essay
by JEAN BAUDILLARD
Something of this radical metaphysics of appearances, this challenge by simulation, still lives in the cosmetic arts and the glamour of modern fashion. The Church Fathers were well aware of this, and denounced it as diabolical. “To be attentive to one’s body, to care for and paint it is to set oneself up as a rival of God and contest His creation.” This stigmatization has continued ever since, but is now reflected in that other religion, that of the subject’s liberty and essential desires. Our entire morality condemns the construction of the female as a sex object by the facial and bodily arts. The female is no longer denounced by God’s judgment, but by the dictates of modern ideology, for prostituting her femininity in consumer culture, and subjecting her body to the reproduction of capital. “Femininity is woman’s alienated being.” “Femininity manifests itself as an abstract…