vanity, vanity

13 Jul, 2025

🚨 content notes: sexual assault; victim-blaming; illness; bodies bodies bodies; boobs boobs boobs; capitalist/Protestant purity culture; class warfare; astroturfing; cancellations

I have been crying a lot lately. At some point I went to dry my eyes with a rough piece of paper towel that happened to be at hand (because I buy unbleached, recycled paper towel rolls, because I don't want any extra dioxin in my frozen dinners), and rubbing my face with stiff rough paper caused a spontaneous, extremely minor hemorrhage under one eye, where the skin is thinnest and most fragile.

I found myself staring in the mirror at this fresh blood spot. I am covered in these spots, but this new one was really going to bother me. I first started developing them in 2015: both my upper arms are now speckled with little pinpricks where I've bled into my skin. Over time these spots have spread down my forearms, onto my neck and torso, a couple on my hands. You might say that they’ve “gotten under my skin” (ha ha). A rheumatologist referred to me to a dermatologist, whom I recently visited. The dermatologist seemed to think the blood spots were normal-ish.

"If there's nothing to biopsy, I can't help you," the dermatologist said. He said that sentence a few times actually. I raised my eyebrows at this, since we were in Beverly Hills and I'd already seen advertisements and pamphlets for dermatological "help" in the waiting room.

"Not every appointment has to end in a biopsy," I finally said. He seemed startled, and then he said he'd give me a script for a medicated cream for the scar on my boob so I "wouldn't be leaving empty-handed." He also promised me a referral to, who else, the referring rheumatologist.

In the waiting room again, I hesitated before turning toward the exit. A roving staff member noticed this subtle flicker of uncertainty and beelined toward me. What was it? How could she help? Oh my God, okay. I asked her if I should be leaving with the dermatologist's prescription in-hand? Or should I give my pharmacy's address to the receptionist? This was a simple question that deserved a simple answer.

Instead, it turned into a labyrinthine conversation, a game of Twenty Questions, and I finally sighed and blurted that I had a huge scar on my boob and no I did not remember the name of the medicated cream I needed. I tried hard to not acknowledge the other patients in the waiting room.

"Ohh," the woman said knowingly, "I know what kind of scar. Women come in here all the time with those scars." If I am recalling correctly, she winked at me.

I stared at this unhelpful person like she was absolutely insane, because she was. Did she think I'd had a breast reduction? A breast augmentation? No one on Planet Earth would ever size down or up to these cans. Seething, I told her I'd had a biopsy done on a lump and that the biopsy wound was not healing.

"Probably Mupirocin," she said, not reacting to the additional context I'd very unwillingly provided. "Your doctor will send the prescription to your pharmacy."

"Thanks," I said dryly, and left.

This is all a way of saying I will be speckled in my own blood foreseeably, and only occasionally do I do something myself to cause a new one to form, obviously not on purpose.

Now I was standing at the bathroom mirror, groaning at this fresh new microhemorrhage. I attempted to lube up my undereyes using whatever was in my medicine cabinet, then sat back down at my desk. I felt ashamed at how upset I felt. I sighed. I opened a new tab in my web browser, and I typed into the search bar "is there any benefit to vanity."

What turned up, at the top of the search results, was the video "Why vanity could be a good thing" as published by the BBC. “Are you vain?” the video starts. This is the voice of Dr. Nat Rutherford, a university political-science lecturer and moral philosopher. “If you think that you’re not, you should probably think again!” Whew, okay.

“Most of us do care about what other people think of us,” Dr. Rutherford continues, “not just in terms of our physical appearance—vanity isn’t just an aesthetic concern—but about how we seem to other people.

For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French philosopher, we only really became modern humans when we became vain. As societies developed, at some point between hunter-gatherers and the Enlightenment, Rousseau says that humans became capable of living only in the opinion of others. And so we get our self-worth solely from the value that others place in us.

Rousseau distinguished between two types of Self-Love: l’amour de soi, the natural desire to worry about your own survival, and l’amour-propre, the desperate need to shine in the eyes of other people—or, in other words, ‘vanity’. On this view, vanity was a product of living in society. Humans had become increasingly vain and incapable of independent self-assessment. The more they see one another, the less they can do with seeing one another more, Rousseau said.

As we became more and more socialized, we started to care more and more about how other people perceived us—until eventually the mask replaced the face beneath. […] We now value what people think of us, not the skill or the virtue itself.

