Against the New Technologies of Beauty
“The beauty backlash is indeed absolutely necessary for the power structure’s survival."
In retrospect, buying a Fitbit was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.
I bought the little black watch in the beginning of 2020 to count my steps on runs and walks. When you-know-what slowed life to a stop in March, I projected my desire for progress onto my body. The innocent tracking of steps turned into a fixation on every data point the Fitbit app offered, from peak heart rate and calorie intake to macros and minutes in deep sleep.
I told myself the data would allow me to understand my body and optimize my health, maybe “preventing the quarantine 15” would be a perk. I chanted healthy! healthy! healthy! but there was a smaller voice whispering skinny, pretty, beautiful at the same time. I saw the trap—the conflation of health and beauty—once I fell into it, and in this essay I aim to expose how the new technologies of fitness function as the beauty myth’s discipline in disguise.
Michel Foucault (oh you thought I’d make it five essays without talking about Foucault?) coined the term “technologies of the self” to describe the instruments that “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” Technologies of the self operate on an individual scale to encourage self-discipline, while “technologies of power” subjugate on the scale of governments and institutions.
Foucault may have seen self-tracking devices in his nightmares as the ultimate technologies of the self, but his failure to recognize gender as a disciplinary instrument suggests he would not predict that such devices as Fitbits and smart scales would be deployed against women’s bodies in particular. Self-tracking devices gather and analyze biometric data constantly, motivating users to transform their bodies in order to attain a certain state of perfection. For women, that state of perfection is beauty.
Beauty is not a sexual good but a political one. It is not the state of being pleasing to the eye but stasis within the bounds of a normative femininity. (I don’t need to describe what this normative femininity looks like because we are all battered by images of it everywhere, every day.) In The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf argues that the cultural fixation on beauty, and the ever-more-difficult-to-achieve beauty standards women are measured against, represent the patriarchy’s “backlash” against the inroads achieved by feminism.
As I have discussed in previous essays, patriarchal power rests on binary oppositions—body/mind, emotion/logic, woman/man, nature/culture, grotesque/monumental—and women’s movement out of the domestic sphere without abandoning it entirely threatens those binaries. A woman rejecting the domestic sphere, choosing career over marriage and children, is somewhat acceptable since the patriarchy can call her unwomaned. A woman who “does it all,” feet firmly planted in the domestic and cultural spheres, rattles the bars of those binary oppositions since she makes claims to power without appearing to reject femininity.
Having failed to prevent women from making claims to power, patriarchy in the “post-feminist” era has applied the neoliberal rationality of individualism to make femininity laborious. Beauty, already a qualification on the marriage market that dictates, at least in part, the value of an individual woman, was taken up by the labor market so that women had nowhere to hide from competition with each other. Financially independent women, educated women, sexually liberated women, women who make it to the C-suite of Fortune 500 companies still feel the creeping inadequacy, insecurity and jealousy caused by what Wolf terms the “professional beauty qualification.”
The labor women perform to maintain beauty for the sake of their jobs is as beneficial to patriarchal dominance as keeping women locked in the home, as the resulting exhaustion prevents collective action. “The beauty backlash is indeed absolutely necessary for the power structure’s survival,” Wolf writes.
Just as patriarchy and biopower—Foucault’s term for “power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations”—have adapted to the neoliberal modality, the beauty imperative has changed shape over the decades to maintain its hold. The language of health as a new technology of the self is gaining on the language of desirability, which has long been used to induce women to buy in to beauty and consent to its discipline.
In an article titled “Self-tracking in the Digital Era: Biopower, Patriarchy and the New Biometric Body Projects,” Rachel Sanders of Portland State University writes that 21st-century medical and political authorities have constructed an “obesity epidemic” that frames fatness as a public health crisis and national security threat. The World Health Organization called obesity a “global epidemic” in 2000 and a former U.S. Surgeon General called it a national epidemic of “crisis” proportions in 2003. This threatening language created widespread “fat panic” and ushered in the age of racist and gendered “surveillance medicine” that enforces a normative body size.
