Latest / Mic Drop Comedy / Jia Tolentino - _Instagram Face_ and Our Inverted Beauty Standards _ The Daily Show

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Jia Tolentino - _Instagram Face_ and Our Inverted Beauty Standards _ The Daily Show · Mic Drop Comedy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Thank you for writing a New Yorker article that didn't
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: take me six months to read.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: Oh, you're so welcome.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Appreciate that. Let's start with your 2019 New Yorker article,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: which coined the phrase Instagram face. And then we'll get
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: into your latest piece. What is Instagram face?
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: So I think it was about a decade ago where
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: probably I was not alone in noticing that kind of
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: all of the most visible women on the internet had
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: started to morph into the same face. This kind of
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: singular thing was emerging. It was a face that It
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: intrigued me because it was a face that seemed to
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: have been kind of contoured by the algorithm. It was dictated.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: It was a face that people would click on and like,
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: and people were kind of getting it slowly en masse.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: And as such, I mean, and so I wrote about
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: it because it seemed then like the most visible fulcrum
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: of this larger thing that was happening in which the
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: corporate incentives of trillion dollar social media companies were kind
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: of beginning to seem to many people like deeply personal desires.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: And all of this was just written on the face
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: in a way that was interesting.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Well, this piece, the latest piece you call our plastic
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: surgery nightmare, but it really focuses on the face. What
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: is it about the face? I'm looking at your face
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: right now. You're looking at my face. If you have
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: a face, listen to this answer. Why is that the
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: focal point?
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: So historically, as far back, you know, as ancient times, right?
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, the face, we love looking at faces. We
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: love looking at each other's faces. You know, we're New Yorkers.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: We like to sit on the train and stare at
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  Speaker 2: each other. The face, you can gather an enormous amount
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: of human information about someone, their temperament, their life, their selfhood.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: It's their soul. You know, the face is the portal
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: through which all of this information is given to us.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: And that when we love looking at each other and
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: and reading each other's faces. And in the last few years,
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: it has started to feel to me more that the
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: face is being kind of denuded of human information and
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: is serving on social media, especially like through our phones
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  Speaker 2: more as a kind of a disciplinary guide and kind
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  Speaker 2: of a consumer manual. We are, you know, and also,
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, people's faces, they're, they're beginning to look kind
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: of nuts. Yes.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: You know?
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: People's faces are looking nuts.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Look, you obviously stare at people's faces on the subway.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: I stare at their calves. For Jets tattoos? You just
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: don't get as much information from someone's calf. But what's
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: strange about what you're saying, the face is this portal
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: to our soul, to our experiences, to our adventures, to
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: our loves. Yet what everyone's doing to them now is
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: they're eliminating all that stuff.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the thing, you know, the thing that is
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: interesting to me is that these faces are ostensibly becoming
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: more beautiful, right? All of these, the face, the version
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: of Instagram face that's emerging, you know, I mean, people
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: are also, things have escalated, right? People are fully getting
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: kind of head transplants, you could say. Like people are just,
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: ages are being invented that have never been invented before.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: Like these wild things are happening. But what's striking to
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: me is that, you know, when I say the face
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: that people have now, like we can all probably picture
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: that face, right? It's not, it's a face that the algorithm,
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: that Instagram, that TikTok, that social media has deemed beautiful
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: insofar it is extremely profitable. But it is not a
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: face that humans take pleasure in.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's laughable sometimes when you see the face.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of pleasure. That kind
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: of pleasure, yeah.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: But what has changed in plastic surgery that's made this more,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: is it more approachable for everyone to change their face
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: or is it just that we are seeing so many
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: more images than we used to? I used to go
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: to the grocery store with my mom when I was
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: a kid and I would see three magazines, right? And
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: you would see the women on the magazine and that
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  Speaker 1: was kind of it. But now a kid is seeing
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  Speaker 1: thousands of images.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: Has plastic surgery become more approachable to everybody too?
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: Well, 10 years ago, when people were starting to get
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: an Instagram face, it was still kind of a coastal
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: elite and celebrity thing. The sort of injections that would
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: make everyone look like a hybrid of Kim Kardashian, Emily Ratajkowski,
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  Speaker 2: Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, you know, this singular... Michael Kosta, yeah.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: Michael Kosta, yeah. That wasn't a joke.
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  Speaker 1: Why is everybody laughing at that?
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  Speaker 2: And now it's democratically available. You can Klarna your injections.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: It's quite democratically available. But it's part of this larger
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: thing where you were saying what has happened with phones
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  Speaker 2: and the sort of larger regime of surveillance and broadcasting that, again,
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  Speaker 2: is this enormous profit center for tech companies that hate us.
