This experience was alarming, but fortunately short-lived. Botox, which smooths wrinkles on the skin by paralysing the muscles underneath it, is cleared from the body within three to six months — at which point the injectee, or the ones not allergic to Botox at least, return for another round. Indeed, it’s a built-in expectation of the whole Botox industry that women (who were the recipients of 95% of the 4 million Botox treatments performed in 2020) keep coming back for more; some proprietors have even begun to offer discounts or bundles for returning customers, not unlike those Subway sandwich punch cards that give you one free tuna melt for every ten you eat. There’s an entire dissertation to be written about the normalisation of non-surgical plastic surgeries, the endless drone-like march of women into clinics for their biannual dose of injectables, but the cultural conversation about these procedures often ignores the fundamental reality that Botox is popular — despite the cost, despite the risks, despite the horror stories of half-frozen faces and drooping eyelids — because it really, really works.

“I’m so angry,” my friend texted me, the week her face finally stopped twitching. “Because I really really liked the way it fixed my elevens.” And yet, there’s something enviable about my friend’s position — not the nightmarish months of uncontrollable twitching, but the paradoxical freedom she now enjoys of not having a choice. Imagine the serenity: never having to decide whether or not to do Botox, or, having done it, when or whether to stop.

That women will confront this decision is something of a foregone conclusion, as illustrated by the endless bombardment of Botox-related media stories, advertisements, personal essays, and gossip magazine features in which plastic surgeons debate which celebrities have what done to their faces. The reasons to get it done are simultaneously myriad and yet, at base, all the same. We want to look rejuvenated, which is to say, younger. Or to look less tired, or less angry — which is to say, again, younger. Botox erases the effects not just of time but the human experience: disappointment, grief, rage, joy, any emotional disturbance that causes expression that in turn puts lines on your face. If you inject a paralytic toxin early enough, often enough, maybe you can look like a person who hasn’t lived at all.

Indeed, the rise of injectables has changed the nature of the game from restoration to preservation. Gone are the days of waiting until things are dire enough to merit going under the knife, waking up bruised and battered but with the promise of looking 10 years younger after the bandages come off. Now, the thing is to simply never allow the effects of age to take hold at all. My own dermatologist assured me that the best time to get Botox was before you actually look like you need it. “If you can’t make that face, you won’t get these wrinkles,” she said, which gave me the disturbing sense that by getting Botox I would be not so much protecting my skin as changing my destiny. They say that smiling can be an instant mood-booster, because the movement tricks your brain into thinking you’re happy even when you’re not; what happens to the brain of a person who’s been physically unable to scowl for years? Is it as smooth as her forehead? Smoother?

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It is tempting to put this new standard of beauty, one maintained at the tip of a needle, in the context of broader questions about feminism and empowerment. Objectively, certainly, it is better to be beautiful: attractive people are paid better, promoted more, received more warmly by society. But what of the patriarchal system that defines beauty to begin with? Is the woman who improves her appearance with injectables — or, rather more to the point with Botox, preserves whatever beauty and hence privilege she already possesses past its usual sell-by date — guilty of sustaining a paradigm that leaves women in general worse off? On the one hand, in some ways, maybe; on the other, surely this is a ridiculous burden to lay upon any one woman’s brow, no matter how unwrinkled.

And then, too, there are the women who never opt into that paradigm in the first place. Another friend, the novelist Leigh Stein, recently tweeted her relief at never having felt compelled to nip, tuck, or inject herself. “The benefit of never having been beautiful is that I don’t feel the pressure to maintain my face,” she told me. I will note here that various commenters disagreed vehemently with Stein’s assessment of her looks, but again, her peace of mind seems enviable. I have never been the kind of beautiful that stops traffic or entices modelling offers, but I am nevertheless aware of my face as an asset, one which has been periodically valuable to me but is now sliding inexorably toward the floor.

For this reason, I have had Botox: four times in all, starting at age 35, when I began receiving injections once a year, except for the one time when it was more like 18 months. The haphazardness of my commitment is not due to any great moral ambivalence about plastic surgery; I’m just lazy. And because I took the advice of the dermatologist who urged Botox as a wrinkle-preventing mechanism, the injections don’t actually make any measurable impact on my appearance. I look the same; what’s different is that I feel — bizarrely —like I’ve accomplished something.

