Redefining the Terms
A few weeks ago, I watched The Substance through my hands. During particularly bloody scenes, I would study Thomas’s face as he grimaced, attempting to judge when it was safe to look at the screen again. The film—which interprets the violence of body modification and our cultural obsession with youth through a campy lens—hits a high point of disgust within the first hour during a horrific gestational scene in which a “younger” version of Demi Moore’s character is “birthed”: Her body splits open down her spine as she writhes around on the cold, white tile of a bare porcelain bathroom, and a glistening, new version of her, played by Margaret Qualley, unceremoniously climbs out.
Despite the copious gore, I found the film’s more banal moments to be the most distressing. For long stretches, Demi Moore’s character, Elisabeth, was “on” and Margaret Qualley’s character, Sue, was “off” (as in, body literally powered down in a makeshift closet). Almost as soon as young, hot, supple Sue was “born,” older (though, frankly, still hot and supple) Elisabeth fully abdicated her life—she accepted the terms of human worthiness (youth) defined by her industry (Hollywood), and wasted away in her apartment during the seven-day stretches between “Sue” weeks, counting down until she could reemerge as someone society valued.
The billboard outside her home, which once bore Elisabeth’s face but now features Sue, haunts her.
Over the next couple of days, I kept returning to this message, struggling to metabolize it. To make sense of how unsettled I felt, I went hunting for essays that unpacked the absurdity of its grisly, heavy-handed symbolism. One piece, which included an interview with beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino, featured an arresting line (emphases mine) that I’ve found myself returning to a lot—not because it makes me feel good, but because it treats not feeling good as normal:
“People ask me, after years of doing this work, do you feel good about yourself all the time? And I’m like, no, I feel like f***ing shit most of the time. But I don’t feel any worse than I did. The difference is, I’ve freed up a lot of my actual sources of power: my time, my money, my energy, and attention, and the amount of myself that I now have to dedicate to other pursuits. As a result, my life has materially improved in a lot of ways that don’t currently include feeling great about what I look like.”
When I engaged in an intentional glow-down several years ago, I figured at some point I’d burst through the clouds of superficiality and come to appreciate my natural self as favorably as I did the artificial one. But as my blond highlights grew out and my face, nails, and body resumed their natural shapes and coloring, I confronted a startling discovery: By the conventional, rapacious standards of capital-B Beauty, all that effort really did make me look better before.
“Gaining something else necessarily meant losing elements of what our culture deems ‘aspirational’ for women.”
This realization presented a choice that felt existential in the way the film made literal: Accept these terms and choose to reclaim the undeniable economic power of being a stereotypically “well-groomed” woman in exchange for the life force it consumes, or take the chance that there’s something different, and hopefully better, waiting on the other side (even if that means forgoing the dark magic of Botox and bleach).
In retrospect, my surprise was naïve. To think I could wrest back the time, money, and energy I had formerly devoted to this pursuit without losing the very things that the time, money, and energy had been in service of was an obvious miscalculation. Gaining something else necessarily meant losing elements of what our culture deems “aspirational” for women.
My naïvete aside, this sort of reverse-Faustian bargain—otherwise known as the distinctly American fantasy that we can get a bunch of something for nothing—happens all the time in economic theory. It’s why we often remain gridlocked when debating the validity of certain plans and proposals. The most explicit example is probably the Laffer curve, an idea which entered the mainstream in the 1970s and became the bedrock logic for Reaganomics and the idea of “trickle-down” prosperity, promising that if you lowered taxes for corporations and high earners, tax revenues would actually go up and everyone would get richer. Its supposedly ‘win-win’ nature makes it a powerful narrative that still dominates in some circles today.
And while it’s true that Reagan cut taxes in his first year as president and revenues rose during his time in office, the lesser-known plot point of this story is the part where the 1981 tax cut blew such a huge hole in the government’s revenue that the rest of his presidency was spent finding new ways to covertly raise the money to pay for it. “If you add [all the following tax increases] together,” wrote Justin Fox for Bloomberg, they “were almost as big or even bigger than the 1981 cuts, depending on the measure you use.” One of Reagan’s staffers (who later became an adviser to Bush in the 2000s) estimated that the positive economic effects driven by the 1981 cuts recouped only about a third of the revenue losses they created, so the rest had to be generated by increasing taxes elsewhere. One such area was payroll taxes, which disproportionately impact people under the payroll tax limit. They’re far less painful for high earners, for whom the majority of income is over the Social Security cap. (Believe it or not, this will come back around to Demi Moore’s hotness.)