The authority of the public health apparatus induces individuals to accept personal responsibility and blame for the health of their bodies (the nightmarish “Presidential Fitness Tests” come to mind), which strengthens what Foucault calls the “politico-medical hold” of biopower on the population. Self-tracking devices, diet plans and expensive visits to personal trainers are the 21st-century intermediaries between biopower’s two poles: the micro-physical technology of disciplinary power that aims to optimize the capabilities and compliance of the individual, and the macro-scientific technology of regulatory power that polices the health of the population at large.
Anti-fat public health discourses are hardly gender-neutral. Women’s bodies have been cast as inherently unhealthy by medicine for centuries; the traumatic history of hysteria makes us susceptible to messages about health that revolve around sexual difference. Moreover, people with uteruses generally have more fat to support the maternal function, and since the maternal function circumscribes normative womanhood, the pathologization of fat causes women to see a threat in the mirror at almost any size.
The patriarchy delegates the policing of beauty and thinness to the cultural realm of expert guidance. Women-identified magazines, for instance, make us believe we’re getting beauty tips from other women while they help enrich the male executives of the 532-billion-dollar beauty industry. (Vogue recently published a YouTube video called “Olivia Culpo’s 40-Step Guide to Dewy Skin and Winged Eyeliner.” The description of the video hyperlinked to all 40 products and noted that “When you buy something through our retail links, we earn an affiliate commission.”)
The constraints of feminine beauty have long had women fearful of taking up too much space, but the beauty industry taking up the language of health means spending $200 on makeup products or a steel-boned corset won’t do the trick anymore. Taking up too much space is now framed as a disease that can only be solved internally. Women-identified media, celebrities and social media influencers now discuss the “potent healing properties of celery juice” and how intermittent fasting prevents insulin from storing fat cells. The familiar sources of expert guidance on beauty now appropriate the language of science and medicine to raise the stakes of the beauty imperative.
The internalization of the beauty imperative down to the viscera has lead to the high visibility of “body projects”—Sanders’ term for the efforts women go to to physically transform themselves in order to attain normative femininity, that certain state of perfection. These body projects are digitally documented and shared, and they’re often guided by biometric data from nutrition apps, self-tracking devices and high-tech scales. I see body “transformations” on social media every day (I’m being disciplined by the Tik Tok algorithm, perhaps) and the young women showing off their successful “fitness journeys” never admit to being motivated by desire for male approval or even desire to be “thin.” The veil slips when someone comments “I wish I was that skinny” and the OP rights it by repeating the mantra of the modern body project: “I did it to be healthy, not skinny!”
Health becoming synonymous with beauty and the resulting cultural anti-fatness leads many women to abuse their bodies. Health “authorities” from influencers to doctors recommend restricting calories to lose weight; the media I was exposed to throughout my adolescence and young adulthood told me 1,200 calories per day was the gold standard for dieting. That number had become so normalized in my mind that reading about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment jarred me: During World War II, a group of conscientious objectors endured semistarvation for six months in order to understand the physical and mental effects of the famine affecting war-torn areas of Europe. During the semistarvation period, the young men in the study became obsessed with food, fatigued and weak, irritable and impatient, they lost all interest in sex and dating, and they showed a myriad of physiological signs of malnutrition as well. The semistarvation diet in the experiment was about 1,560 calories per day.
Learning about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment made me realize that dieting, which most girls begin doing by age 10, causes mild versions of semistarvation symptoms. When I commit or recommit or recommit to a calorie-restricted diet, I find it hard to go more than a few hours without thinking about food. I meticulously plan my meals and begin anticipating the next meal almost immediately after finishing the last. I feel irritable and negative, interest in my hobbies wanes, desire flies out the window. How can the body tell the difference between “I can’t let myself eat too much” and “There’s not enough to eat?”
The participants in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment starved in order to guide humanitarian efforts to refeed civilians who had been starved during the war—the recruitment posters read “Will You Starve That They Be Better Fed?” and the participants reported feeling motivated by desire to help the world’s hungry. When I diet, what is it for?
Even when hunger is self-imposed in the interest of achieving or maintaining a “healthy” physique, the body feels an ancient insecurity that makes it impossible to focus on what makes life joyful and fulfilling: love, creativity, sex, power, learning, play, the pleasure of food and the warmth of flesh. When women suffer in order to be thin, they are not rewarded for being beautiful but for being obedient: The scarcity mindset caused by dieting makes women docile, neutralizing the threat we pose to patriarchal power. We don’t do it for the male gaze but for the panopticon’s gaze.
