Everyone Is Botoxed & No One Is Horny
An interview on the Botox Paradox with Laura Pitcher for Dazed.
A while ago I responded to a tweet calling for controversial opinions about sex. “Eliminating microexpressions via Botox [is] part of why chemistry and eroticism are dead,” I said.
I was referencing a stable of studies that show injectable neuromodulators like Botox lead to “decreased activation of key brain emotional centers,” may “alter the way [the] brain interprets and processes other people’s emotions,” and can “flatten your affect, disconnecting you from your [own] feelings.”
Journalist Laura Pitcher saw the tweet, reached out to me for an interview, and recently published an excellent piece for Dazed Beauty called “How Botox killed eroticism.” Read it!
Since our full interview didn’t make the final cut, I figured I’d share the rest of my answers with you all here. Continue reading for more on the evolutionary importance of microexpressions, the emotional consequences of neurotoxins, and what I call The Botox Paradox.
Dazed: You recently tweeted about eliminating microexpressions via Botox. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Jessica DeFino (me): There has been so much discourse lately about people having less sex than ever, the state of dating being really bad. There are a lot of statistics that show loneliness is on the rise, that people are feeling very disconnected from each other. Obviously, I would love to see more direct study of this — but a casual observation is that we do have a lot of studies on how neuromodulators like Botox and Xeomin or Dysport actually can affect the way we both process other people’s emotions and express our own emotions. They change the way we connect and communicate with others — even reducing our capacity to feel empathy — by freezing our muscles and eliminating our ability to make microexpressions and mirror other people’s expressions.
Microexpressions and mirroring are forms of unconscious, nonverbal communication. They happen in a fraction of a second, outside of our control. This is just part of our ability to communicate with people. Everyone can recognize and mirror microexpressions, regardless of what language you're speaking, so it’s sort of this universal language that plays an evolutionary role in connecting us — in helping us feel for others, and understand what other people are feeling, and even understand what we’re feeling ourselves. And so I do have to wonder if there’s a link between the rising rates of Botox use, the fact that people are getting neuromodulator injections younger and younger, and the same demographics experiencing feelings of loneliness and disconnection, as well as romantic and sexual frustration.
Dazed: Sometimes I see people critiquing Botox, or making a case for not getting Botox, but it’s most often about skin sagging or more physical side effects. Why do you think that this? The aesthetic communication element, which is quite important to our relationships — why do you think that’s not circulating as a major reason not to get Botox?
JD: I mean, I think the beauty industry encourages a hyper-fixation on the physical. The communication piece does not apply to the average person’s reason for wanting or getting Botox. It’s a purely aesthetic pursuit. People have been conditioned by beauty culture in general to focus on the aesthetic, whether in the positive or the negative, as the basis for making most beauty decisions.
Although at the same time, I think it is important to note neurotoxins like Botox are often marketed as a sort of mental health measure — there is this embedded idea that it will make you feel better, that it’s an expression of love for yourself, that it will ease appearance anxiety. So it is curious how that is part of the messaging, yet so little of the critique against Botox is focused on the fact that it’s also perpetuating a particular standard of beauty, beauty as eternal youth — an unmeetable standard of beauty in all senses of the word — and beauty standards themselves are known to lead to increased appearance anxiety, increased incidences of appearance-related depression, dysmorphia, disordered eating, disordered behaviors. So that could be part of our general despair too. It is concerning that none of these critiques really come up when we’re talking about the pros and cons of some of the procedures available to us.
Dazed: For sure, because you would think that people getting into skincare, makeup — you would think that an element of it is, Oh, I want to look good for my friends or to attract someone. It's such a contrast [if] it's actually going to impact your relationships in a negative way. There have been discussions around like, everyone wants to look sexy, but in a way that isn't actually — it ties into eroticism.
JD: Right. I mean, there’s that great article from years ago: Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny.
Beauty culture has taken these really embodied, metaphysical concepts of beauty and desire and attraction and relegated them to the superficial realm. So we're really only considering these supersensible concepts on the surface level, which is not serving anybody. Except industry executives! And like I said in that tweet, I really, really do think there is a connection between relegating some of these concepts to the external world and then experiencing existential symptoms of loneliness, anxiety, depression, emptiness, and disconnection. It’s because we’re not conceiving of beauty and desire and attraction in the multi-dimensional way that they exist in our lives.
I often frame it like this: Becoming beautiful in the sense of meeting a certain standard of beauty can have some benefits in the socioeconomic sphere, right? Things like pretty privilege, fitting in. More beautiful people tend to make a little bit more money and have better legal outcomes — these are socioeconomic benefits of being “beautiful.” But they're often contrasted with negative existential outcomes. So with industrialized beauty, we sort of have to do the cost-benefit analysis of like, economic status vs. existential consequences. When you're thinking of meaning and connection and communication, these are the things that really matter.
Dazed: Is there anything else you want to mention about Botox in terms of relationships?
JD: I did come across one study from 2018 that found Botox treatment was associated with both reduced emotional recognition and reduced sexual function, which I thought was really interesting.
Dazed: I wonder if people would rather be sexless and smooth.
JD: 100%. I do think that's part of why this argument hasn't caught on — because these are not our cultural priorities. Culturally, we do not prioritize deep feeling, or a full experience of life. We prioritize status and aestheticizing our lives, and we’re rewarded for that. The paradox of Botox is that so many of us get it because we think it will enhance our lives. What we’re actually doing is 1) perpetuating the standard that made us feel bad in the first place and 2) limiting our potential to connect and communicate and empathize with others — which, I might argue, are the only things that make our lives meaningful.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
"Culturally, we do not prioritize deep feeling, or a full experience of life. We prioritize status and aestheticizing our lives, and we’re rewarded for that." Wow ok yes!!
Excellent! Reminds me of this Audre Lorde quote that one of PE Moscowitz’ users commented recently:
“We have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”
I was struck by that piece you linked to a while ago about AI images, and how it said the vast majority of images of women that AI pulls from to create a “beautiful woman” is from porn. It feels like not only are our beauty standards deeply enmeshed in porn as an industry, but Botox itself seems like it plays into a porn-ethic of what beauty is: the expedient at the expense of the real and complex.