Rousseau’s occasional friend, the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, saw things a little bit differently. He thought that Rousseau was probably right—that vanity was the major characteristic of modern humans—but also that it was necessary, and the source of our redemption. Smith asks “What purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world?” and answers that it’s to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation. It is the vanity, not the ease or the pleasure, which interests us.

For Rousseau, l’amour-propre is the inescapable feature of modern humans. It’s also the source of social inequality: In societies where appearance is more important than reality, seeming to be virtuous replaces being virtuous as our primary motivation. And so we pursue wealth and power in order to seem important. But Smith thought that this supposed vice was the source of our sociability and our morality. We are vain—and society makes us so—but it’s our vanity that allows society to actually function. We do care about what other people think of us, and so we adjust our behavior accordingly.

Uh-huh. Smith seems to make the case that the best or only way to enshrine a shared value system is by making people fear others' perceptions of their supposed goodness or badness. Like the philosopher Rousseau, I’m skeptical. I want to be “perceived” as good for the reasons my behavior is good—and I frankly resent that I have any desire to be perceived at all. I also think that history has made Rousseau’s point pretty clearly: forced to compete over artificially-scarce resources, people are becoming less financially secure and, therefore, necessarily more self-interested, the amour de soi of desperation. With an epidemic of predatory and exploitative behaviors—and few social safety nets in place—society rapidly becomes low-trust.

In other words, Smith’s way is not working. I have already written about those whom I find to be “antisocial and anti-human, and deeply immature,” for whom “the only thing [ever] keeping them minimally on the straight-and-narrow was the slight gravity of the expectations of others (shame, validation).” Smith would seem to believe that this slight gravity is what motivates all of us. I suspect it doesn’t, or else mass protests might persuade a billionaire to pick a different wedding venue.

Journalist Megyn Kelly was recently in the news for her comment that ‘It’ girl Sydney Sweeney was only invited to the Venice Sánchez/Bezos wedding "because she’s got these enormous breasts that everybody’s obsessed with." Despite Sweeney having what many would proclaim the 'ideal figure'—as well as a movie deal with Amazon, making her wedding attendance unmysterious—Kelly is using Sweeney’s physical proportions to diminish and discredit her star power and her influence.

Having strong opinions about other people’s breasts is weirdo behavior, a special kind of smug. Perhaps the original smug weirdo was Aura, a minor Greek deity with a propensity for shit-talking, who eventually ran afoul of Nemesis. As the Greek goddess of balance and, later, retribution, Nemesis was especially committed to rectifying human hubris in dramatically-ironic ways.

Aura was a handmaiden and consort to Artemis. In ancient Greece, membership to the Artemis cult required scrupulously preserving and maintaining one's virginity. As the story goes, Aura was proud of her athletic figure—an enviably androgynous, boyish build—and she basically turned to Artemis one day all like "A virgin? Hah! No way! Not with that body." (Although artists typically depict Artemis as having a ‘normative’ figure, this myth asserts Artemis had bombastically feminine, even motherly proportions.)

Aura was intimating that a body made of straight lines conferred a sort of apparent credibility—the appearance of moral virtue, a 'serious' female videogame character—while Artemis looked like a slut. Unfortunately, I understand both sides: I was gamine until my early 20s, when something suddenly shifted internally, and now the additional weight I carry is ever more apparent. Just having boobs is “asking for it,” for some sort of something: sometimes it feels like the whole world is made up of Auras.

Artemis’s wrath was one of righteous indignation, as she didn’t appreciate having her virginity questioned. Furious, Artemis called on Nemesis to wipe the smirk off Aura's face. This is where the story turns brutal: Nemesis, notorious for having zero chill, compels another god to pursue and sexually assault Aura. That’s it, that's the whole myth.

I do not interpret this story as victim-blaming Aura; Nemesis herself is just "wow what a twist" personified. The way I take the story, which is the correct way, is that purity culture is bullshit. It is a mistake to invest your self-esteem in transient, fleeting states like good health or taut skin, or an otherwise untouched, uninvaded body. Shit inevitably happens, and that's the real horror of the Aura fable. At some point you will have to be a survivor—of something, something that will change you fundamentally—whether you like it or not. And if you’ve already been passing arbitrary judgments on others, you are about to be so unprepared for this.

I'm vain, but it isn't because I want to be perceived as good without having to do any of the hard work of being good. Rather, I am vain because I've internalized the capitalist message that to be virtuous is to be unblemished. I am striving to look like nothing bad has ever happened to me—not one scar, not one blood spot, not one ding, dent, or stain.