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Maybe I have. All cosmetic interventions — the Botox and the serums and the lip-plumping injections, the waxing and lasers and liposuction — somehow fall under the dubious banner of “self-care” rather than the comparatively unsavoury one of “egregious vanity”. Yet despite being dressed up as something almost altruistic, an act of caring for yourself the same way you’d care for an elderly parent or a potted plant, self-care often seems more a question of caring about how your self is perceived. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the pandemic saw a surge in patients seeking Botox injections, having been tormented for months by the sight of their own haggard faces while attending meetings on Zoom.) How much does it matter to you, to keep up the appearance of not being past your prime? How much are you willing to invest — in time, in money, in subjecting your face to routine maintenance, like a car?

The thing about Botox, of course, is that it’s a gateway drug. If you do it once, you’ll probably do it again — but you’ll probably do other things too, eventually, until you end up with a face that is perhaps more youthful than the one nature would’ve given you, but also no longer entirely yours. I see these women from time to time, the ones who decided long ago on the latter option, their cheeks so eerily smooth and plump that they seem like they’re peering out from behind a mask. There’s something fascinatingly remote about them, and not just in their apparent lack of concern for the way others view them, with voyeuristic judgment and ridicule. They no longer look anything like their younger selves. They don’t look like the mother or aunt or grandmother they might have grown to resemble. They don’t look entirely human, really. But they do look like each other, a strange sisterhood of choice.

I don’t intend to join them, but I wonder if anyone ever does.

Both these competing visions of beauty have one thing in common: they are the result of many decades of the self’s extreme commodification. In other words, both are evidence of the fact that we have fundamentally lost our ability to see real beauty.

An intuitive sense of beauty should transcend trends. But our understanding of it fluctuates wildly. Just look at how the ideal woman’s body has varied in the last few decades: the fetishisation of heroin chic was en vogue in the Nineties, only to be replaced by the curvy Kardashianism of the early-2000s. Only in the last week, Kim herself has made headlines for having lost 10 kilos and “her signature curves” — heralding an era in which skinny is back.

This oscillation is the sign of a culture that has lost touch with the eternal. In its place, culture is now ruled by the narcissism of the individual — who, as Fromm put it, now “experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions”. The impact on interpersonal relationships has been drastic, and terrible. Fromm argued that one has to transcend one’s narcissism in order to see beauty in another, and so experience love — but society now precludes such transcendence, by seeing meaning-making as purely a question of economics. Community has broken down, and so we are forced to find meaning through marketing ourselves to the highest bidder.

The result is not beauty, but ugliness. Consider the marketed self that dominates social media: an exaggeration of sexual attractiveness which has, with the help of the beauty-industrial complex, become grotesque. Female bodies are made to appear hyper-fertile through Botox and butt lifts, and male bodies virile through calf implants or tummy tucks. A recent GQ article highlighted a man who spent $75,000 to have both of his femurs broken and his legs extended to increase his height by a few inches. “I noticed that taller people just seem to have it easier,” he said.

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Such comments hint at how ideas of beauty influence intimate relationships. In dating algorithm swipe culture, taller men get more engagement. So, instead of removing himself from a market in which his body lowers his chances of finding a date, this man chooses to alter his body to game the system.

As for women, almost every form of cosmetic surgery has been on the rise since the pandemic, including Botox, lip fillers, and nose reshaping. When we were forced into becoming avatars of our real lives, in both professional and personal settings, we increasingly saw ourselves as the image we projected. It inspired many to alter their bodies in ways that look good on screen but horrifying in person. Instead of resisting the urge to flatten our existence to how we appear on Zoom, we altered that appearance so that our avatars look younger and similar.

This is one form of ugliness: radically manipulating the appearance of the self in order to satisfy our sense of what beauty is. But there is another prevalent form, which is based on radically altering any shared sense of what beauty is — by declaring it to be a form of patriarchal oppression. This form is epitomised by the fat acceptance movement.

At their most extreme, fat-acceptance activists claim that health standards, let alone beauty standards, are a social construct that must be overthrown. The “health at every size” mantra of The Association for Size Diversity and Health is, in some ways, an understandable response to sometimes extreme pressures to be thin. But it goes even further,  completely detaching health from weight, despite strong evidence the two are fundamentally linked. Elsewhere, this group forgets that a plus-size model posing in a tiny bikini (inevitably sent by a sponsor) is simply an individual commodifying her appearance to gain status. Unlike other models, this status comes from playing the victim: fat activists often suggest that equating weight with health is discrimination or an affront to their disability.

