Don't snatch your face

Fuel for the resistance

Now that I’m a 37-year-old crone, I’m exquisitely aware of the social pressure to stay hot, despite what gravity and time are doing to my face and body.

In my preppy town, I’m surrounded by hot moms who have been getting work done. It’s subtle, it’s sophisticated, but fewer foreheads move and fewer heads are gray. Lips are suspiciously plump and jawlines are tightened. Skin is so perfect it looks like a mask.

Cosmetic surgery and elective procedures are ubiquitous. Facelifts and filler used to be the domain of the notably wealthy, but now they’re everywhere, fueled possibly by the “Zoom dysmorphia” of the pandemic and definitely by our slippery little germ bricks, ever present in our aging hands. Since 2019, cosmetic surgery is up 10%, Botox up 54%, and filler treatments up 75%, according to the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery National Databank.¹ Those are immense increases. And it’s almost entirely women we’re talking about: 92% of people who get such procedures are women.

There are so many duplicitous threads within this subject. Let’s tug at a few while we still have time.

I write this not to lambaste women who have “gotten work done” but rather to beseech those who haven’t yet succumbed. This is not a critique of the recently Botoxed. This is fuel for the resistance.

1. It’s not anti-woman to acknowledge that women can be manipulated

Just like men. Just like everyone. Elective cosmetic procedures are 100% manipulation, of which I hope to persuade you by the end of this screed.

There’s an insidious vein in modern discourse that insists we should celebrate every choice a woman makes. It’s her choice! Celebrate your freedom, girl! Do whatever you want to your body! Live off juice and get on Ozempic and stay perpetually high! Snatch your face! Have a lightly recreational eating disorder! Live your truth.

The Sense of Sight, Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds Italian, circa 1620

This line of “reasoning,” if you can call it that, is trotted out whenever anyone dares criticize elective cosmetic surgery. There’s a very thin attempt to make such a critique about a defense of “feminism”: You’re not supporting women if you don’t support every single decision they make. No one can tell women (as if we were a monolithic category, comprising fully half of humanity) what to do or question their choices. About anything.

As a woman and as an alleged feminist, I’m offended by this popular argument. The implication is that women aren’t smart enough to understand when they’re being manipulated by culture and the Kardashians and international cosmetic conglomerates. The implication is that women, because of a millennia of oppression, get a free pass on logic and morality on such matters. Women have had it rough; let them do whatever they want. They can’t really understand the ramifications anyway. Give them a glass of champagne and a boob job!

Is Botox the endpoint of female enlightenment? Is getting lip filler liberated feminism? Finally, women get to do whatever they want with their hard-earned cash! I highly doubt it.

As my new favorite unhinged Substacker, Father Karine, writes:

“Choice feminism fails because it prioritizes personal consumer acts over all others by assuming all choices are made with equal freedom and awareness. It also discounts (if not entirely disregards) how heavily our choices are influenced by well-established and inherently exploitative systems.”²

This mania for and celebration of cosmetic procedures is one of the more misogynistic trends in our current moment. We are encouraged to see it as empowering and value neutral. I shall attempt to make this case that it is neither of those things.

2. It’s a scam

Let’s first acknowledge that elective cosmetic procedures are a hugely profitable commercial enterprise. This is a massively successful industry, and it feeds on and profits from the insecurities generated by a culture that despises women.

The average cost of a Botox injection ranges from $400-$1,300 for one treatment. And you have to go back every three to six months. Lip filler: $500-$1,000 per treatment. Any other more invasive procedure is upward of $3,000 per. And so forth. There’s good money to be made in messing with faces.

The special brilliance of this scam is that you’re never done. There’s always something else that’s sagging, somewhere else that’s losing collagen, because you are a human being in an aging body. There’s always more that your friendly cosmetic surgeon could do to “help” you! They’re nothing if not accommodating!

At their core, elective cosmetic procedures are a money-making scheme designed to leave you perpetually unsatisfied.

