Chris Duffy

you know, doing cosmetic procedures or even just, you know, facials and all of that stuff, increasingly people are asking them to make them look more like the people that they see through the screen.

And often those people who they see through the screen are actually putting on a technological filter, right?

So people then feel like they have to, in the real world, live up to the standard of the technological filter.

Until I read your book, I hadn't ever really thought about that idea that like beauty standards aren't just socially formed anymore.

They're also now being formed by the technology.

How do you personally handle and deal with the technological gaze, whether that's pushing back against it, whether that's living with it, whether that's a mix of both?

What do you do with the idea?

The caveat that I'm kind of curious to talk about, and again, you address this in the book, is the caveat that for some people, being able to modify their bodies and being able to have access to plastic surgeries.

And I'm specifically thinking of trans people.

Having access to surgeries like that can be a really important piece of gender affirming care.

The more that we accept that everyone should be making big changes to their bodies and to their appearance all the time, the more that we just put this work on everyone.

But we also can't quite say that no one should do that.

So where do you land on it?

You know, there's a part where you talk about Squid Game, you talk about Gangnam Style, and you talk about, you know, your amazement that capitalism can absorb critiques of capitalism.

How well capitalism absorbs and profits off of critiques of capitalism.

So the reason I bring that up is because I think that reading your book and thinking about this, so many of the beauty standards and the standards of what we think of as how people are supposed to look are often kind of proxies for beauty.

Right.

Like you talk about how being looking white is often, in your opinion, misinterpreted as a racial or colonial goal in Korea.

And that, in fact, it is much more to do with people wanting to be seen as not having to spend time like outside that they can have the privilege to not be in the fields.

And that's where it started.