Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation is not to be dispossessed by the other but to be dispossessed of the other, that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence, and thus to be continuously referred back to oneself and to one's image.

Jean Baudrillard, "Plastic Surgery for the Other"

Look. I’m going to be honest with you. Adopting that hard anti-plastic surgery stance while trans people’s lives and right to transition is at stake is absolutely horrendous timing. Knock it off.

Noble Roman nose to cute pug nose. Hmmmm. If you're a Darcey & Stacey fan, remember how the twins spent months in Turkey getting plastic surgery and new teeth, b/c it's less expensive than here in the states?

thinking about how, in another world, Bruce would’ve paid for the best plastic surgeons around the world to remove the brand from Jason’s face

Lookism is so funny to me because usually it's a normal battle shonen but every now and again it just goes "hey what if the most horrifying thing you can imagine actually happened" and then it just goes back to normal and pretends that didn't happen.

i think everyone on sunnytwt needs to be sat down so i can explain to them what basic human empathy is. and then maybe i put them in a blender until they agree to write meta about the characters instead of whether or not charlie day got facial reconstruction surgery.

ALSO fuck I forgot I have another story. I've been sitting on these for a bit lol. you know how there's always shit in the news about ransomware attacks hitting hospitals or whatever... recently I was like "man these guys are going after the wrong people, they should hit up plastic surgery clinics because they actually have money and tons of compromising information" and not two days later I saw a headline about a ransomware attack that hit a vegas plastic surgery clinic and how they were emailing people pictures of the victims' nude before-and-after pics and my heart fucking sank dude. like oh fuck I willed this into existence and it's my fault and now everyone is gonna see my awful legs and my awful pussy. then I read saw that (1) the actual attack happened months before I got my lipo and (2) it was a different clinic. but still. can you imagine lol.

one thing about hbo is that when they get a journalist coming up to them and going “man do i have a fucked up story i want to follow” they really do let that person go wild. i’ve mentioned the way the ronan farrow one really moved me emotionally and that’s just because ronan knows how to investigate and tell a story to get you righteously angry for who it is he’s defending. he’s good at his job!

but this one, quiet on the set, has genuinely made my jaw drop a few times, even if i think some of the framing could have been better in the last episode. of course i know about all the rumors about dan schneider and the abuse on set, it’s hard to have been into the teen nick scene and not notice, and it’s pretty easy to figure out which kids were being harmed through too much attention and which were being harmed through not enough attention, and there’s been all sorts of rumors floating around for over a decade!

but the build up to the drake bell reveal was well handled, i thought. i was initially skeptical because i think it’s hard to make a documentary about child sexual abuse without leaning into being exploitative in some way. and at first, where you have the actors who left early, like katrina, or who you remember but weren’t mega famous like giovannie, and they’re all saying “this set was so weird & inappropriate, i knew something was wrong but i didn’t have the experience or vocabulary to say what” it feels a little too schlocky. like, oh we’re just kind of speculating on the inappropriate nature of dan’s “friendship” with amanda bynes for two episodes? yeah it is fucked up that two pedophiles were on that set, but did they hurt anyone on set?

and then drake bell walks into the room dressed like timmy turner and says it was me. he hurt me.

i can’t stop thinking about the choice of clothes here and the way it helps drive home the point of the doc. he’s sitting there in fairly odd parents colors as an adult and can’t describe the sexual trauma he experienced as a child still, has never spoken about it, had his mom lie to his father over it because he was so screwed up. really driving home the point that he was just a kid who had a knack for physical comedy and it got him preyed on by dan, a man who should have protected him, set up and handed over to a monster who traumatized him for months and years.

but when that reporter said she got a judge to let them unseal the court documents because drake bell told her how much support peck had? my jaw dropped, like yeah this is reporting, this is someone who saw this story and finally fucking cared not about the salacious details but about who knew what and why they did nothing to stop this from happening. it’s not about forcing drake bell or katrina jackson or alexa to live through the worst moments of their life - it’s about how so many people knew what was going on and didn’t do a god damn thing to stop it. it’s about how these monsters, these convicted pedophiles, were given access to little kids to hurt and traumatize and everyone knew and didn’t just look the other way, they actively helped cover it up. THATS the story. Not that it was an isolated tragedy but that it was a clinical, purposeful environment built by people who wanted to harm little kids.

Not me running both late and early to work thinking about the logistics of a body transplant procedure for mr house courtesy of big mt

Anyways i concluded that if you could get the pod there and keep it a secret from dr 0 and pay dr dala in research related favors it would totally work. Foolproof plan truly

Oh and finding a lobotomite with a compatible body. Organ transplants are tricky and like thatd be super fucked up if the host body just started rejecting the new brain

this is literally how it feels when a celebrity who had the same facial features as you gets plastic surgery

Thinking about how so much of what we call beautiful and attractive is just proximity to white European features and figures. I think a decolonized understanding of beauty necessarily wouldnt allow for any universal standards. Ideally, there should be no premium put on attractiveness. Failing that, however, it would be real nice if whatever arbitrates the concept of beauty didn't involve simply hating your racial and ethnic origins.

I'm not particularly evolved in that area myself. I still find fair skin, light eyes, slim figures and sharp features much more appealing. However, I do find stick thin white women unattractive as hell. For now, as a proud South Asian woman with child-bearing hips, I call that praxis.

🦨

one day i'm going to muster enough psychic power to erase the veneer trend from people's minds

Alfred Burke puts on his best policing face as Parisian detective Inspector Maron, in Overseas Press Club - Exclusive!: The Billion Franc Mystery (1.6, ABPC, 1957)

You are a God damned chimera, you know that you son of a bitch?