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True and transcendent beauty, though, is not to be found in either status game: it lies neither in exaggerated sexualisation nor exaggerated victimhood. Quite the contrary: beauty depends on the eschewal of narcissism, and the practice of outward virtue within an interdependent community. Today, however, this is no longer possible.

The upshot is that we have begun to see ourselves as standardised products, to be compared across an image-saturated marketplace. This view is apparent in the statement ubiquitous on TikTok: “He/she is a 10, but…” By reducing appearance to a crude number, our sensual experience of someone’s being is reduced to the visual — it is completely flattened. We are losing, to use Ivan Illich’s phrase, “sensual praxis”: a way of living that appreciates the full extent we are able to experience the world.

Illich asked, “What can I do to survive in the midst of the show?”, before answering his own question with a proposed two-fold approach. First, he calls for “an ethics of vision”, which calls for us to “protect” our “imagination from overwhelming distraction, possibly leading to addiction”. Second, he suggests “ocular askesis”, a discipline by which we train ourselves to perceive the world as we wish to see it. Illich scholar L.M. Sacasas goes further: “Our task, then, would be to cultivate an ethos of seeing or new habits of vision ordered toward the good. And, while the focus here has fallen on sight, Illich knew and we should remember, that all the senses can be likewise trained.”

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Fromm says something similar about love, which, he argues, “isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.” Love, like beauty, has been decoupled both from the context of interdependence and the wholeness of embodied experience. The decoupling has left us with a crisis of intimacy: even as we reveal more intimate details about ourselves on social media, we are losing our ability to be close to others in real life.

The commodification of beauty is at the heart of this crisis. Fromm argues that “the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle underlying love are incompatible”. But we can overcome the idea that we are only beautiful if we can be marketed in specific, narrow realms. We can choose not to rate each other with numbers, or indulge the swipe culture of dating apps. Training ourselves to see the transcendent beauty of virtue is a way to open ourselves up to the expanse of human experience, to hone our “sensual praxis”, to restore our ability to be interdependent again, and to love.

The Miserable Older White Woman emerges from the same blend of old-school misogyny and ageist ugh-mom-ism that brought us first the Wine Mom and then the Karen, in the summer of 2020. In theory, a Karen was a white woman who called the police on black people who were simply minding their own business. In practice, the term started getting used (and is indeed still used) in reference to any woman over the age of 25 who has spoken up, in any context. In the early pandemic days, I was once called “Karen” after asking some teenagers on public transit to put on masks. But anti-maskers also got labelled Karens too, so we can’t win (unless we stay silent).

Who has it in for these women? A significant number of the Twitter accounts piling hate on middle-aged women seem to be controlled by young men who give off incel vibes. They are also angry at young women for rejecting them, and their mothers for not sending their favourite meal down to them that evening in their proverbial basement. What is clear is that these women are an avatar for complaints that span, or defy, the ideological spectrum. The Miserable Older White Woman inspires an intense, if difficult to pin down, political fury. Both progressives and the Right seem to agree that “Liberal white women on antidepressants will be the end of our civilisation”, but the stereotype allows a range of people to channel a variety of frustrations. She’s the 53% of white women who supposedly (but not actually) voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but also the tear-strewn pussy-hat wearer at the Women’s March protesting that election’s outcome.

For the Left, the privileged lady wrangling a prescription for her non-problems can be blamed for all of society’s woes: racism, imperialism, the housing shortage, the cost of living, climate change, perhaps even monkeypox. Her antidepressant usage can be categorised as yet another indulgence she engages in while other people suffer, akin to a day at the spa: “White women live off of Starbucks and antidepressants.” The Left-produced caricature lives in a large suburban house with a rich husband and resents her perfect life: “Excess red wine, antidepressants, free time and money has truly done wonders to boomer white women.” This is a women whose problem is that she has it too good. If she had to deal with the same adversity as everyone else, this would build character, and she’d stop the whinging.

