A knock at the door. A subtle and yet distinct sound. I’m thinking, who could it be at this hour? Who has come to bother me on my personal digital echochamber? Who dares know my address? Do they not know this is my explore page they are knocking on? A full house. Crowded, if you’d like. Vivienne Westwood runways from the 1990s and raccoon-tail hair-dye videos, senseless create-mode memes and advertisements for AI girlfriends. Who let it in? Upon which algorithm did I confess to my insatiable need for a .png copy-paste girlfriend? On the one hand, Camus assures me that perfection and beauty are at odds with one another, that “…at the heart of all beauty lies something inhumane.” On the other hand, Wolf warns “…the machine is at the door. Is she the future?”
Perhaps no longer the future, but the present, a generated kind of woman – carefully concealing her charging port. It is true that we have, in the crux of a sopping epoch of digitalism, mistaken the pursuit of beauty for the bloodthirsty pursuit of perfectionism. A mirage of thousands of female faces, accumulative perfection weaved through our feeds. We want filler, and we want it now. We want to stamp out our crows feet and wrinkles and thin-lips in exchange for a luscious, cosmetically enhanced kiss. We want the fat taken from our stomach and planted straight into our ass and we crave small, upturned noses. We want Face Cards and filters. We, and the rest of our nation, want to mock the women on Married At First Sight for looking unnatural, and to spend hours generating different hair colours on ourselves. We want AI girlfriends, AI porn, AI beauty.
We want visuals so far removed from basic human anatomy we forget what the human is supposed to look like, beyond something flawed, something to be fixed. A dear friend scans her face into an AI generator. It is her face but… different. Newer. The audio automatically assigned to the video she created says “me finding out that instead of mysterious and cool, people think I’m autistic and a lesbian.”
We are living through the genesis, the birth of the man-made woman. A notion in which this kind of beauty — this ‘perfectionism’— is not only mass-produced, but largely accessible. No longer is the self care day splurging on a fresh set of acrylics, but getting lip filler from a walk-in clinic. A woman’s beauty ‘maintenance’ becomes assisted self-mutilation in the image of artificially generated women. We put our money back into the machine to continue creating what created us. The beauty standard has deviated from the ideal woman to the ideal woman-shaped machine.
We desire a sterile beauty, a too clean, too common, too symmetrical perfection that disappears unto itself entirely. Everybody begins to look the same, and it is that manufactured sameness that creates a beauty that is so beautiful, it is no longer beautiful. Was it not Wilde who demanded rather, that life imitates art, far more than art imitates life?
And yet is this not it? Art being the ultimate defense against the mass-manufacturing of the body? The abscess stuck to the face of beauty is humanness. For, what does the mechanical sex-dolly have that we don’t but for a metal skeleton?
There is a rule about beauty, in which it must coexist with a kind of ‘ugliness’, something macabre and irregular, in order for beauty to be the most beautiful it can be. It is a rule that is found everywhere: from nature’s sublime imperfections to the Gods we’ve created in our image.
Imperfection breeds beauty. It’s what William Morris spoke of in The Lesser Arts of Life, that “production by machinery is all together an evil,” because the machine can physically only produce sameness and perfection. There is no craftsmanship, no careful artistry, no asymmetrical, blue-tinted wine glasses: just the 4-pack of champagne flutes from Kmart that end up in every single Vinnies. The machine, Morris argued, prohibits the creation of art, due to the sameness and perfection of the material it produces, and also the speed at which it does so.
Is this not the age of the man-made woman? A quick, efficient trend cycle that values mutilation as self-care and sameness as beauty. The mathematical perfection of AI generated women on social media has nothing to do with true beauty; it does not rest on the shoulders of perfection, it actually outruns it.
The machine lacks flaws, which really are just defining characteristics of beautiful things. Think of adored models in the 1990s; like Kate Moss and her lazy eye, which was a defining characteristic of her beauty, a beauty so fervent because of its strangeness, imperfection, and disharmony. Anomaly is not effortless to look at: these defining flaws that make up true beauty is beauty that takes time to observe, more than 0.5 seconds in the digital sea of manufactured symmetry. Truly arresting beauty is balanced with the ugly, the mutated, and the macabre. They are intrinsic to our experience of the world: of each other, of ourselves.
I used to think of myself as a perfectionist, I guess I’m a little impartial to the idea now. My face need not be scrutinised by AI-scanning, product-recommending databases to assess the perfect and most exploitative skincare routine. I need not save reels for outfit inspiration, nor to peruse the ins and outs of stylised and generated man-made women. What can these apps, this perfection, give to me that I cannot already give to myself? I am made up of an intricate network of imperfections, mutations, flaws, and ugliness that are defining characteristics to a beauty I call my own. I know I am beautiful, because I am me.
As you, dear reader, are you.
