Gaze of the Other

There’s an old coaching cliché, probably true, that wallowing in misery gets you nowhere and a bad decision is better than not making one at all. Quit whining and just do it, as our favorite sports philosopher Nike writes on T-shirts. The majority of people have internalized this and are making decisions all the time. True to the sneaker brand’s gospel, the body is where people make their most feverish decisions. After all, thin, fit, and attractive people are free in the modern world. Right?

In the age of social media, watching people make the life-changing decisions they believe will catapult them into freedom is almost too much to take. At the height of the woke era, Instagram forced us to look at women with very hairy legs, armpits, and bikini areas, and that included a perfectly serious advertisement for a body hair care oil. Ever since the great destroyer Donald Trump and his armada seized control of American pop culture, people haven’t stopped making aesthetic choices; they’ve just adapted to the zeitgeist. They’ve become more brutal: while the leg-hair oil startup is surely bankrupt by now, the middle-aged actress Denise Richards is making her facelift public, complete with swelling, pain, and bruises. The unshaven feminist and Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife, who’s once again radiantly smooth and youthful, are making completely different choices. Yet both are aimed at the same thing: a liberating breakthrough. One wants to escape the suffocating male gaze and the other wants to break free from what she experiences as the prison of invisibility.

From lasers to facelifts, broadcasting facial treatments straight out of a horror movie has now become the norm, just as it was de rigueur to ostentatiously show the supposed freedom of accepting the cellulite on your thighs a few years ago. Just as the big body positivity stories were told as heartwarming gamechangers at the height of political correctness, now personal stories about »deep plane« lifts (essentially muscle grafting, which Kris Jenner delighted and shocked everyone with at the same time) or life-changing Ozempic journeys are being poured into the digital world with the same pathos. But on TikTok and Instagram, it’s not just the female body that’s being worked on—the male body’s also being meticulously sculpted with the precision of BMW engineers. It’s called looksmaxxing. But what sounds like harmless self-care is, in reality, a full-scale remodeling program for male losers. Jawlines are analyzed, practices such as »canthal tilt« and »facial harmony« are debated, and workout routines are devised not only for muscles but even for facial expressions. A broad, defined jaw is to these guys what eternal youth is to women—a way to escape the shackles of insignificance. Looksmaxxers often inhabit the manosphere, where influencers hate women and make money by telling other guys how to make money. The media has covered this extensively, since it’s scandalous, of course. And yet the female counterpart is by no means less radical. It’s just packaged differently. Under hashtags like #glowup or #fulltransformation, women document their extreme measures. Lips are injected, noses straightened, hair extensions bonded in, and skin lasered—and all of this is no longer a secret. It’s shown with pride. The story goes that aging makes women tired and bitter and hopeless. So instead of staying stuck in such misery, the subsequent surgery becomes an imperative decision in the story of one’s life. The scalpel’s incision is the first step into a space that’s free of everything unpleasant—free of self-doubt, fear, and the nearness of death—except for the painful healing process.

For now, let’s just say that the misery bodies cause only stops when they cease to function. The question then is how much freedom such bodily decisions actually afford.

If only we could ask Jean-Paul Sartre, the high priest of existentialism: Might public selfmutilation perhaps be textbook existentialism? Remember: existence precedes essence. Which means it’s not that we are, it’s that we become through the decisions we make all the time. Freedom isn’t a commodity, but an act. One of Sartre’s central ideas was the »gaze of the other« (le regard). In his work »Being and Nothingness« he describes how we define our-selves through the eyes of others. If we asked him about today’s mania for rejuvenation, he’d probably take a weary drag on his cigarette and say, »You’re optimizing your appearance to come out ahead in the social comparison game—but you run the risk of turning yourself into an object instead of acting as a free subject«. 