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For the Right, the Miserable Older White Woman is the opposition: “Democratic party supporters are self-hating college-educated white women. Basically if you live in an apartment in LA and own four cats, a massive ‘sex toy’ and consume a lot of antidepressants you are a Democratic party voter.” And she is getting her comeuppance for her decades of liberalism. She foolishly bought into the feminist myth that women have brains and should have high-powered careers and look at her now, all alone with her cats, pining for the life she could have had if she’d settled down when still turning heads. If she’d stayed a virgin until marrying Ward Cleaver at 22, she wouldn’t be popping pills of any kind. She’s sad because she’s alone, but don’t feel sorry for her, it’s a misery of her own making. A lesson for young women: get married before you’re middle-aged — and why not to one of the charming young men who spend their days online mocking older women?

And yet critics from the Right also have it in for the Miserable Older White Women who have settled down, but who fail to have either aged into traditionalist matrons or remained chipper 20-somethings. Pratt, of “Welcome to Hell”, more recently made the rounds for introducing Twitter’s cynical masses to the Peach Mom, a comic about the angst of an apparently well-off stay-at-home mom (albeit with side hustles) who despises her husband for doing less of the housework and childcare. The woman behind these evidently autobiographical comics then got widely ridiculed, in part because it is objectively ridiculous to post comics to the internet that bash your spouse, but also because she was a Miserable Older White Woman, unhappy with her lot, but for no good reason. Why wasn’t she grateful that she had a provider husband who also did some housework? (Much was made of the fact that he apparently does childcare when she goes out in the evening to teach yoga, as though the teaching of yoga is an indulgence and not a part-time job.) She should be grateful, was the gist.

But the common ground of why she’s demonised is that she represents liberal modernity, to people across the political spectrum who object to it. The Miserable Older White Woman is a normie, a Hillary not Bernie supporter. An AWFL (“affluent white female liberal”); a Twitter search for that very-online acronym paints a similar picture. Her reaction to Kamala is an enthusiastic yaaas. She posts milquetoast liberal messaging to her Instagram, about Black Lives Mattering and trans rights and abortion rights, but in a cringe way.

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There’s a perception, among her detractors, that liberal modernity has given women of this demographic too much ground, which has made them (as well as everyone else) worse off: “Affirmative action, war on poverty, and the modern feminist movement empowered white women. This newly empowered group remade society in a way that harmed men that couldn’t adapt. This new society is not so great and white women begin taking massive amounts of antidepressants.” Men’s rights activists agree with far-Left advocates for the true marginalised: white women are spoiled pseudo-victims. They are society’s actual most powerful, but imagine themselves oppressed.

Does it all come back to Hillary Clinton? Hillary — per her haters — the privileged complainer. Hillary, the embodiment of the dorky, stodgy mom who does not know how to relax. Unlike other ways of medicating away bad moods, antidepressants have exactly zero reputation for being edgy or fun. Much like you know who. Even Hillary’s supporters faulted her, during the 2016 US presidential campaign, for not appearing to have a good time. (Too young, too attractive, and too fun-loving is also a problem, as a certain Finnish prime minister could attest.) The people who wanted to vote Democrat in 2016 but just couldn’t stomach Hillary are, in their rhetoric, very like those who see a stat on older white women’s antidepressant usage and go: “makes sense.”

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There’s also cross-ideological consensus that older women have committed the crime of having aged out of hotness. A Reddit theorist suggests older white women are upset because “they’re the most protected and coddled class when they’re young. When their looks fade they stop getting preferential treatment which is hard for most to adjust to.” The thing where “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, in other words. So, according to their critics, these women used to have too much and are now bitter over a normal existence.

To appear old is, in a sense, to look miserable. Society values women for youth, a fleeting quality, which is enough to make anyone miserable. But there’s also the specific fact that the changes to facial features that happen naturally with age read, on women, as anger. Women sick of being told they seem angry seek Botox — an anti-aging treatment — to remedy the situation. One wonders whether Miserable Older White Women are as miserable as all that, or just look that way, and are disproportionately prescribed antidepressants because their doctors — fallible humans like the rest of us — interpret their ordinary facial expressions as ones of distress. The medical establishment has made stupider mistakes.

Women, particularly housewives, have long been prescribed drugs at a much higher rate than men. One can look at this as society throwing drugs at women to distract them from their situational misery so that they don’t question the situation itself. But one might just as easily see this as a case of men not having access to proper mental health care, or indeed to the drugs that can be used relatively safely to make them less miserable. Are the men who sneer at antidepressant-using women just repulsed, or are they also, perhaps, envious? Do they wish they could be like the women who face somewhat less stigma for going ahead and making an appointment with their GP? Is the Miserable Older White Woman’s crime being miserable, or is it valuing herself enough to do something sensible about it?

