On Lookism

Humans have become the product in the digital age, and our time has been monetized. The competition for staying relevant for creators and the sites themselves leads to a death spiral, with the youth spending more and more time on the sites. As a result, much of our culture, identity, and ideas come to be found and defined on said sites. The more positive and encouraging these things are, the more positive society can become. Yet these things seem to become more and more hurtful as time passes. Although social media can make people feel more secure about their bodies, it has created unrealistic beauty standards through beauty trends and algorithms that promote attractive people, leading to a culture that is intensely invested in looks.

Social media has led to communities and trends extremely obsessed with looks. People admiring beautiful people is nothing new. The obsession with Megan Fox, a famous 2000 actress, as the “hottest woman ever” or fans fawning over actresses and actors is not much of a change from 50 years ago. What fast-form social media has led to is trends highlighting hyper-specific beauty details. Take the popular TikTok trend on canthal tilts, which declared that eyes with a downward or negative tilt are unattractive and eyes with a positive tilt have “predator/hunter eyes” and are more attractive.

Hunter vs Prey eyes example found on a blackpill channel (blackpill basically means they believe that looks are all that matters)

Or take the trend of hip dips, where people felt they must get rid of the standard human feature for a bit of indent on the side of the hips. These trends highlight the specific focus on looks seen by the present online society. Imagine a television show or even an older relative talking about the hideousness of negative canthal tilts or the horror of hip dips. They would have seemed crazy, and for good reason. Yet TikTok and Instagram have provided a platform for these communities to flourish.

Another trend is mogging. Mogging is when photos of beautiful people standing next to people considered uglier are posted on the internet, with the uglier person considered to have been “mogged.” That is the whole content, yet entire Reddit subreddits or TikTok accounts are dedicated to this topic.

“Mogged” example

In traditional media, which emphasizes looks, there is always something other than the looks themselves. For example, beauty pageants compete on things like talent, and runway shows display outfits. Hollywood actors still act. Yet here, the subject is the looks and nothing else. Not only that, but the subject is to put people down based on just being average or unattractive. There are more of these trends, such as looksmaxxing and thirst traps. Looksmaxxing pushes teens to do everything possible to become the most attractive version of themselves. This includes mastering their diet, workout, skincare, and facial bone growth, which puts a lot of pressure on people still looking for their place in life. There is also the super standard video of a thirst trap, where attractive people will mouth along to usually around 10 seconds of a song. The common thread in all of these trends is their harmful approach to beauty, hurting anyone who doesn’t fit their standards and harming themselves when they inevitably don’t fit their standards for perfection, such as with aging. These trends are not niche communities with just a small number of followers; they are trends with videos gathering hundreds of thousands of likes and tens of millions of views on their hashtags. These trends can cause people, especially teens, to internalize the explicitly high standards for looks they feel are all around them and project that onto themselves, leading to deteriorating mental health.

TikTok and social media generally do little to discourage these trends and use features that lead to their prominence. TikTok has a beautified algorithm that promotes content made by people considered prettier, based on nothing to do with the content itself. While this helps TikTok keep more people on the site, it discourages people considered less attractive from content creation and promotes a normalization to a certain standard of attractiveness. The average teen spends 4.8 hours a day on social media, and if that media is filled with abnormally attractive people, then people can get used to this standard. The aesthetic Pinterest couples lead to the mindset that this is what all couples look like. The physique of the Instagram influencer leads to the mindset that this is what bodies are supposed to look like. Thus, in everyday life, they expect this standard from their peers, partners, and themself. Yet not everyone is as attractive as TikTok influencers, and simply put, that’s ok. A similar feature by TikTok that subtly promotes attractiveness is a filter on videos. Usually, filters show an icon at the bottom of the video so the viewer can see when they are used, but for one filter, this is not included. When editing the video, the filter is front and center and is brandished as a refurbishing filter. It removes acne, hyperpigmentation, and some effects of age. The problem with this feature is that the viewer is being exposed to a higher beautification of reality than traditionally seen in their everyday lives, without even knowing it. While trends like mogging and negative canthal tilt are very harmful, they can at least be avoided knowingly. With the beautified algorithm and the hidden filter, a user is unaware that what they are viewing may not represent the average beauty of everyday people.

This isn’t to say that social media has to be this way and always is. Social media can provide an outlet for people to find others who represent their ethnic, religious, or general group identity which may be seldom in the general media. The spread-out nature of social media can allow for niche interests to become the main focus of some if they choose to prioritize this. Take social media creators who detail their lives being plus-sized and the struggles that come with this. Someone plus-sized can relate to their posts, and find comfort that they are not struggling alone. A similar experience could happen with burn victims or physically disabled people. The message these accounts can provide is that they aren’t the only ones experiencing this, and thus can provide confidence.

The US is in a mental health crisis, with the causes of this strongly correlated to a rise in social media use. Teenagers who are on social media for longer amounts of time show significantly higher chances of having signs of severe depression. In another regard, the amount of teens who feel they are “almost always” on their phone is nearly 50% percent, up from 25% in 2015. Our world is increasingly digitalized at an exponential rate. For example, while most of the article is about TikTok, other platforms have started to use the same style of fast-form videos as TikTok, such as Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, the list goes on. How will the endless hours spent on this short-form content come to shape us, especially the youth? It is not as if there was a previous experiment run to find results, we are the experiment. A multi-million, maybe even billion-person experiment done in the present with unknown results for the future, although we are starting to see the results. They aren’t looking pretty. In 2021, 42% of students reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless, and 22% seriously considered suicide.

Yet where can we go from here? Our world is so decentralized that fighting for anything can feel like yelling in a soundproofed room. Nothing you or any of the content you consume will likely lead to very much in-person action, with a good example of the housing market or student loan debt. As a high schooler myself, everyone knows about these things, everyone worries and complains yet practically nothing comes out of this. No changes. So really, where can we go? I don’t want to end on a pessimistic note, so I would urge a kind of societal movement that completely questions every preconceived notion. In my utopian world, where this happens, people would discuss the world’s problems in meetings full of people of all ages, politics, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc., in their communities, not in the echo chambers online. We must question where our society is headed and things that are wrong from every angle. I fear without substantial change soon, our society will slowly fizzle until it no longer represents a society at all. Who knows, maybe that process has already begun.