The Broken Aesthetics of You Doing You

I think I’ve been doing a bad job of reading the Internet because beloved Facebook friends have begun to send me links. It’s actually better this way. Makes me less desperate as I scroll through twitter. Means I might even pick up a book here and there. Want me to bash at something? Tweet or FB message me. I’ll get to Katie Couric tomorrow. Today I want to remind everyone of something. Remember how I said that modern day Feminism, whichever wave we happen to be thrashing about in, has an aesthetic problem?

A few people shouted that I was being mean, but mostly I got a lot of quiet likes, which means I must be right. Anyway, I stand by whatever it was I said then. The main reason I can’t self identify as a feminist is because of the aesthetics. They’re awful. Today I have a couple of nice examples of why this is so. The first is the easiest because it’s so ghastly.

Go on, click this link. You might feel like you’re dying, and probably you are, but in your last gasping death pains click back here and read some immortal prose.

Did you look? Wow. Right? That really is something. I would say it rises to the level of Man Abuse. Not that the man is abusing anyone, but that the fashion designer is abusing all his “male models.” Although, I would argue that putting these kinds of clothes on a woman would also be really mean and shouldn’t be done.

I know. I know. We’re supposed to all be gender fluid and it doesn’t matter who we are and what we wear. We should all have basically the same shape–flat as a board in muted colors, except for the strangely lurid bank of flowers at the back. Is that a thing this year?

All the angles and colors and shapes and expressions are meant to say Decadence. Be whoever you want to be as long as it looks just like this and acts put out.

Because unhappiness is the new happiness.

Now let’s compare that to Lena Dunham who went on Howard Stern (!) to complain about Trump (!!!). This is jumbling too many categories for me. Didn’t Trump used to always go on Howard Stern to talk unpleasantly about women? Isn’t the point of that show to be bawdy and inappropriate? Isn’t it to shock and break down the boundaries so that we can all fully express ourselves and talk any which way we want to? I still don’t understand why the left is upset about Trump. He embodies everything they have fought so hard for–serial marriage and internet trolling. Why on earth is Lena Dunham unhappy about him?

Anyway, she lost weight because she’s been so miserable. This is actually a great quote, and I agree with her.
“Everyone’s been asking like, ‘What have you been doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Try soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness and you, too, will lose weight.’”

I’m confused, though. I thought her meme was body acceptance. Why would she be happy to lose weight? Why would she show off her new thinner look? Isn’t body acceptance all about not giving into the patriarchy whatchamacallit and Not being thin? So many contradictions so little time.

Seriously, the patriarchy. Where is it? It’s certainly not on the runway. Who exactly wins when men are dressed up like Louis XVI women being led away to the guillotine? Or do you mean Trump? Because he’s the icon of the feminist age–pouting lips, weird hair, irrationality. In the age of You do You, he does him. We should all rejoice because, as his inaugural dancing went, “He’s doing it his way.” That’s what we all Wanted. We shouldn’t be upset when someone listens and obeys.

I didn’t mean to bash Trump. Nor even Lena Dunham. She has the freedom to look anyway she wants, to wear what she wants, to be who she wants. But she’s not really embracing that freedom. She’s reacting to the supposed oppression of the age by dressing as badly as possible. That way she wins.

For all the winning, nobody seems to be enjoying it. In the pursuit of happiness happiness has flown away and all that’s left is rage and sorrow. And that’s why it’s so aesthetically unpleasant. It’s not the outward form–though beauty has moved from being fleeting to being essentially nonexistent–it’s the angry gaze underneath, the bitter reproachfulness, the willingness for the other person to die. Really, the most beautiful people in the world are those have already died to themselves, for whom bitterness has no sway, who, when encountering anger, dispatch it joyfully to the uttermost parts of the sea.

Honestly, I don’t care what Lena Dunham wears, as long as she wears Something. And those poor demoralized men, prancing around in a caricature of the female form–if it made them happy I’d have a harder time complaining. (Don’t worry, I still would.) But in the age of You do You you don’t actually get to be a whole person. You are reduced to the imaginations of your own mind, a mind broken and angry, and the outflow of the heart, which is assuredly wicked. There’s no real fulfillment here, not even the buzzword of the day–Human Flourishing.

As our dear leader would say, #sad.