“But something would have to be sacrificed—and maybe that ‘something’ is the standard of value we’ve been applying to these questions; the terms of the discussion.”
But I don’t want to suggest this rhetorical strategy is solely employed by conservative economists: Progressives use it, too, when we’re trying to sell the idea that programs like universal childcare would “pay for themselves,” or that four-day work week experiments don’t result in any productivity loss. The subtext is, You will lose nothing, and you have so much to gain. In other words, nothing will have to be sacrificed. I understand why we frame these policy positions in this way—we’ve been trained to fear things like higher taxes and trust things like profit motive, so the best way to persuade skeptics is to point out all the ways in which something like universal healthcare is actually way cheaper than our current system, right?
But something would have to be sacrificed—and maybe that “something” is the standard of value we’ve been applying to these questions; the terms of the discussion.
Rather than emphasizing how we don’t lose any productivity when we only work four days per week, what if we asked whether our current level of productivity is necessary? What if instead the pitch were, “Yeah, we might lose some productivity and money. Would that be so bad? If you can work 20% less but only earn 5% less, would you take that trade?” Or, more to the point, “Why is the current level of productivity necessarily the right level?” Now we’re having a much more interesting conversation!
Rather than promising that universal healthcare or childcare would be less expensive or boost GDP, what if we said, “Yeah, your taxes might go up. You might have less money. But you’ll also get to go to the doctor for free whenever you need to, and every child will be guaranteed a spot at high-quality care centers with healthy, four-course meals like those little baguette-swingin’ French kids get. Is that worth having a little less discretionary income? If so, how much less?” At the very least, having the discussion on these terms would force us to identify more clearly where we disagree.
To hash out these questions in terms of their costs automatically cedes the framing to a few core assumptions: that anything that raises taxes, lowers productivity, or results in someone having less money, is bad. End of conversation. Nobody in charge (well, almost nobody) is interested in challenging this framing. That we rarely step back to question whether these are the right metrics to optimize for is part of the problem.
America’s economic identity is one of aspiration, and that means we’ve spent the last 40 years maneuvering for change within frustratingly narrow terms: More growth = good. More tax = bad. That partially explains our current bewildering position, in which all the data says life in America unilaterally rocks (and rocks more than anywhere else!), while a plurality of people who live here insist otherwise. Still, part of the challenge is how enduring the romantic Reaganomics vision turned out to be: one that replaced our early twentieth century skepticism of the ultra-ultra-rich with reverence, and defined “freedom” as the unrestrained ability to lose everything. (The latter is probably best captured by what political scientist Jacob Hacker calls “the great risk shift,” or the systematic transfer of financial precarity from government and big business to individuals.)
“The US in 2024 feels a little like Elisabeth, holed up in her apartment, staring at a gigantic, mythic version of herself on the billboard outside—one that, maybe, never really existed.”
Electoral politics aside, I think there’s something to be gained from this lens on a personal level, too. To not feel favorably about, say, the shape of your body or the size of your bank account, and then not feel compelled to change it, is to introduce a glitch in the system, to redefine the discussion on your own terms. Sometimes, in a perverse way, the only thing that provides relief when I feel like I’m failing is to embrace what I get in exchange for this ordinary suffering: a life in which I set the standards. The suggestion that we should always feel thrilled about the way we look, or, in a much broader sense, that it’s even possible to feel good all of the time, is, in many ways, the promise and project of a system for which the chief economic health indicator is just the value of everything being bought and sold. The idea that perfect mental health is attainable at all creates a sort of obligation to attain it, which, it’s worth stating explicitly, leaves us pretty vulnerable to marketing departments the world over.
The US in 2024 feels a little like Elisabeth, holed up in her apartment, staring at a gigantic, mythic version of herself on the billboard outside—one that, maybe, never really existed—accepting that her best days are necessarily behind her. The fantasy of perpetual youth is similar to the mirage of casino-style bootstrapped success, in the sense that neither pursuit adequately or honestly addresses what must be sacrificed in order to preserve their supremacy. Something will be lost in releasing these fantasies. Something better will be gained.