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  Speaker 2: They put ordinary people in the position of what only
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  Speaker 2: celebrities used to be before. where the face and the
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: body are a potential source of profit, and that they
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: could be looked at at any time, recorded at any time, broadcast,
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  Speaker 2: and that the better they look, the more money they
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: would make you. We used to kind of formally recognize
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  Speaker 2: this as a demented way of living, and now it
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  Speaker 2: is kind of the universal one for anyone with a
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  Speaker 2: phone and an instinct to self-broadcast, which is most young
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  Speaker 2: people and many of.
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  Speaker 1: Us, maybe. People are being more transparent about saying, this
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  Speaker 1: is what I had done. I mean, you'd write about
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  Speaker 1: this in the article. Tweeting out, this is what I
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  Speaker 1: had injected. I shuddered at that. But is this transparency
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: better for us? What's your thought on that?
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  Speaker 2: I wrote this in the piece, but I think of,
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  Speaker 2: you know, it's a bit of a recursive, circular, whirlpool-ish
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  Speaker 2: nightmare where it's like, you know, oh, it's good that
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  Speaker 2: people are disclosing so that we will know what they
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  Speaker 2: do so that it can be more approachable for us
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  Speaker 2: to do too.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 2: And then on and on and on. I'm sort of like,
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  Speaker 2: it reminds me a little bit of kind of a
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: land acknowledgement. It's when a celebrity acknowledges plastic surgery, it's
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: like acknowledging the unjust system that you are about to
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: perpetuate just a little bit more.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Right. And this isn't just women. Yes. So feminism has won.
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  Speaker 1: Men are now obsessed with beauty and looks. Yes. Talk
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: a little bit about looks maxing. Truly, this was something
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: I did not know about, believe it or not. How
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: has this infiltrated male culture?
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: When I was in my 20s and I was working
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: for all the feminist media that no longer exists, it
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: seemed to me, it seemed to me that- Take that, man.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: Who really won now? But it seemed to me that
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: there was this broader impulse to designate everyone as beautiful,
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: as if it was politically important. And I remember at
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: the time in my 20s having this feeling inside me,
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: I was like, no, no, no, no, no, it should
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  Speaker 2: matter less. Like actually it's de-escalation that would free us.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: It would be, and so what we have now is
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: not that, you know, the previous decade of more mainstream
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: feminism freed women from beauty work, you know, deescalated the situation.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: It merely escalated for men. So now everyone is living
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: in the nightmare that has existed for women since, you know,
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: like mass commercial beauty industry.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: What you write about is these men, one of them
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: hitting his jaw with a hammer.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: Let's not say his name.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Let's not say, I don't know. Yes. But what's sad
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  Speaker 1: about it to me was you used to care about
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: your looks so you could try to have sex. That
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: was the whole thing! That was the whole thing! Maybe
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: I'll work out so I can get laid. But now it's,
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  Speaker 1: maybe I'll deform my face so I'll get more likes.
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  Speaker 2: So I can get more Twitch stream followers, whatever you
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  Speaker 2: call it on Twitch. Yes, it's strange to think, it's
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: strange to be looking back.
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  Speaker 1: Those men out there, sex feels good.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, it is so strange to be having this
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  Speaker 2: discussion in 2026 and thinking like, what happened to just wanting,
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: like these are not pure, these are not noble impulses, right?
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  Speaker 2: There's like me wanting to look at a beautiful person
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: because it feels good, because it brings me pleasure. You know,
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: us wanting to become more attractive so that we can
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: have more interesting sex with a more interesting person. Like
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: it's wild that that now feels kind of, it feels
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: quaint and beautiful because, Yeah, because that's the thing. The
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: regime of the looks-maxers, which grew out of a reactionary right-wing,
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: men's rights incel kind of conglomeration that rose on the
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  Speaker 2: internet last decade, it configures beauty as something you do
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  Speaker 2: to display dominance. Sex is something that maybe can be
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: acquired as a commodity, but the way they speak about
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  Speaker 2: it is not pleasure. It's not human pleasure. the whole
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  Speaker 2: concept of human pleasure that our bodies and our faces
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  Speaker 2: and each other's bodies and faces bring us just as
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  Speaker 2: people existing in the world. It's absent entirely from the
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  Speaker 2: new regime of this kind of the only, the only,
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  Speaker 2: the only entity that is loving it is the phone.
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  Speaker 1: Is the phone. Well, that's where this all either started
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  Speaker 1: or leads to. I mean, caring about beauty and looks
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  Speaker 1: didn't start with the cell phone.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: Certainly not.
