The first chapter contains the scene of two female friends meeting. The prettier of the two has been reported to the authorities for her good looks, and faces cumpulsory plastic surgery to level her down to the average standard.
“It was my lashes they mostly picked on, for being too long and curly. My fault, of course, I should have cut them, but sometimes I forgot. One woman complained she had lost several nights sleep just thinking about my eyelashes. She felt they were digging into her, she said.”
This sounds like a great read.
Societies already do this. Sometimes this is done by promoting a single standard of beauty above others and coercing everyone to adhere to it or make excuses why not. Sometimes it is done by harassing and degrading people who are different but beautiful until they self destruct. You’re only “safe” if your beauty is a certain kind. Even then, you’re not “safe” so much as a preferred commodity.
It’s so bad, and the hatred of beauty is so deep today that even if one has just a little bit of it, though plenty of defects, people seek to kill the little that is there.
The great averaging has already begun. People are discouraged from doing things that are healthier for them, and encouraged to take only surface effective shortcuts. There’s a pill, a surgery, or a denial to solve everything.
The different but beautiful are in a sort of a dilemma these days. On the one hand, if we play it down, we look like easy targets and get casually shit on. On the other hand, if we assert our beauty by obviously nurturing it, we can be more intimidating, which keeps away casual shit, but then get more aggressively shit on personally. I suppose we just have to pick our poison.
I’ve wasted a lot of anger about the facts of human nature and social dynamics in the past. It’s really not worth being angry about. It’s like being angry because people are mortal. People are stupid. This is life.
What I would like is to become less compassionate towards the stupid. I keep not wanting to hurt them just because they are stupid, when the fact of Nature is that they were built to be used and harmed. They beg for it by underestimating stronger people, mistreating others who’ve done nothing wrong to them, and constantly trading freedom and fulfillment for fitting in.
I know I’ve given “no more Miss Nice Gal” speeches before, but I think after the latest stream of shit…two hours of prattle about someone’s inner dilemma about whether or not to keep seeing me, based on crap I didn’t initiate because I’m not stupid, I’ve had enough.
Hearing it said a thousand ways that someone hates themselves for desiring me, or that they’re too weak to face the costs…I’ve heard enough of that shit.
So I think I’ll read this book when I can get it, to further explore the mind of the weak. Maybe that will strengthen my resolve to become truly merciless. Tools were made to get tooled. Might as well become an expert.
Forced equality…I can see it coming because enforced equality is already here.