I have a skincare regime, because who doesn’t? Very simple: just wash, serum, sunscreen in the morning; cream cleanser, gel cleanser, retinol treatment and face oil at night. But I don’t wear makeup every day: just a light layer, three or four times a week, which takes about five minutes. (A full face takes 20 minutes, but I’ll only bother with that once a week.)

Leg and underarm shaving is optional — hey, I’m a feminist! Once or twice a week. It’s just nice not to be hairy if I’m going to the gym, which I do three times a week for about an hour a time, but that’s about fitness as much as appearance. It’s not like I’m having fillers or Botox or plastic surgery. I love myself the way I am. I just spend hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds every year to achieve it.

Listing everything I do for beauty makes me sound, I know, unserious. If you’re a man, you may feel incredulous at this litany of vanity. Possibly you’re wondering how I have the time or the money for these commitments. If you’re a woman, though — even if you’re a woman who has opted out of all this stuff — then you will recognise the pressure to go along with it.

Nora Ephron called it “maintenance”, in a 2005 essay: “Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door.” More recently, the philosopher Clare Chambers has coined a new word for the daily effort we expend on our bodies. In her new book Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, she calls it “shametenance”.

But what’s so shameful about the unmaintained face? Many men insist that they prefer the “natural look” in women; then again, far fewer men demonstrate a preference for women with grey hair, wrinkles and hairy armpits. When a female celebrity gets papped without makeup, it’s a conspicuous enough event to make the Mail’s sidebar of shame. A bare female face is an invitation to ask: can she get away with it?

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This, though, is a time of exceptional frankness about the work of femininity. Maintenance is no longer cloistered in dressing rooms, but out there in Instagram stories and TikTok tutorials. Actresses no longer pretend their extended youthfulness comes only from nothing but sleep and hydration; instead, they try to sell us things.

Being obviously beautiful can now be a full-time job. Very few influencers bother with the tedious fiction that their desirable “skinny-thicc” figures (narrow waist, full hips, big tits and behind) are the lucky outcome of good genes and exercise. Instead, they put up sponsored posts about the surgeon who did their Brazilian butt lift (BBL).

And so, if honesty about beauty can eliminate some feelings of inadequacy, it only replaces them with a shopping list for becoming adequate. If the idea of the “natural look” has been debunked, it’s only allowed the most extreme and graphic plastic surgery to be normalised. Meanwhile, the “shametenance” list grows ever longer. These days you can get fillers at your family dentist.

And the more routine these interventions seem, the more people want them, even at considerable risk. If you can’t afford Botox from a medical professional in a clinic, an unqualified practitioner working in their living room can inject an unlicensed alternative into you instead. Victims of this black market suffer infections, sores and permanent scarring. For every 6,000 women who have a BBL, one or two will die as a result. It’s still the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery in the world.

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Maybe there’s an argument that the BBL is at least a rejection of the “waif” beauty standard formed in the Nineties and Noughties. In Sexual Revolution, Laurie Penny writes: “Today, the ideal woman takes up as little space as possible. She is fragile, breakable, thin and hungry-looking.” But that is not what the “ideal woman” looks like in 2022. If it were, women would not be spending thousands of pounds for a big bum and a non-zero chance of an embolism.

If the thinness of the waif was the point, then the skinny-thicc look ought to be liberatory: it’s all about having an ass that takes up as much space as possible. But the difference in the ultimate appearance of these ideals is irrelevant. What matters is that both advertise, through their exaggerated aesthetic, the effort that went into them: a waif is waifish because she scrupulously manages her food intake, a skinny-thicc is skinny-thicc because she’s put in the hours on the operating table.

In 2004, the sex advice columnist Dan Savage was asked about another fashion in female body shape: why weren’t women in porn getting enormous, “bigger-than-your-head” breast implants anymore? And this is what he replied:

“The sudden appearance of women with ridiculously huge boob implants was arousing in part because of its shock value. There was the shock of women with such exaggerated racks, of course, but there was also the more important and, sadly, the infinitely more arousing shock of women finding a novel new way to imperil their health in order to attract the attention of men.”