I was struck by this admission, shared in a rather pro-procedure article from Women’s Health, quoting Dr. Usha Rajagopal, a board-certified plastic surgeon in San Francisco:

… all these treatments and procedures can be a slippery slope. “Because people tend to go overboard, super big lips can make your face look unbalanced, and now you need to do something to enhance your chin,” [Dr. Rajagopal] says. “Doing too much at a very young age winds up making you look much older.”

People tend to go overboard. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. This is dark shit. To wit:

3. A generation of girls, sacrificed

We can say this a million times over, but the internet has wrecked a generation of girls’ self-image and self-worth. Instagram and TikTok are not real life. Those faces and bodies are not real life.

Women of any age are susceptible to this kind of manipulation and societal pressure, but girls are especially vulnerable.

Among the sadder statistics I’ve encountered show, again and again, the massive increase in cosmetic procedures for very young women:

“According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, neuromodulator injections—which include the botulinum toxin commonly known as Botox—rose by 71 percent among ages 20 through 29 and by 75 percent among ages 19 and younger from 2019 to 2022.”³

These are disturbingly massive increases, in just a few years, and some among actual children.

But hey, if you can get them young, you can have a client (/prisoner) forever, as the plastic surgeon quoted above admits.

4. The loss of individual, imperfect beauty

Of all of the thousands of tiny consequences of social media, one we didn’t anticipate was how much it’d make everyone want the same face.

Nearly all A-list female celebrities now have the same algorithmic countenance, created almost entirely by cosmetic surgeons. You know what I’m talking about. In case you don’t, “aesthetic practitioner” Dr. Sophie Shotter describes this desirable face thusly, with some poetic turns of phrase:

“It usually features a smooth, high forehead, lifted brows, large, open eyes, a small, refined nose, full lips with particular emphasis on the upper lip, rounded cheeks with forward projection, and a softly defined jaw with minimal angularity. Skin texture is often unnaturally smooth, with asymmetry and markers of age erased. The face reads as immediately attractive and emotionally legible, but also curiously interchangeable.”⁴

Immediately attractive. Emotionally legible. Curiously interchangeable. Whether you call it “same face syndrome” or “copy-paste face,” this is the face that everyone wants. The women our country holds up as the most beautiful and the most enviable are made via botulism and acids, via needles and scalpels. And the end result is a boring, flattened, but entirely pleasing visage.

5. The vapid countenance of the Internet-dysmorphic woman

People have been praising 46-year-old Claire Danes’s amazing “face acting” in her new TV show—primarily because we all forgot what middle-aged women actually look like, women whose faces move and wrinkle. The actresses and models of the day struggle to make expressions. They are hard to read; their performances seem… muted. An untouched 46-year-old woman looks to us like a different animal, a strange new breed of a less hot but more talented actor, given the immobile faces we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on the silver screen.

In a time of copy-paste face, we lose not only individual beauty but also nuanced communication.

Naniwa Okita Admiring Herself in a Mirror, Kitagawa Utamaro (ca. 1790-95)

Microexpressions—the involuntary, fractional facial movements we make—reveal our true emotions, even if we are trying to hide them. A briefly furrowed brow, a squinting eye, a quiver of the lips: All of these beautiful, subtle expressions are lost to the needle and scalpel.

If I may be so bold, the extremes of cosmetic procedures turn women into living sex dolls. They have no discernible feelings. Their eyes look dead, because they cannot naturally smile or wrinkle. Their eyebrows cannot rise in surprise or delight. Google Kim Kardashian trying to cry. It’s a familiar phenomenon, and it’s pleasing to the misogynistic hordes. Here is a woman, pressured to keep her body fixed as a perpetual object of desire, who has become physically unable to express all of those troublesome and complicated womanly feelings. She looks pleasant all the time, and she looks like there’s nothing going on inside. Just the way we like it.

6. You can never leave the body cult

If you’re a woman who doesn’t get into this death spiral with a cosmetic surgeon, you’re perceived as lazy at best or disempowered at worst. Who can blame the Kardashians and actresses among us? This is how you make it. This is how you keep attention. This is how you have worth.

