Pretty Boy: Difference between revisions

We have arrived at the present moment. The Western male is the most visible, measured, and self-conscious man in human history. He has access to more information about his own appearance—and more tools to modify it—than any man who has ever lived. And he is, by many metrics, more anxious, isolated, and uncertain than his pre-modern ancestors. Why? Because he has no ritual. No calendar. No community. No shared symbol that transforms his individual vanity into collective meaning. He has only the algorithm, which tells him that he is never enough, and the market, which sells him the tools to try again tomorrow.

By the end of the 20th century, the transformation is complete. The pre-modern man was a soul in a vessel, embedded in community, governed by ritual, seeking meaning. The modern man is a self with a body, competing in markets, governed by data, seeking optimization. Every component of the old symbolic order has been replaced by a secular, scientific, commercial equivalent: