One More Thing! No. 2
how to be both skinny and drunk, the fallacy of biological reality, and a recent read
Hello readers, welcome back to One More Thing! This is a special feature (that will someday be exclusively for paid subscribers) in which I supplement essays from the Medusa’s Body archive with new developments and fresh takes.
Two elixirs are better than none
I’ve written several times—most recently in Divine Protection, Now in Powder Form—about the wellness industry’s use of science jargon to make beauty products sound like medical products. An amusing example is this detox product from Biocol Labs. The company’s name and the glass ampule radiate medical seriousness, and the product is supposedly “formulated and used by doctors.” It claims to aid in the “maintenance of normal liver function and support the detoxification and elimination of additives, food excesses, and effects of pollution.”
Liver function sounds important! Meanwhile, the million social media ads I’ve seen this month, presumably because both losing weight and quitting drinking are topical in January, focus on how alcohol makes you fat, and this product can prevent that.
Alcohol is poison, and when the liver breaks down alcohol to keep it from killing us, it produces other chemicals that damage liver cells and lead to the accumulation of fat in the liver. About half of liver disease-related deaths are related to alcohol consumption. Most of us drink too much, and conversations about alcohol that tend to take place in January are honestly great to see.
This product is a perfect illustration of how wellness culture perverts important health discourses, turns them into flimsy little veils to drape over beauty and diet products. Wellness today is all about appearance (note the pregnant emoji…), and it’s all about addition rather than subtraction. Instead of reducing or eliminating alcohol from your diet to heal your liver, lose weight and save money, you should have your cake and eat it too. Consume both alcohol and wellness products that purport to undo its harms, give your liver the finger and laugh in the face of death, drunk on buying power!
Fundamental and incontrovertible reality
Speaking of biology. The text of one of Donald Trump’s day-one executive orders, chillingly titled DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, uses the word biological/biologically 14 times. The phrase “biological reality” is repeatedly deployed in opposition to “gender ideology.”
The language of the executive order—“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality”—reminded me of an essay from 2023 called Reliable Images of Definite Things. I quoted Vitruvius, who dunked on grotesque architecture in 25 BC: “Monsters are now painted in frescoes rather than reliable images of definite things.” He wrote, “Minds beclouded by feeble standards of judgment are unable to recognize what exists in accordance with authority and the principles of correctness.”
The grotesque feminism that I’m developing with this Substack is opposed to “biological truth” / “fundamental and incontrovertible reality” / “principles of correctness” because all of these notions are just as changing and weaponize-able as any ideology. Biology cannot be separate from ideology because scientific knowledge is always a product of its time and place.
The monumental body, a fabrication of patriarchal civilization and a projection of its ideals and fantasies, has a static reality that the real body simply doesn’t need. People who hate the grotesque body and want to see it buried under the monumental body tend to hate disability and illness, gender nonconformity and transition, menstruation and menopause, truly anything that points to the changeability of the body and the insubordination it implies.
One last thing
I enjoyed this interview by
with Joseba Eskubi. I encountered Eskubi’s work via the MPM Instagram and have been drawn, needy and silent and mothlike, to the artist’s page (and MPM’s exhibition) for more gulping looks every day since.
I find it immensely satisfying to hear artists talk about their work, partly because I get to snatch up their words and add them to my ekphrastic vocabulary. Here are some of Eskubi’s: “I am interested in the figure appearing in a certain conflict with its own form, as if there were another body inside it that was pushing it and making its way outwards, opening fissures than communicate these different identities. The eyes and mouths multiply, creating a labyrinth of beings. The flow of matter, the continuous metamorphosis of things is something that always hovers over my work.”
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