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[ID] => 10613
[post_author] => 15
[post_date] => 2026-05-22 15:35:35
[post_date_gmt] => 2026-05-22 15:35:35
[post_content] =>
Why I'll always forgive vanity in women.
I grew up in a small town in Northern New Jersey, where the local mortician is fantastic. In their parlor, one frequently hears the refrain: “Make sure I get done by the Pizzis!” These days, I think about the Pizzi Funeral Home often; namely, every time I see the photographic remains of a red carpet. Given the rage for deflating one’s body with GLP-1s and re-inflating it selectively with filler and implants, then pinning back and sucking out various parts with buccal fat removal, blepharoplasty, and deep-plane brow lifts, before finally freezing it all with Botox…one could be forgiven for mistaking a step and repeat for an open casket: To appear rich or famous is to look embalmed while alive.
The plastic surgery industry is as old as Hollywood. I recall my childhood horror watching Katherine Helmond’s saran-wrapped facelift in Brazil, to say nothing of Death Becomes Her. However, given the proliferation of medspas, and the plague of twenty-somethings freaking out about their “elevens,” facial modification has come to the masses. You no longer have to be somebody to look embalmed. Seeing forehead movement sometimes feels as quaint as modem dial-up sounds, and not only amongst celebrities or in the society pages, but amongst anyone—from coworkers to MILFs in your area.
This is why, when I recently found myself in Vienna, I reveled in one particular room at the Belvedere: the one that contains Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s Kopfstücke, usually translated as “character heads.” For the uninitiated, these 64 busts were created in the 18th century Hapsburg Austrian Empire. Yet, they evince no calm of the Enlightenment grin, nor do they possess a buttoned-up Teutonic air. Rather, they are largely recognized as the masterworks of a man who lost his shit. By the 1770s, Messerschmidt was a successful sculptor with multiple royal commissions to his name. However, in the wake of a series of career snubs and medical setbacks, he flamed out completely, retiring to Pressberg (now Bratislava) where he lived simply, focusing on these weird, remarkable, sublimely expressive heads.
Taken as a whole, the busts evoke a symphonic range of human emotion written upon the face. Typically bald—perruque tossed to the wind, Turkish hairlines a far-off future—many bare their teeth and stick out their tongues in a way that shreds any historical filter, like seeing a photograph of a Victorian smiling. They scowl, grimace, laugh, shout, and howl. To create some of them, Messerschmidt pinched himself and studied his own reactions in a mirror. Some art historians believe he suffered from hallucinations, others say the busts are satire; there is no clear consensus. The context is nil, which makes them seem that much closer to us, that much more human and alive. Though carved from silent stone, their volume is turned permanently to 11. I fucking love these things, and I made my luggage overweight schlepping home a giant monograph.
Visiting a room where stone could scream, sing, sob, and sneer made me depressed at how inanimate—how quiet—we now wish human flesh to be. We prick it, slice it, stab it, lop it off, suck it out, and drug it to keep it at bay. Smiling begets crow's feet; laughter begets lines. So we bolt the tits high beneath the caved in clavicle. Trim the eyelid, freeze the jowl. Buy a silk pillowcase. Break your nose. Jam needles in your lips. Shove Gore-TEX in your chin. Go ham with hyaluronic acid. Don’t sag, don’t crease, don’t jiggle, don’t fold—the antithesis to Kopfstücke. While I could go on about how sad the dearth of human facial expression in the media makes me and how it distorts beauty standards and impairs artistic expression, we’ve had that conversation already. Besides, I’ve got to be real with you: I inherited my father’s forehead lines, and I don’t like that at all.
For Messerschmidt, his face was a canvas, a stage, even a lab. For me, my face is something very different: It’s my calling card. I don’t say this because I’m a model or an actress, but simply because, unlike Messerschmidt, I’m a woman. And, as a woman, you are first and foremost judged by how fuckable you are. This is as cruel as it is true—and remains true even if sex is far from the matter at hand. Since time immemorial, no matter what is going on between a woman’s ears, what could be going on between your legs is always lurking somewhere in the ether. Younger women are ruthlessly judged by their reproductive choices; older ones find themselves “invisible.” And it has also only become increasingly acute a reality as social media and smart phone use warps society far beyond what any Enlightenment philosopher in Habsburg Vienna might have anticipated. This, I can assure you, takes a toll. And it bums me out way more than Ozempic face ever could.
Beauty standards are inherently fucked up by virtue of their existence. Someone will always get the short end of the stick. But when your participation in society at any moment can be reduced to Darwinian sexual selection, the result is, to put it lightly, toxic and demeaning. It drives you to think that maybe your life will be different if you lose ten pounds or do something about those elevens, which, obviously, it will not be. But, you reason, maybe you’ll feel a little better about yourself, so you book an appointment, or cave into some other bodily misadventure to chase an illusion of control.
And, yeah, I’ve read up on the male loneliness epidemic and the crisis in masculinity. (Let's make it about them for a minute!) Clavicular may facemog a lot of column inches in his fascistic looksmaxxing quest, and plastic surgery is on the rise among men, but women are still trapped, as usual, by lose-lose scenarios. If the classic dichotomy of the genre is virgin or whore, we now have looking overdone or giving up on life; doing too much and aging oneself prematurely versus looking so young it’s scary. Women cannot win: They are getting more degrees and finally closing the wage gap a little, threatening the very men they’re supposed to want to attract while they continue getting terrorized by capitalist scams involving Botox, egg freezing, perimenopause, and weight loss drugs—as though their platonic ideal of a final form were a smooth-faced vulva with a 401(k).
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that many of these surgeries and treatments enable gender expression, facial reconstruction, and other medical treatments beyond walking the finest of lines that exist between vanity and sanity. But given this state of affairs, I will always forgive vanity in women, no matter how uncanny the valley. So what if your face is frozen in some weird rictus? So what if your cheekbones could impale someone on a crowded subway car? It’s YOUR face. We cannot write anyone else’s playbook on how to present as female during End Times. We are all just trying to get by. Whatever choices we make to do so—trapped in Zooms and FaceTimes and forced to look at ourselves constantly in a world where over 16 trillion images exist yet you cannot shake the 15 of your double chin—vaya con Dios. We cannot tell anyone else how to cope.
If it isn’t for you, that’s also fine. If you wanna go natural and raw-dog Mother Nature and Father Time, right on, sister. That’s a hell of a threesome. But, no matter where on the plastic surgery spectrum you fall, just give yourself the grace to do whatever the fuck you want, and cut everyone the slack they refuse to cut themselves—literally and metaphorically, until the Pizzis themselves have their turn.
And, should you need to release any number of emotions related to this beauty standard garbage fire, no matter what you have or haven’t done yourself, I can direct you to a room in Vienna full of appropriate reactions. It's fitting that Messerschmidt is often written off as crazy or difficult or overly emotional. In this way, he is in touch with his feminine side. What is deeply powerful or expressive is often dismissed as crazy, and these busts remind us of that, too. They remind us how raw emotion has the power to reach across time. Though they are of one particular man’s face, we can all see ourselves in them—regardless of what degree of mobility our own faces have. One might even think of those character heads as 64 Dorian Grays. Each, in its extreme state, stands in for a facial expression one can no longer make in the service of looking youthful and taut. They scream for those who can but smize.
[post_title] => How to Present as Female During End Times
[post_excerpt] => Why I'll always forgive vanity in women.
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[post_modified] => 2026-05-27 15:36:05
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