Like most men or gay fems, I do notice good-looking women along the aisles of H.E.B., but I seem to sort of wince at those with heavily Botoxed lips.
Is it because I prefer things more natural or proportionate or do larger lips just seem out of sync with the rest of the face?
My limited reading on this subject suggests I'm making a generalization about people with cosmetic "procedures," a judgement. OK, that's possible.
One article explained that folks like me have a predetermined view of the human form and find changes or enlargements simply "off" or out of balance.
Perhaps, I should share what got me thinking about this subject. I was writing an article about the high number of murders of women and girls in Mexico, femicide, focusing on a particular influencer recently slain, a gorgeous beauty shop owner and former beauty contest winner.
While looking for a suitable photo of the woman, I noticed that every picture reflected heavily Botoxed lips, so I dropped the article, a judgement call reflecting my own prejudices. In my flawed thinking, the enlarged lips made her less of a sympathetic victim.
I'm not proud of that decision, but at least it revealed an obvious personality flaw, a deep-seated dislike of Botoxed lips, an irrational bias for which and from which I'm in recovery.
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Beautiful women hanging with violent men. The men get drunk, they get jealous and kill their girlfriends. All over the world.
ReplyDeleteThe town’s Market Square—situated at its center—once served as a place of commerce, a primitive arena where the needs of the id were directly fulfilled: fish, tomatoes, necessities of the flesh. Before the dominion of modern giants such as H-E-B and Walmart, this square functioned as a communal nexus of exchange, a symbolic mother’s breast from which nourishment and comfort flowed.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Robert, a figure in my personal mythology, often spoke of arriving there as a child with his shoeshine box—a totem of early labor, of striving toward masculine identity. He hoped to acquire coins—mere fragments of value, but enough to secure small pleasures, perhaps ice cream. These were the primal rewards of boyhood instinct, not unlike the oral fixations of Freud’s psychosexual stages.
When I first arrived in Brownsville, the square had already begun its transformation—a gentrification, if you will—yet still bore traces of its unconscious past. In those earlier days, it was no genteel plaza. It had bars that functioned as dreamspaces of chaos and release, where music—specifically cumbia, rhythmic and bodily—was played by aged men, themselves relics of repressed artistic longing. Robert would perform there, but warned me not to linger. This fear of ‘trouble’ reflects society’s superego, ever restraining the pleasure-seeking id.
I recall the bandleader—a man with talent, yet visibly fractured—slipping behind the speakers to inhale cocaine. His secretive act, half-concealed yet known to all, mirrors the compulsions that hide just beneath the surface of civilized behavior. The music was loud, and no one minded; catharsis was the goal.
In these bars, the repression of society had all but vanished. Prostitutes smoked crack openly, reclaiming agency over their desires in the very face of moral order. These were Dionysian spaces, raw, unfiltered, and teetering on the edge of collective collapse. And yet—there was a kind of honesty there, a purity in the open indulgence.
Today, the square has been consciously reordered. Clean bricks, aesthetic improvements—symbols of the superego’s attempt to sanitize the primal chaos. The bus depot, once nestled within, has been pushed away—an act not unlike repression itself. And yet, the unconscious remains: the spirit of the old Market Square lingers.