We, collectively, conflate the ideal of 'being incorruptible' with looking totally untouched by human appetites (ours or others'), inviolable, or otherwise unhandled by the invisible fingies of time and the inevitable ravages of poor circumstances.

And I literally mean poor circumstances: so much moralizing is done about classist markers like weight, teeth, and “rich girl skin.” The queasy messaging is that, in the U.S. and beyond, you "reap what you sow"—that income is commensurate with moral value—and, by extension, you deserve the appearance you get. Health, size, and class are used to make casual moral judgments about a stranger’s character, discipline, or basic worth. You can be aware and refuse to play along while still feeling utterly ill that others are measuring your credibility using arbitrary weights, A.K.A. "dishonest scales." As Jonny Thomson writes, "It's about social, ethical conformity."

We expect paragons of "moral beauty" to look wealthy and softhanded, having endured not one violent act, not one trial. We don't want to see that someone is a survivor of circumstance. Everyone loves a redemption arc, but no one wants to witness evidence of any uncomfortable, messy pain attached.

Recently, while applying off-brand TapeTox before bed—this is a type of pre-cut kinesiology tape that might be slightly more effective than Frownies—I thought about my childhood, which was spent reading People Magazine, tracking fads, uncannily forecasting fashion trends well in advance. My conspicuous consumption of pop culture had made me something of a pariah until junior high, when another girl walked up to me and said, totally unsolicited, "Jenny Frank, I always thought you dressed weird. But then I saw something you were wearing in one of my mom's magazines, and I realized you dress pretty cool." I was startled at this concession, a preteen olive branch.

I'm thinking about this now, because my continued trend-tracking isn't a desperate bid at dodging irrelevance; it's a survival instinct forged in an incoherent society with an ever-shifting vocabulary and mores. It's my attempt—a little half-heartedly—at staving off another yet another avenue, another vector of attack, from whence an interloper might try to deplatform me, take away my voice ("they look old"; "they look angry") or otherwise erode my credibility. This isn't a justification for vanity, but it gives me an entry point into feeling compassion for myself.

Gradually I am relinquishing even the appearance of piety. The other day I remarked to a friend about the seeming online disappearance of a musician I’d liked. I wasn’t sure what had happened. There had possibly been an allegation about his behavior. I didn’t really know anything beyond that; I’d seen an isolated comment about it on the Internet, a rumor of a rumor.

“If you can’t un-cancel yourself within ten years,” my friend said wryly, “there was probably some merit to the claim.”

I blinked. “I’m sure there are people who feel that way about me,” I said flatly.

My friend is already aware that I deleted my Twitter account in a panic in 2016, after I’d reappeared on the Rxlph Rxtxrt, generating renewed interest in me with the exact wrong crowd. My endurance had been flagging for a while, and I’d finally cracked under pressure. Surely some people had thought of my flight from public view as an admission of something. “People who were’t really paying attention during Gxmxrgxte,” I continued aloud—clarifying who the ‘people who feel that way’ might comprise—“and who just believe I’m still gone now.” I sighed. Although it hadn’t shown up in mainstream circulars, the phrase “disgraced journalist” had been deployed in headlines more than once.

A look crossed my friend’s face. “I never thought of that!” he said. “There would absolutely be people who’d just assume you’ve been ‘dealt with’ rightly.”

Yep. I screwed up my face, a pinched wrinkle-nosed smile, as I stood to leave. “Uh-huh,” I said in the doorway of the bathroom. “Well, it’s a blessing in disguise. I’d always regretted that I didn’t have a more self-selecting audience.” I closed the door.

This morning I went to the bathroom and checked on my giant core biopsy scar, and I rolled my eyes. The superficial layer of skin has completely healed, but now there is a hematoma, because the core wound has resumed its bleeding under the skin's surface. Of course it has. I'm not too sure Mupirocin will help this. I stuck a piece of silicone tape on it and hoped for the best.

One morning I answered a knock on my apartment door while wearing hot-pink kinesiology tape from the night before. I opened the door to my neighbor. I immediately apologized for the state of my face and, in particular, my slavish loyalty to TikTok trends in bondage of my own vanity.

"Having a skincare routine isn't vanity," the neighbor murmured, smiling shyly. "I should actually—"

"It really is," I interrupted her—not wanting to hear the rest of that thought—"but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I think I'm letting myself be ultraconformist in less harmful ways, hoping to skate by socially unscathed, so I can be nonconformist in other, more meaningful ways."

"Yes!" my neighbor said, delighted. "Exactly!"

That's us!, just two neurodivergent horror shows trying to hide out in the world until showing up really matters.