The point of all these extremes is their demonstration of commitment to being beautiful — to fulfilling the assumption, as Chambers describes it, that “to be a woman is to be sexually attractive, or at least to be sexually available, or at least open to judgement for being or not being sexually attractive and available”. It’s not that these physiques are universally desired by men at the times they become popular. It’s that they become the accepted symbol of a woman’s willingness to reshape her body in order to be pleasing.

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Trends are cyclical: an aesthetic gains ascendency, spreads to ubiquity, is pushed to absurdity in the competition for attention, and then collapses under the physical limitations of the body to be replaced by the next standard. When the thing after skinny-thicc begins to emerge, it might feel like an escape, but it won’t be. It will go through the same process, have the same distribution of winners and losers, exhaust itself the same way.

Women’s bodies, in other words, will always be a problem to solve. They will never be acceptable. That’s what makes Chambers’s position in Intact so appealingly radical: she argues that bodies do not need to be modified. Your body is valuable just as it is, because it is you. And I agree — while being enormously grateful that Chambers leaves enough flexibility in her thesis for me to agree without having to change any of the habits I’m attached to.

Intact is not absolutist. Sometimes, writes Chambers, modification is justified — for reasons of health or happiness. So it’s okay to spend £150 getting my hair done, because it’s a pleasure. (I’m a primate: it’s nice to be groomed. The sociological term for this is “the beauty touch”, says Chambers.) It’s okay for me to lift weights in the gym; so long as steroids aren’t involved: “bodybuilding can be good for both body and soul.” My tattoos are perhaps a more challenging case, but they too are defensible for Chambers as acts of “self-expression”.

In fact, any kind of body modification turns out to be acceptable in the end, because “the principle of the unmodified body asserts a premise, not a goal”. This saves her from doing anything as gauche as telling other people what to do with their bodies, but it does set her argument a little adrift: her book is part passionate defence of physical integrity, part “you do you” shrug.

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Chambers is also careful to make a fine distinction between “unmodified” and “natural”, pointing out that the latter is an unhelpful concept because “if being natural means being without human interference, then no human and no body can ever be natural”. Everything you consume, every movement you make, can alter the appearance of your body. How can a woman decide what to do with her body when every possible choice is loaded with value?

I’m not as scared of being censorious as Chambers is. As far as I’m concerned, wanting to change your appearance is part of being human, and one of the ways we signal status and group loyalty. But not all modifications are equal, and the ones we should be wary of are, first, the ones that infringe on the body’s ability to be a body: that destroy its capacity for function or pleasure (labiaplasty), that attack its self-reliance by turning it into a permanent patient (fillers that must be endlessly refilled so the stretched-out cavity won’t sag).

We should also be suspicious of modifications that distort our idea of the average. If you want Botox and can afford the good stuff, I do chafe at the idea of banning it. However, and as Chambers argues, we should not pretend the ethics here end with individual choice: if you eliminate your fine lines, you will change how others feel about theirs. When you’ve seen enough strangely ageless faces, your own normal creases begin to feel like deformities.

And finally, we should query modifications that are displays of pure female submission — by which I mean the extreme and dangerous forms of plastic surgery, but which arguably includes a great many of the less intrusive things I do. Chambers describes makeup as the ultimate in self-objectification, because when we wear it, “we see ourselves as others see us, and treat their perspective as the one that counts”.

I baulk at this — my face is a means of communication, and makeup is a fun way to play with the vocabulary of expression — but I should, at least, accept the possibility that I might be wrong. Beauty may be laborious. But declining to do beauty is its own kind of hard. In a society that judges women in particular so harshly on the way they look, it’s an announcement of non-compliance, and it’s often met with hostility.

The point is, even when a woman decides she will not make a statement with her body, she is making a statement. The point is, this is exhausting. The point is, it’s supposed to be: even on the days I’m not spending hours in a salon or carefully painting wings along my lash line, I’m still distractedly thinking about how I look at least some of the time. And if I stopped thinking about it? Someone else would still be thinking about it for me, judging me. The point is, there is no way out. We’re damned if we care, and damned if we don’t.

“Many this year want a pout like Sharon,” says Hoo, meaning Sharon Gaffka, the former beauty queen turned Department for Transport administrator who — despite having prominent work done to lips, face and breasts — failed to form a romantic connection with any of the men and was booted out of the villa last week.

