A body is just a

The idea of challenging ourselves was easy. We had been fake-challenging ourselves many times, ping-ponging different variations of similar hypotheses back and forth between us. About a year ago, it was hard to tell if our actions thus far had been half-baked out of laziness or fear. A real challenge though, the way we saw it, might just be a way out. We had also been interested in fetishizing the thing we hated most. To hate is to devote oneself, really. If we remain in this same circle running, I said to my friend, let’s do it with full conviction.

It is scary to be stuck in a world that seems to be of your own making, but that was actually installed in you — except in the flesh there is no scapegoat. There were real material conditions, and the real and big abstractions that created them. Like laziness, fear is easy to commit to. We are girls, had become girls, etc. That was always the vantage point. I had been closely investigating my frown lines for a few months, maybe longer, and felt shame for time being so visible on me. It seemed almost too intimate, my body forming wrinkles before the world, and, of course, it felt too soon. I would feel that feeling and say back to the mirror that a body is just a vehicle, what even is a body.

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Body body body body body body body body body body body (...)

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— maybe the more I’d use this body without interrogation, the more it would lose its meaning, the same way that repeating its linguistic representation would abstract. The problem with this theory is, of course, that it is not self-sustaining. Stop repeating the word body, maybe for a few hours or a day and it melts back into its original semantic form. We’ve got nothing on time. That is something we did learn.

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Much like Ben Lerner’s description of a depressed uncle’s disposition toward life in “The Rose”, I often feel less like I’m living my life, and more like I’m displaying my life’s elements (Lerner). Time wasn’t mine and that felt bad.

Of course this is not only disassociation or a flavor of clinical depression, if you will. Beauty culture, my participation in it, alienated me from my experience of time, replacing my present self concurrently with different aspirational selves; future self and the self I once was.

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Weeks after turning thirteen, I shaved my cunt for the first time and felt oddly betrayed, finding my anatomy looking different from ‘how I left it’. Nearing my thirties, the affective facts were much the same. I couldn’t reconcile with how insatiable of a stance I had towards my appearance and how little I had to say about it, though these smile lines came from my own laughter, these frown lines from my own anger. At one, this is the dual effect of time working in two different directions to create a friction where the present self is always denied (Stood).

I started to figure aspiration was maybe more an end than a means.

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What we look like is none of our business, Rayne Fisher-Quann said. The best way to be in your body is to forget that you have one, my friend said. Logically, I agreed. She had an eating disorder and was romantically involved with someone on the waiting list to get a mastectomy. Lauren Berlant, too, describes the present as a relatively affectively formless space (Berlant). A body is just a vehicle [...], I said, attempting to block out all distractions.

The shame neatly sedimented. Wrinkles are the body’s pure disobedience to hegemonic aesthetics. Atop the embarrassment I felt about this —the way I imagine a parent is embarrassed when their child makes a scene in public— came the shame from what can only be described as injured ‘pretty privilege’. Keeping up the basic, but continuous work to stay pretty was suddenly no longer enough. We’re like people with money, my friend said; no one is more afraid to lose money than the rich.

Again I reference Berlant in formulating another sediment, who explores the notion of the ‘broken circuit’ drawing from scholars Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Together they use this notion to describe shame structurally: (...) If somebody has a form of longing that gets attached to a person or world, the moment of shame is when the person/world breaks its relation of reciprocity with the subject (Berlant).

Likewise, we were not granted Beauty. She was a fugitive, abandoning me, telling me no more. My friend and I experienced this abandonment concurrently, making it easier to take the shame, put it on a pedestal and interrogate it, as if to turn personal failure into intellectual rhetoric. If our bodies refused to continue their shape after our desire, we could simply refuse the wrinkles’ sprouting in turn; it was 2022 after all.

We talked about what such an explicit no could look like, if there was any intimacy in choosing compliance, choosing form over function. How about adhering to beauty standards as a form of togetherness? Closer to people’s idea of good and of beauty, therefore closer to the people?

My friend had brought up our intention to try botox during her Art, Science & Technology seminar. The class had just finished its group reading of Rosi Braidotti. One of her male classmates sighed that it is simply impossible for women to engage in posthumanist research experiments, due to their emotional attachment to their bodies as currency.