Some weeks ago my sister and I were watching The Bachelor and saw a commercial for Amazon Halo, a new Amazon “service” that aims to compete with popular fitness wearables with an artificial intelligence-powered app and the Amazon Halo Band. The device monitors activity and sleep, analyzes body composition and tone of voice, and suggests “healthy habits” for the user to adopt. The ad we saw features a nondescript animated person demonstrating how the app uses photos to produce a 3D body model and body fat estimate.
As my sister and I watched the commercial with ice cream spoons suspended in mid-air, I bit the tip of my tongue to keep from crying. The avatar’s blank face invites the imagination to take over: I pictured myself locking the bathroom door and setting up my phone first thing in the morning, holding my breath as Amazon appraises the topography of my body, sinking its gaze into every dimple. I imagined myself squinting at the AI-generated model on the screen, feeling exposed and ugly in greyscale.
By that point I had long “lost” my Fitbit and deleted the app. The endless tracking and monitoring made me feel alienated from my body, ironically, and far from healthy. I valued sleep quality metrics over dreams, my calorie intake goal over my love of cooking. The Fitbit app told me professional athletes have very low resting heart rates, but the slow beat of my heart after months of punishing runs made me feel half-alive. It was not self-knowledge but self-abnegation.
I found an article published by Amazon in which Dr. Maulik Majmudar, a cardiologist and the principal medical officer for Amazon Halo, wrote that the new product offers “clinically relevant” data and “provides a view into body fat percentage, considered a better indicator of health than just weight or BMI.” (To address anti-fatness in medicine, alternatives to weight and BMI that do not involve body fat percentage are urgently needed.) Weight loss is sometimes clinically indicated to prevent or manage disease, but what is “clinically relevant” about a body model slider that lets the user visualize how their body would change as they gain or lose fat? Why is collecting “clinically relevant” data at home my responsibility and why should Amazon (italics to indicate gritted teeth and clenched fists) be involved at all?
This new device demonstrates how far from holistic health self-tracking technologies are straying. The pathologization of fat will surely lead many already healthy people to buy this product and increase the visibility of their bodies to a disturbing new height. At the same time, I doubt that the device will lead to any meaningful improvement in the prevalence of metabolic/cardiac diseases or their outcomes.
Biopower is about disciplining the body into a machine-like passivity in order to provide the state with docile laborers, but the threat that feminine power poses to the state makes the disciplining of women’s bodies particularly urgent. The jealously and self-hate bred by the imperative of external beauty isn’t enough because women can say “no, fuck the male gaze, I don’t want to spend two hours on my hair and makeup.” Replacing the language of desirability with the language of health, and framing health as a prerequisite for beauty, makes obedience more likely because the opposite of health is disease.
The popularity of self-tracking devices that collect biometric data around the clock and offer the user insights about their “health” demonstrates how deeply internalized the responsibility of self-discipline has become. These new technologies of beauty fuse woman with machine, making her internal body as visible as wrinkles and fly-away hairs and exposing her more deeply to judgement.
Normative beauty may be the carrot, but our constant striving is what keeps the cart of patriarchal power moving. If women saw self-tracking, dieting, measuring and weighing-in as disciplinary methods of biopower, methods aimed at keeping us away from our power, I doubt we would buy in so enthusiastically. But, the forces that work on us are insidious and they work on me still, so I would be a hypocrite to say that the solution is to simply stop conflating beauty and health. All I know is that the rage and joy that fill my life with energy and my limbs with volition are not there when I’m in the midst of a restrictive body project.
I will leave you with a benediction from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which she imagines what would happen if women were let into institutions of knowledge but fails to imagine how we would still hunger once there:
The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Foucault, Michel, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Technologies of the Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
———. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
Kalm, Leah M., and Richard D. Semba. “They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment.” The Journal of Nutrition 135, no. 6 (2005): 1347–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/135.6.1347.
King, Angela. “The Prisoner of Gender: Foucault and the Disciplining of the Female Body.” Journal of International Women's Studies 5, no. 2 (March 2004): 29–39.
Sanders, Rachel. “Self-Tracking in the Digital Era: Biopower, Patriarchy, and the New Biometric Body Projects.” Body & Society 23, no. 1 (March 2017): 36–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X16660366.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.