Her failure to attract represents a painful Love Island irony: the correlation between surgery and attractiveness to men — and especially the ability to generate strong feelings — is weak. The less obviously enhanced women, from surfer-girl Lucie Donlan to winner Amber Rose in winter 2019, to Millie and Lucinda in this season, more often stoke an unambiguous, instant lust (they’re “fire”), while the women with more exaggerated features often struggle. Season Five’s Anna Vikali’s £100,000 of plastic surgery didn’t stop her from being summarily dumped when a better option came in, while Shaugna Phillips’ (Season Six) boldly artificial-looking mouth, eyes and nose did not keep Callum Jones from trading her in for a thinner, younger blonde at Casa Amor.

So why do women bother getting work done? Partly, of course, because it’s a fashion, disseminated at warp speed since the arrival of Instagram through the lucrative, Kardashian-inspired world of ultra-filtered influencers. That fashion has capitalised on a uniquely contemporary mixture of deep insecurity, and the politicisation of that insecurity: a defiant pride in “doing what makes you happy” and therefore doing what it takes to “pass, to survive and to thrive” — even if that means capitulating to one of patriarchy’s most devious regimes.

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The confused but angry politics of the new beauty burst to the surface in the first gripping set-piece of the current season of Love Island. The islanders were playing a game in which each person had to guess something about the person they were paired up with, to show how well they’d got to know them. The women’s cosmetic procedures were included in the game, with a frankness never seen before in the programme’s six-year history: one of the questions the men had to answer was what “work” their women had had done.

I’d have found such a question excruciatingly embarrassing, but then I belong to an outdated era in which one’s beauty is meant to look effortless — a fairly burdensome requirement in itself. By contrast, these women wrote with jolly loudness on their little blackboards what they’d all had done: all bar one (Kaz) had had something; a significant number had had Botox, filler and breast surgery. All of them were under the age of 27, and none of them seemed remotely coy about it.

A number of questions involved each party stating what they liked, or didn’t like, in a partner. Fan favourite Hugo, a 24-year old PE teacher with a club foot who has frequently been passed over for being “too nice”, used the word “fake” three times. He declared a strong dislike for “fakeness” or “anything fake” in women — personality and looks. It sounded like a fairly general word for a barrage of bad things in a society obsessed with authenticity, and no worse than what the other men claimed to revile, including women with visible arm hair. But after Hugo’s second invocation of “fake”, the heavily enhanced Faye growled: “that word keeps getting thrown around, doesn’t it?”

On the third time, Sharon and Faye exploded, calling Hugo “ignorant” and demanding he “get fucking educated” about why “girls get work done”. Hugo, oblivious, then burst into tears at the extreme consequences of his word choice, to which Faye responded, “I don’t give a fuck if he’s upset, he can fuck off”.

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It was clear now that “fake” had been taken as a slur word on a par with open racism — a comparison later made by a furious, filler-lipped Sharon, to the consternation of fans. Twitter duly exploded with “fake gate”, with former islanders — women who’d had work done — weighing in. Amber Rose agreed that the word had seemed pointed, while Laura Anderson, of Series Four, claimed that the women had “gone too far” in their reaction.

Faye explained her strong retort in telling terms:

“For me the word fake doesn’t go well. My mum and dad watched me cry every day from the age of 13 to 18 because I was underdeveloped, then they bought me a boob job for my 18^th birthday because I was having such a tough time.”

Getting work done was a reaction to body insecurity — a helpless, only-human female response to patriarchy. Sharon had also taken offence because “fake” insulted women who were driven to do it: “you don’t know the reasons why we’ve had stuff done and I think that’s really unfair”.  That she — that all the women on Love Island — had embraced and then benefitted hugely from the system she’s criticising was not acknowledged.

Fake-gate highlighted a new kind of feminist, then: a woman who sees her obsession with her own looks as both something justifiable and a sign of patriarchy-created vulnerability. This type of feminism has crystallised since social media allowed people, especially women, to get rich and famous from home-made self-portraits and videos — the more suggestive and exaggerated the better. The “fake” look condemned by Hugo is more likely to be seen on working-class women (the Love Island fan base is not generally middle class), but influencers’ use of some form of sexiness crosses class. This sexualised route to stardom doesn’t feel particularly feminist to someone schooled in, say, Women’s Liberation — but then, it can certainly be lucrative.