And then there’s his »mauvaise foi«, self-deception. Anyone who pretends that their fate, including the fate of their body, is determined by external factors denies their own freedom. To illustrate that extreme plastic surgery wouldn’t automatically be wrong to him, he might have cited sixty-seven-year-old Madonna: clearly not a woman who cares about the male gaze or any other, but who is rather a totally free Gesamtkunstwerk that has been surgically altered to the max. Unlike the looksmaxxers. And unlike the hairy influencers. However individual choices may feel, the desired faces and bodies are social media standards. And so, Sartre would probably just ask: Are you living authentically? Or are you hiding behind a predetermined identity?

Identity: the buzzword of recent years. FLINTA*, LGBTQIA+, agender, androgynous, bigender, cisgender, pansexual, omnisexual, gender-queer, intersex, or gender-fluid: you could pick out your very own identity from a long list of terms as if you were at the supermarket. Even for a square, heterosexual, well-paid Green Party voter in Charlottenburg or Schwabing, the body and its adornments—meaning, clothes and gadgets (for example, a cargo bike)—became an identity. After all, some decision’s behind every Patagonia backpack. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a matcha latte mom or a Trump Barbie—no one makes a choice in a vacuum; you’re always within a social context. So we exhaust ourselves with fighting for freedom—no more designer bags!—only to disappear the very next moment in a uniform crowd of people carrying tote bags. As a result, the space for freedom shrinks instead of expanding. It’s the fate of every youth culture: the crusty aesthetic of the punk movement, just as much as the functional, body-hugging look of the nineties rave scene, were initially expressions of freedom and then became style codes, conformist signals of belonging. Authentic or not, there’s someone inside each of us who just wants to get past the bouncer.

Choosing a style—or a body or a face or even a gender identity—is,

and herein lies a certain human tragedy, always a decision against something else, too. Anyone shaping their body today—whether with body hair, a scalpel, or fashion—navigates through a field of tension made up of images and norms they didn’t create. As is well known, the most overheated debate is the one between older feminists (Alice Schwarzer, J. K. Rowling) and the transgender community. The issues? The right age for gender affirmation procedures; women’s restrooms as safe spaces for »biological« women (that is, those born with a uterus); and the disadvantage of the very same uterus-bearers in professional sports (the first female president of the Olympic Committee has recently made the call to exclude transgender athletes from all women’s disciplines). What’s at stake here? Personal freedom. Michel Foucault is often quoted in this highly emotional debate, as he already argued in the twentieth century that sexuality—that is, categories such as male and female—are not dictated by nature. In his reading, identities emerge through medical, moral, and psychological discourses as well as social norms. As such, Foucault can be invoked by both opposing sides. He says, »Each person’s life could be a work of art«. For trans people, that means no one has to settle for the wrong body. He also says, »The soul is the prison of the body«. Biofeminists could interpret this to mean that what counts as the true self is, in turn, a form of control, dictated by debates and social developments. Right now, that debate dictates that the ultimate intervention with a scalpel is gender affirmation and not a »transformation«, since the woman or man was always there, just trapped in the wrong body. Are all bodily decisions in the end just one grand, vain art project of the self, one that only squeezes us into new norms? The question sounds cynical when applied to the immense suffering many transgender people endure, yet it seems justified when applied to the suffering of looksmaxxers.

When in doubt, we can only turn to the old warhorses of philosophy. Aristotle would have probably found all painful forms of aesthetic self-fashioning incomprehensible. After all, freedom meant maintaining a harmonious balance in all things for the ancient Greeks. The Stoics Epictetus and Seneca would have probably also disliked the fixation on the body and, by extension, all conscious decisions about identity. In Stoicism, what we can control is not our appearance—and certainly not the accident of birth—but only our inner attitude toward it. Of course, that’s easy to say in a world without the temptation of Botox, when life was much shorter anyway. And so, while modern humans suffer one panic attack after another from the sheer number of aesthetic decisions they have to make, they can only console themselves, to paraphrase Søren Kierkegaard, with the thought that anxiety is the vertigo of freedom.