For the rest of us who aren’t constantly broadcasting ourselves, “self-care” and “wellness” are our purview. Because even if you’re not an A-lister, you’re a woman, and women are inducted into a deadly serious body cult from childhood. We are obsessed with our bodies. We can’t stop fixating on and criticizing them. “Looksmaxxing” and self-optimization are not just pastimes; in the patriarchal–capitalist empire, they’re framed as moral obligations.

With this comes a message, with a whiff of a warped Protestant work ethic: You have the money and the ability to do something about that aging face: So why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you do everything to stay sexy and powerful? Buy all the serums, get all of the masseter injections, try all of the lasers. Who among us wouldn’t opt for the semblance of eternal youth, even as it slips through our sun-spotted claws?

With every passing year, the pressure increases.

Feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky summed up the bind neatly in the 1970s:

“Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised.”

If we’re not “taking care of it,” doing everything possible to make it “better,” we are regarded as devaluing our self-worth.

The pursuit of cosmetic interventions is a capitulation to this lifelong message. Constantly evaluate and improve yourself. You are the appraiser and the thing appraised.

7. But am I still pretty? Do men still want me?

Like my husband’s poems, this is ultimately about SEX and DEATH.

We don’t want to say it out loud because we want to be Independent Women who don’t need that kind of validation from men. It’s embarrassing to admit when we’re halfway through our lifespan that we still want men to look at us and find us desirable. Shouldn’t we have grown out of that by now? You’d think. But culture has really done a number on us gals. The need to get airbrushed into oblivion is summed up by Bartky, above: You have no worth unless a man finds you sexually worthy.

There’s this graph, which all women just know, instinctively, without having to be told:

Source: OkCupid users, Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One’s Looking (Christian Rudder)

And so what are we to do about it? Everything. If we have the means, we will do everything. If we are to maintain any semblance of power and competence, we will try to get men to look at us for as long as possible.

We try to pretend like this is not the case by again ducking under the weak defense of choice feminism. Claiming we do this “for ourselves” is one of the more insane defenses of cosmetic procedures I hear time and time again. No, really, I want to get into a wildly expensive vicious cycle to inject toxins into my body and be perpetually disappointed by the results. I want to fixate on my appearance until I die! I love it! It makes me happy!

(A darkly ironic outcome for women who get too many procedures is that they actually age faster than women who haven’t done anything. The more work you have done, the worse you’ll look over time. Plastic surgeons don’t even try to hide this truth, and yet we still flock to their doors.)

This is the cruel endgame of misogyny: Keep women in this state forever. Keep women feeling like their sole worth is in being a sexual object of use to men. Keep them pretending like it’s actually for their self-worth. And in this way you will define their desires forever.

8. The way of all flesh

No matter how snatched your face is, you’ll still die. We hate this. Surely there must be something we could do about it by now. A great cosmetic surgeon can feel like an escape hatch.

The art of dying

Americans are always trying to outrun death: Get a cybertruck, get a younger girlfriend, get a new face. Perhaps we’ll forget we’re one step closer to the grave if our foreheads become immobilized.

“Young Woman at a Mirror,” Gerard ter Borch (1650-1652)

Our faces are maps of our lives. It is a truism, but what a privilege it is to grow old. What a privilege it is to reckon with mortality and our rapid decay. What a privilege it is to think about what our bodies have done for us, even as they no longer work or look like they used to.

And for us women, what a privilege it is to try to get free from the double bind of misogyny. This is the real work that confronts us in our middle years. If we’re going to get any work done, it ought to be this.

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Currently reading

• The Bell, Iris Murdoch

• Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

• Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico

• The Hounding, Xenobe Purvis

1. Rush University Medical Center, “How the Pandemic May Have Increased Demand for Cosmetic Procedures”

2. “The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read,” Father Karine (11 November 2025)

3. UNC Chapel Hill Media Hub, “Baby Botox” (7 April 2024)

4. “The rise of the ‘copy-paste face’ and why celebrities look the same,” Laura Craik, The Telegraph (19 December 2025)