BENEATH THE FILTERED FACADE
Part 3
What is the Problem with Filters?
Beauty and Surveillance
As more technology is unveiled, the more it seems to offer in regards to keeping tabs on something. For example, you can access a live video feed from your house security system, smart beds adjust positions or temperatures according to how you sleep, Apple AirTags track items that you place it on, and Apple Watches can now track your Blood Oxygen level. Today’s tracking technologies have no bounds and are found even in the beauty sector. Feminist studies scholars Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill (2017) argue that for many in today's world, digitally tracking every part of our lives has become an obsession. This can take the form of period tracking apps, the Fitbit counting steps, the Apple Watch tracking activity rings, and many more tools. This industry is not stopping any time soon either, and industry analysts predict that the self-tracking technologies market will grow by 40% each year the next five years.
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As it is becoming more common within airports and schools, digital tracking is becoming an increasingly normalized part of everyday culture online. However, there is an element of surveillance in which personal information and privacy are being violated. Gill and Elias quote Lisa Nakamura."No form of surveillance is innocent and biometric forms of monitoring serve two functions: 'to regulate, define, and control populations; and to create new gendered, racialized, and abled or disabled bodies through digital means." Beautification apps have built on this form of surveillance in offering tools to keep track of bodily health and functions, as well as showing you how to conform to the White standard of beauty through filters.
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Neoliberal feminism is promised through the beauty filters giving a false sense of agency and empowerment by self-scrutinizing and constantly working on self-improvement. Neoliberal feminism, as defined by Wendy Brown, is when citizens are seen as rational, self-interested economic actors with agency and control over their lives. This concept speaks to the above issue in offering women an opportunity to be individualistic in their feminist endeavors to further their personal agency in the world through digitally enhanced beauty.
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Beauty and Data Collection
Beautification apps claim to have significant authority and ultimate knowledge of what will make you the most beautiful. These apps coerce you into taking a picture to let the app analyze you, rate your beauty, and/or show you what you would look like with bigger eyes or a smaller nose or without under-eye circles or pimples.
The supposed neutral metric systems of assessment and surveillance these beauty apps offer are framed in such a way that they are viewed as a welcoming asset. From there, the app gains authority in the user's mind to be able to assess and correct "bad" features and suggest ways to make them better and more beautiful so they can be more popular or look like everyone else.
Not only that, but once a face is analyzed within an app, it then can be offered up for feedback from friends and family to "maximize visual social capital", meaning gaining more people looking at the newly modified you with an aim for positive feedback in regards to being an elevated you. According to Elias and Gill, through these apps, women are conditioned to see themselves and their gender roles as bound up with intensive forms of digitally enhanced self-assessment, which extends to the surveillance of others' weight, skin, and other physical features. Simultaneously, as Elias and Gill stress, user's are taught to think of the app as their new best friend.
Fatphobia in Filters
Filters have not developed into the destructive and harmful technology that they are overnight, but rather emerge from longstanding forms of discrimination and biases. For example, let's consider filters that slim a user's face. According to sociologist Laurie Cooper Stoll (2019), in the 1800's and 1900's, fatness was seen as a symbol of prosperity because access to much food was a rarity. This was changed by the food production industry that allowed more food access to more people (Stoll, 2019). Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, and with the rise of the Protestant work ethic in the West which emphasized self-restraint, fatness changed from being received positively as a marker of wealth and privilege in the U.S., to being seen as something negative, signifying a weak-willed and unrestrained look. Stoll explains that, “​​To be fat was to be of the lowest social order, which was associated with immigrants and other peoples of color believed to be so-called inferior races by scientists and prominent social thinkers of the day (Farrell 2011). Thus, thinness became a marker of social status in the United States and a proxy for fitness for citizenship and the capacity to be civilized.”
Beginning in the 1940's, the BMI (body mass index) came about to generalize what the height and weight of "average" individuals should be (Stoll, 2019). Adolphe Quetelet, a mathematician, sociologist, and astronomer worked to identify what an "average man" was. Quetelet was of the mind that the mathematical mean of the population was the ideal man, thus the creation of the BMI. At first, the formula that was used was based solely on the size and measurements of French and Scottish participants resulting in measurements focused on the white westerner. Furthermore, Quetelet, never intended the BMI to be used to measure body fat, build, or health, but rather to measure populations for statistical purposes.
Today, as Stoll’s work emphasizes, society often views being fat as a choice, and at that, a bad choice, due “in large part to the pervasiveness of several health myths that so often go unquestioned in our culture,” furthering the economic interests of the beauty-industrial complex. Fat people are discriminated against in media, education, employment, and healthcare, with disparate impacts for fat women of color, in particular. Even still, today filters work to slim or to shame fat individuals, furthering the standard that slim is the best. TikTok is currently under fire for creating a filter that makes your face fatter to make you feel better about yourself. Many users are outraged and are speaking out about the inappropriateness of the filter and its applications. However, the fact that the filter was even created in the first place is discouraging for seeing meaningful progress in filters and education in the field of body image and self perception.
