Internal_Teach_7032 I (29F) left my 8-month-old daughter with my MIL (56F) for an afternoon so I could run errands. When I came back, my baby had pierced ears. I nearly fainted.

My MIL said, “It’s a cultural thing, she looks so much prettier now,” like she did me a favor. I was livid, we never discussed this, and I never would’ve consented. My baby cried for hours that night from the pain.

My husband (30M) is furious too, but his mom keeps doubling down saying, “it’s my granddaughter, I get a say.”

I honestly don’t know if I can ever trust her alone with my baby again.

Quote:But what I want to bring people back to is, beauty is a depreciating asset by design. Unlike investing in actual capital — which will grow with time, it will become more valuable — when you invest in beauty, the opposite is happening. It’s going to require more and more cash to extend that half-life.

Quote:Such factors coincide with a double bind that midlife women often face: cultural pressure to remain thin and youthful and an aging body that naturally shifts away from the proportions idealized in media. The pressures are so intense that research shows an overwhelming 73 percent of midlife women reporting weight dissatisfaction—making it clear these struggles are not just personal, they’re systemic.

This dynamic has only been intensified by the surge of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and harmful diet trends promulgated on social media such as #SkinnyTok. “Asking a woman between the ages of 45 to 55 to be the size she was at 15 or 20 or even 30 is terrible advice,” says Kievit.

Quote:A few days after my Instagram feed surrendered to the SkinnyTok takeover, the tradwife content began to sneak in. Beautiful women baking bread in linen dresses spoke to me about embracing my divine femininity. I should consider “softer living” and “embracing my natural role.” All of a sudden, I wondered whether I, a single woman in her late 20s living in Manhattan, should trade it all in to become a mother of 10 on a farm in Montana.

Watch a few more of these videos, and soon you’ll be directed to the anti-vax moms, or the Turning Point USA sweetheart Alex Clark’s wellness podcast, Cultural Apothecary, or the full-on conspiratorial alt-right universe. This is just how the internet works. Eviane Leidig, the author of The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, sees a connection between SkinnyTok and tradwives in their “very strong visual representation of femininity.”

Whether they mean to be or not, they have become part of the same pipeline. Algorithms grab your attention with lighter, relatable content while exposing you to more extremist viewpoints. The alt-right, she said, is great at making aspirational and seemingly apolitical content that viewers relate to. “This is a deliberate strategy that the conservative space has been employing over the last several years to capitalize on cultural issues as a gateway to radicalize audiences into more extreme viewpoints.”

Quote:With South Korea being one of the world’s most popular destinations for plastic surgery, it is no surprise that some medical tourists are facing challenges when going through immigration after their makeover.

So much so that the Chinese Embassy is reminding everyone to carry a doctor’s certificate when leaving the country. After all, during long holiday breaks, many tourists from China flock to South Korea for aesthetic procedures.

This situation is reminscent of an incident in 2017 when three Mainland Chinese women in their 20s were reportedly stopped from leaving South Korea because they couldn’t prove that they were the same people in their passport photos.

zazzatazz Just over 24hrs ago, my sister died due to the complications of Ozempic she was getting off the dark Web. She died in pain and confusion and all in the pursuit of fitting a societal beauty standard that's fucking made up bullshit pushed on us by advertisers.

It's senseless and not fair. I don't know what to say I just hurt so much for a life wasted. She was 28 years old and had so much to live for. It doesn't feel real.

Edit: I know it was not real ozempic. The point stands that she died because she felt so unhappy in her body she made risky choices to fit a beauty standard.

Quote:A recent tell-all book by former Facebook insider Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled "Careless People," is blowing the lid on the sheer depravity of the social media giant's targeting machine. Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook — which subsequently changed its name to Meta a few years back — from 2011 to 2017, eventually rising to the role of public policy director.

As early as 2017, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook was exploring ways to expand its ad targeting abilities to thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across Facebook and Instagram — a decidedly vulnerable group, often in the throes of adolescent image and social crises.

Quote:The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, "so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment," according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a "Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index."

Quote:We’ve talked before about how the utterly necessary and radical work of body positivity activists and campaigners has been appropriated and turned into just another skinny girl thing for the masses, stripped free of its political urgency. Capitalism demands a reinforcement of the status quo and what it believes to be guaranteed routes to profit, regardless of what history or economics say in rebuttal. So the faces of body positivity are the same stunningly beautiful people who would be used to sell detox tea, only now they’re cloaking their utterly substance-free inspirational messages in a false sense of universality. No, see, we’re all beautiful and you just need to believe in yourself!

But here’s the thing: I wholeheartedly believe I am unattractive and I am not bothered by that. I don’t think I’m beautiful and I think it’s OK to say that. It is not a curse or a lack of self-confidence that encourages me to think such things about myself. So why does everyone get so wound up when I say it?