Chris Duffy

And you've lived in the U.S.

You've lived in East Asia.

You've seen this global change in the way that beauty standards are expressed.

And you've also experienced it personally.

I feel like every single person who is listening to this is experiencing already, whether they know it or not, this concept that you describe in the book that I'd never heard before, which is the technological gaze.

Can you define that for us?

Well, so this is an interesting part for me here is that

when you interview people who are making changes on people's physical bodies.

So when you're talking to people who are plastic surgeons or who are,

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.