A Blissful Fury: Beauty, Ritual, and Rage on Social Media
CHORUS OF FURIES singing
strophe 1
Alack, alack, O sisters, we have toiled,
O much and vainly have we toiled and borne!
Vainly! and all we wrought the gods have foiled,
And turned us to scorn!
He hath slipped from the net, whom we chased: he hath 'scaped us who should be our prey-
O'ermastered by slumber we sank, and our quarry hath stolen away!
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A Blissful Fury: Beauty, Ritual, and Rage on Social Media
The Furies of ancient Greek mythology were monstrous women who cleansed the Earth through revenge, wrath, and righteous anger. While they first appeared in the Iliad as the punishers of abusive parents and oath-breakers, the Furies would eventually move to function as avengers of the ungrateful dead. Grand histories of the Furies teemed with man-seducing horror, moral degradation, and a witchcraft that poured itself into the earth with vengeance. These goddesses of vengeance were crafted with an evocative presentation in much of their early canonical narratives. They were a force to be reckoned with upon the invocation of their name. However, they did not have well-defined physical descriptions until they appeared in the Oresteia trilogy by the Greek tragedian Aeshchylus. A furious and heart-broken Clytemnestra calls upon the Furies to arise from their nebulous underworld to kill her renegade son in the third act. Here, the tragedian describes the Furies with snaky hair, terrible faces––so frightening that women were said to have miscarried in the audience during the staging of this play. Loathsome. Furious. Vengeful. Chaotic. And the most incriminating sin: Ugly.
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In Trick Mirror (2019), Jia Tolentino writes that when you are a woman, “the things… used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like.” There is no other place where this expectation plays out with such expediency and efficiency as social media. Looking beautiful is a regular precursor to the social capital that is deeply sought after on Twitter and Instagram. However, it is not enough to look beautiful. In order to engage with the kind of beauty labor that produces results in the form of market engagement, you must want to look beautiful.
As our online world is increasingly atomized, the abstracted nature of digital relationships often materialize in the forms of favorites, likes, clicks, and comments. Beauty markets and beauty labor have accommodated this development of “social media engagement” in stride. Historically, the terror of beauty has been released inside of the psyches of women––to be legible as a woman is to be beautiful. We have learned to develop a legibility, a legitimacy, and a twisted agency predicated on the specific labor necessary to create and sustain beauty in the heightened scroll-chaos of Instagram and Twitter. When we are bombarded by beautiful images of others, specifically the images of other women performing beauty, we learn to imitate it.
But it is simply not enough to imitate beauty. Given the host of resources available to us through an explosive and frenzied market, we can learn to perform beauty better. As we poke at our own rolling stomachs and put blush on our noses to make them cute and pert, we engrain a pattern, a ritual of self-regulation and surveillance. We get better, smarter, prettier. We become smarter at being pretty––and we do it well. We want to do it well.
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We have stepped into a burdensome self-awareness, a roiling emotional jungle that pulls us into ambiguous territory, territory that we cannot quite articulate. We have a garden of ugly feelings to cultivate––a stark contrast to the beauty that we perform. Stefan Higgins writes in “Crisis Mode” (2019) that scholars have tended to interpret unambiguous feelings (happiness, fear, etc.) as the primary drivers of our actions. However, it is the ambivalent emotions, the ugly emotions of envy, irritation, and anxiety that are perversely functional. Because these feelings are non-cathartic, they “foreground a failure of emotional release.” It is precisely this failure of release that invites a suspended action triggered by the obstructed agency that we feel when we are at the “mercy of endlessly updating platforms and algorithms.”
Irritation, comparison, envy are all dangerous love children of internet beauty culture. They create feelings of weakness and inadequacy that do not provide the sweet release of fury. Sienna Ngai continues in “Ugly Feelings” (2005) that this stuplimity of emotion generates such a futility that emotional release is only found through schadenfreude and public shame. When we are online, these ugly feelings get trapped between our fingers and the smooth surface of our screens. Unable to release these silent shames, this silent self-ridicule when we cannot trick the algorithm to believe in our best angle, we get mean. We turn the bile that churns inside and spew it onto those who have not been smart enough, good enough, at being pretty. How dare they? How dare they?
The constant creation of beauty cleverly masks the greater burden of inadequacy and self-surveillance. When we move further from the center of ourselves and into the comparative world of internet beauty, nascent feelings of bitterness, envy, paranoia, and anger bubble under the surface of our acid-peels and pouty, glossed lips. To ease the inarticulate anger, we create cycles and rituals cleverly masked as beauty routine and lifestyle. This is how we believe that we will win. But there is no winning in this game. There is only the continued creation of a smarter, meaner beauty. It is an Ouroborous. The cycle cannibalizes itself.
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Goddesses of justice, goddesses of truth, satiate your hunger with treacherous Orestes. Blood and pain are drawn to the hardened earth. Goddesses of justice, goddesses of truth, we seek your guidance in the translucence of your skin and the gnashing of your teeth. We see your anger as it is our own.
Goddesses of wrath, goddesses of truth, we invoke your name.
When our minds feel like they are evaporating, may we reach back, deep into the seeds, and feel the beating, of acrid smoke, cooking meat. Sinew dripping from yellow fat which our grandmothers strip with their brown, cracked hands. The blood is precious, signifying, signified. As we become more beautiful, let us become more angry.
Goddesses of irascibility, goddesses of truth, we invoke your name.
Before there is movement, there is a profound and strangled stillness. The sun is an compulsive stain in the horizon, and you chew pensively on the dry skin of your lip. Avulsed. Open. Remember yourself, all of yourselves. You are ancient, an earthen being grounded in the roots of lucidity, of triumph, of immense and apparent shame, of serendipity.
Goddesses of wrath, goddesses of truth, we invoke your name. We invoke your name. We invoke your name.
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Sources:
Milka is a Kenyan-American writer interested in the intersections of beauty and power. As an English Literature student, they primarily centered their research on marginalized bodies and the interiority of black women in postmodern literature. Currently, they focus their writing on creative non-fiction narrative that explores desirability politics, beauty labor in the Internet age, and the tender magic of body liberation. You can find their work in Turnpike Zine, Undertone Magazine, and in little Twitter musings.