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  Speaker 1: But it's hard to not read your work and not
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: get more and more angry at the phone or tech.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: And I wonder how we arm ourselves to be better
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  Speaker 1: or to deal with that in a more optimistic way.
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  Speaker 2: I think there's a way that this is manifesting really
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: specifically with AI, right? If you ask the consequences of
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: all of the most visible women on the internet having
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: the same face, it has become really obvious where if
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: you ask an image generator to show me a normal woman,
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: they will show you a white, thin, conventionally beautiful young
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  Speaker 2: woman with Instagram face. AI, through that framework, through that
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  Speaker 2: structure of seeing, if you are not... optimized and beautiful,
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  Speaker 2: you are scarcely human and you scarcely exist. And I
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: think that- That's up. That's up and I think what
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: we can do is we can strive at the very least.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: I mean, we both have children and I think about
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: this with them. It's like, they're gonna get lost in
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: the sauce. We all get lost in the sauce. But
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: one of my few real hopes for them is that
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: they retain the ability to look at the world and
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: other people, including themselves, in it and see them the
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: way that a human would see them and not the
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: way that a phone would. And something as simple as that,
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: kind of excising the phone vision within ourselves, seems worthwhile.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: And fun. Yeah. I mean, let's try to live. The
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: phone is an amazing tool. I mean, you can, you
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: can order a car, you can order food, you can
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: transfer money. You can, I mean, how do you even
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: parent without a phone now? Like my school is sending
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: me updates. The WhatsApp group. I didn't see that.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: I'm staying off my phone.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But It's really scary, and I think it's
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: really helpful. I know I've called your work scary a
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: few times. That's meant to be a compliment because it
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: should be waking us up to potentially what we are
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: dealing with. I want to talk about Mar-a-Lago face for
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: a second. Because....
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: It's so beautiful.
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  Speaker 1: They're all looking like the same robot. It's strange that
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: our president of the United States lives in this place,
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  Speaker 1: and all the women are having this robotic face, and
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: I can't help but think about.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: Not just the women, Matt Goetz.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Yes, sorry.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: Don't leave him out. Don't leave him out.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: But it also has this relationship with tech. Like, the
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: humans are becoming the robots. I just wanted to say that. Well, I....
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: I enjoy Mar-a-Lago Face because I do take an enormous
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: amount of human pleasure in it because it is quite
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: funny to me. Yes. It's an amazing exemplar of gender-affirming
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: care in an administration that is opposed to it.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Love that.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: And we love to see them support gender-affirming care. Yes, yes.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: And it's also... You know, Mar-a-Lago face, it almost feels
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: quaint to me now because these days, you know, people
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: can get six-hour facelifts and come out looking exactly like
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: they did 35 years ago. Mar-a-Lago face is just so
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: profoundly artificial looking that it's like, oh, this is actually beautiful.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: You're showing the work, you know? At this point, I
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: appreciate that. And it kind of bears the same relationship
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: as I wrote to, you know, the Mar-a-Lago face bears
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: the same relationship to reality that the administration does in general.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: And so it's all very fitting and coherent.
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  Speaker 1: Lastly, are we so far in that it's impossible or
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: can we change our beauty standards to appreciate more human flaws, wrinkles, scars,
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: receding hairline. You know, you watch a movie from the 1940s,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: all the men, these receding hairlines, they almost look more
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: handsome now to me. And maybe I'm saying that because
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: it's going. But can we change some things?
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: I think that following the sort of axis of pleasure,
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: just our deep human physical instincts for pleasure as viewers,
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: but also as producers will get us really far. I
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: think we all watch movies from the olden days, such
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: as the early 2000s. And we see beautiful people with
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: beautiful faces that are just actual faces. And we feel
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: that it feels better than watching a lot of faces
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: now and I think we can follow, like that's the
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: way out. People don't like what's happening to faces. If
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: you say to anyone, it's kind of nuts what's happening
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: to people's faces. Everyone knows exactly what you're talking about instantly.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: We want, I think we have to remind ourselves as
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: the entire AI sort of regime wants to dictate that
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: whatever is human is inferior for being imperfect. I think
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: we just have to remember that for a very, very
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: long time, we believed that actually it's our imperfections that
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: make us interesting and human and worthwhile. And we know
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: that about our friends. We know that about our partners.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: We know that about our children.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: And I think we can know that about strangers and
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: people we see through our phones, too, I hope.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: I hope anyone under the age of 21 is hearing
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: this saying, our imperfections, that is what makes you interesting
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: and special and someone that you want to be and
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: hang around. That's my opinion. Yeah. Thank you so much
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: for being here. Thank you. Our plastic surgery nightmare is
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: available to read at thenewyorker.com.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: Gia Tolentino!