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And she may even recognise, like the women of Love Island, that she’s playing a game with rules set by patriarchy. Sissy Sheridan, a teen TikTok star with 5.3m followers — whose videos mainly show her pouting and lip-syncing in bikinis — believes her medium “is the most misogynistic platform ever,” replete with “slut-shaming and cyberbullying” of female stars. She condemns these slut-shamers as “haters,” proclaims to be a “feminist,” and continues to dance near-naked for her fans and rack up followers: one more example of how blurred the lines between feminism and sexualised self-selling have become.

Love Island’s fake-gate is another example, of course. But the row caught fire because the manipulation of our bodies has never been as explosive a political issue as in this era of trans rights and body positivity. In some circles, “natural” — one of the buzzwords of the body positivity movement — has become as political as “fake”. Right-on beauty observers like Sesali Bowen see the celebration of the “natural” as a judgement of those who manipulate their bodies because they are “marginalised”: trans people getting surgery to suit their true gender identities, say, or those hoping to escape pressures intensified by racism, ableism and lookism. Bowen also argues that plastic surgery is a democratising force that wrests “pretty privilege” from the hands of the few.

Perhaps she’s right. But the downsides of excessive bodily manipulation are painfully obvious. As well as signalling a moveable feast of insecurity and the tyranny of constant self-monitoring, fake-gate has highlighted how easily women can plunge from the envied and powerful into the pitied and reviled. This is part of a long-term female conundrum: how do we change our bodies enough to be beautiful but not too much to cloud our sexual allure? As Ben Jonson put it in a 1609 song, “Still to be neat, still to be dressed”, women should aim for a look of “sweet neglect”, which required being “powdered, still perfumed” — but subtly. Women who use too many additives are suspected of falseness (fakeness’s ancestor) and trickery. Robert Herrick, the 17^th century poet, railed at those who were: “False in legs, and false in thighs; / False in breast, teeth, hair and eyes”.

The potential for pitiable grotesquerie has always been waiting in the wings for women grasping too hungrily at perfect figures, faces and eternal youth. Today, we are inundated with stories of plastic surgery gone wrong; of monstrous transformations in which the attempt at beauty radically backfires. Testimonies by remorseful surgery addicts make eye-watering reading. Heidi Montag, an American reality star, has admitted to procedures all itemised in print: mini brow lift, forehead botox, nose job “revision”, fat injections in her cheeks, chin reduction, neck liposuction, pinned back ears, second breast job, liposuction on hips, waist and inner thighs, and buttock augmentation. “People have fewer scars from car accidents than I have on my body,” she observed.

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Like Montag, the women of Love Island — and their millions of fans and followers — are caught up in a stressful, physically damaging game in which the potential payoff of fame is pitted against the brutal facts of time, human flesh, and fashion. And what are they playing for? The islanders throw everything into their appearance but seem flummoxed about how to actually talk to each other. In the end, the contestants find, no amount of paid-for, hard-won bodily perfection can fill the gap left by really “getting to know” someone — and liking them. When everyone has bodies on the tight spectrum of contemporary perfection, the ability to attract comes down to other things — in Love Island parlance, having “a bit about” you.

And the fashion may soon be turning sharply against enhancements — or “tweakments,” as they’ve called them this season. Ex-contestant Anna Vikali has just announced she is reversing her £100,000 of work, starting with a breast reduction, and Molly Mae Teague, runner up of winter 2019, has turned anti-“tweakment” after failing to recognise her own reflection in the mirror.

Still, the demand for surgical enhancement is continuing to rise, and the danger is that fakeness — understood in the surgical sense — becomes more seamlessly integrated into standard aesthetics, perhaps even morphing into the “natural”. After all, tweakments are now presented by their “feminist” purchasers as an only natural response to marginality, suffering and patriarchy. Like Faye and Sharon, they’ve cracked under the pressure to look a certain way, and surgery was their answer.

But forcing this unfortunate chain of events into a vocabulary of politicised victimhood conceals the seriousness of the motive, which is an obsessive focus on the body as the font of all worth. Recognising this helps us to see Botox, fillers, butt-lifts and boob jobs for what they really are — extreme, often counterproductive measures to fight time and nature — rather than acts of female bravura. They are short-term solutions, not only for individual women, but for women generally — who’d be much better off if the whole sexist system were dismantled, rather than propped up “fake” feminism.