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We liked to tell ourselves that, eventually, we opted in because we wanted to understand what it is, precisely, that we rejected. We knew better, but knowing is a weak state (Lerner, 119, emphasis mine). Of course cosmetic procedures are a very disappointing side effect of the wanderings and efforts of the modern day, and injecting relatively unfamiliar substances in one’s face is nefarious, to say the least. However, we said, in all of our refusal is already our consent to partake.

We walk into the clinic with our recording device. We feel hyped, we laugh. The woman letting us in will later join us in the treatment room. We are assigned to a set of white chairs at a white table in a small cubicle space. The consent forms we’re given, along with a pen, are divided into a personalia questionnaire on the lower end, while the upper half of the paper shows an image of an AI-generated white woman with a smooth forehead and a malicious smile. We fill in our personal details. One of the liability markers on the form states that the doctors will not treat anyone with (signifiers of) body dysmorphic disorder.

In the treatment room, everything feels like silly cosplay. The space is sterile, hardly only out of necessity, I think. Clouded by our own anxiety and sudden feeling of ridicule, we try to charm the doctor on duty with jokes and curious interrogation, but she barely gives in. She is here on routine and has a lot of injectables in her face. My friend sits in the chair first; I am asked to make my angriest face while I get my picture taken. The procedure really hurts. Nobody talks about this. Every tool —truly— is a weapon if you hold it right (DiFranco 00:1:53 - 00:1:58, emphasis mine).

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We walk out disillusioned and with a massive headache. Outside, birds are chirpy as ever. My friend says I actually find it very ambitious to try and see myself as an ironic art project. Maybe too ambitious.

The rest of the afternoon passes slowly with each of us in our separate homes, lighting scented candles and self-soothing fruitlessly. This is the introductory November day of the months to come, in which our foreheads freeze increasingly, exactly as stated in the explanation on the aftercare leaflet.

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On a random Tuesday afternoon, seven weeks post-botox, I enter a parcel shop to pick up an order. The clerk moves antsily between the stacks of packages, the space is clearly too small. He can’t find my name on his handwritten list of addressees and can’t find the package when I give him my name.

I say introducing a QR-scanner for this kind of stuff could work, to prevent such losses. He snaps and begins to scream at me. Have you no respect, I can’t afford that, this is your own fault— a line of people has formed behind me. I feel myself reddening but when I try to express my anger, my face is inert. My negative emotions get pushed back into me, and instead I let out a cynical laugh, or possibly one of disbelief.

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The (inter)personal work I had planned to do—analyzing the aesthetic bliss, seeing if friends and family will notice and what’ll happen if they do, getting concise on being this or that kind of person, assessing my feeling of true betrayal to the feminist community—falls flat steadily, in sync with the toxin taking its effect.

It took a very long time to start writing this text, and the main reason for that revealed itself in almost a caricatural manner: a flat face is a flat mind. The poison took effect drastically across the board—even in the realm of emotional registers. It looks and feels like a whole lot of nothing. Besides, nobody notices and nobody cares. Botox is a supplement, a loss and a preservation at the same time. In that sense it is merely a redemption. There has been a lot of speculation on the reciprocal impediment of one’s emotional landscape due to facial muscle paralysis from cosmetic procedures. I can confirm these hypotheses only empirically. The rest of these winter months were a pseudo-life, and I was pseudo-living it.

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As my lack of a sense of urgency babbled on, my friend’s neurotoxin wore off a lot quicker than expected. The clinic said this was not abnormal, offered her to come in for an additional dose. She would have to pay full price, but it would definitely be worth it. The next time, they said, her body would already tolerate the substance much better.

The dance of prevention is an endless one. It is a premature death that drags on slowly.¹ There is no irony in that. The uncertainty of the potential next is never consumed in any given event. There is always a remainder of uncertainty, an unconsummated surplus of danger. [...] Threat is not real in spite of its nonexistence. It is superlatively real, because of it. (Massumi)

We didn’t return to the clinic. To consolidate, we tried a new, mantric escape-route from seeing our years alive as a performance on other people’s behalf: The best way to live your life is to forget that you have one.

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a life is just a life, life, life, life, life, life, life, life, life, life, life.

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Indeed, many threats self-cause, but meanwhile, languages are going extinct. And amid this haze on a bland February morning, my friend’s father suddenly passes away. Just for a moment, everything seems in total stasis.

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