad. After you got your lover’s clothes off you wouldn’t be changed at all; there would be nothing new to experience, nothing important about this moment, nothing that belongs just to you and just to now. It is Perfect and no more real than your obsession with it in your own head. It certainly will not get better with time. Time is not allowed. If you notice the effects of time, you must buy a cream to hide it.

And if you were beautiful like that, you couldn’t disclose anything by undressing. You look like What You Are Supposed To Look Like, and how could anyone forget the ideal that’s been made an obsession branded into their brains? You couldn’t be vulnerable. You couldn’t even be alone with someone or just with yourself without the eyes of the world on you.

Because the Ideal is that you’re fit for public consumption even in your most private and intimate moments, even in the privacy of your bedroom you’re Being according to the Standard. And there’s nothing left that’s just for those you choose to share it with, or just for YOU, it’s all been decided by something outside you.

Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, New York, April 23, 1948

Photo by Todd Webb

Combined exposure time... 2 Years