Earlier this year, I was in Taipei, Taiwan, where I decided I wanted to make a TikTok about Cup Noodle. Only this brilliant TikTok never happened because of the shock I got when I opened up the app and flipped it into selfie mode. The face looking back at me was a face, but not exactly my face. A whole array of beauty filters had automatically worked me over, and I could not turn them off. There was so much going on here: skin smoothing, skin lightening, teeth whitening, nose narrowing, bigger eyes, and it gave me a thinner, softer jawline. This was a whole lot of nonconsensual filtering or what someone joked was forced catfishing. And for me, it's the perfect example of something called the technological gaze at work.
What is it? Women have had to play to the male gaze forever, you know what that is. But the technological gaze describes an algorithmically driven perspective that we learn to internalize, perform for and optimize for. And then, by taking in all our data, the machines learn to perform us, in an endless feedback loop.
We learn it so young. An estimated 80 percent of 13-year-old girls in America have already used filters or some kind of editing to alter their appearance online. And these days, the filters are hyperrealistic because they tend to be AI-generated. They come with a suite of characteristics teaching us how to look, things like arched eyebrows, or higher cheekbones or plump lips. What then happens is we see the gap between the way we look in the mirror and the way we look in these filters, and the digital world begins to dictate real-world beauty standards.
We've seen it in celebrity culture, and I know this, because I saw it when I lived and worked in Seoul, South Korea, as the NPR Bureau Chief there nearly 10 years ago. Seoul is all about optimizing your face and your body. If you want your vagina rejuvenated, your skull reshaped, any part of your body lifted or enhanced, have at it. It's the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Nearly half of all Korean women have already undergone some kind of plastic surgery by the time they're in their 20s. No other place comes close. These days, traptox is really popular. That's injecting Botox into the base of your neck, your trapezius muscles, to give the appearance of a longer neck. Calves are being injected with Botox for the same reason.
Having a slimmer jawline is so desirable that a Seoul plastic surgery clinic once displayed the human bones of jaws it had shaved down in a glass vase in its lobby. This has since been removed, but this kind of body augmentation work isn't just accepted, it is expected, because in Seoul, looks matter so much for your professional and personal advancement. Headshots are required on résumés. Hiring bosses make character judgments based on your face. You were often bullied if you were bald or big. Trying to look better is framed as a route to economic security and a matter of personal responsibility.
But Korea just shows us a more concentrated and extreme example of the pretty privilege that exists everywhere. Look at fatphobia in the United States, helping drive off-the-charts, off-label use of Ozempic, not for diabetes, but for weight loss. It makes sense when we are so rewarded for thinness and stigmatized for fatness.
And all I'm saying is we should reckon with this, because the more narrow our idea of beauty is, the wider the pool of ugly becomes. And digital culture is now reshaping our actual faces and bodies. Under the technological gaze, I worry that our bodies become projects to be worked on ... forever. And if we don’t slow down this body augmentation arms race that I saw in Seoul, then the enhancements that were available there only get farther and farther out of reach. And not just for women. Because if we are chasing digital beauty, well, then, the limit does not exist. AI's idea of attractiveness is only increasingly inhuman ... and cyborgian.
I don't want this. I don't want my daughters coming up in a world in which their looks are the most important things about them. It is incredibly marginalizing to everybody who can’t fit in and exhausting for everyone who can, because you are constantly having to make or pay for interventions in order to keep up.
So what do we do? Filters aren't going anywhere, but we can challenge what the system is optimized for by changing what it means to be beautiful. Just as the solution to homophobia isn't to make everyone straight, and the solution to racism isn't to make everyone white, the solution to lookism and fatphobia isn't to make everyone interchangeably skinny and conventionally pretty. In fact, it's the opposite. It's to celebrate diversity and the differences that make us who we are, that are inherent to the human condition. And ultimately, we have to disrupt a system that reduces our worthiness to our looks.
Even though my face is rounder and probably darker than an algorithm would like, I have come here tonight wearing my actual face. And my hope for all of you is that you feel comfortable and will continue to feel comfortable doing the same. Because I see a wide variety of jawlines out here tonight, and let me just say they are all worthy.
Thank you.
(Cheers and applause)
