What’s Truly Beautiful

I’m telling you, you’re beautiful. Don’t change a thing. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jean Fenouil. Have you noticed Mar-a-Lago face popping up in pop culture? It’s freaky. Certain conservative women and billionaires’ second wives—people who started out looking perfectly fine—now have puffy lips, exaggerated cheeks, and eyes that look perpetually surprised. I finally figured out what they remind me of: marionettes. They look like marionettes. With control-me, make-me-dance strings definitely implied. Certain conservative men are promoting a hypermasculine version of this display, called “looksmaxxing.” They’re also doping themselves with testosterone and getting injections to enlarge their penis. Politics isn’t incidental here; the MAGA movement is all about enforcing and glorifying a strict gender binary. We’re being pelted with propaganda about warriors and tradwives, all of it infused with ultra-gendered, white-supremacist beauty standards. (Perversely, the same people who prize…