The Erasure of Subjectivity: How Aesthetic Procedures and Beauty Norms Reduce Women to Readable Objects

Friday, March 21, 2025

In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty posits that our existence is fundamentally embodied—that perception is not merely a passive reception of the world but an active engagement with it. The body is not just an object in the world; it is the very medium through which we perceive, experience, and construct meaning. Within this framework, the increasing prevalence of aesthetic procedures, heavy reliance on makeup, and the imposition of rigid beauty standards can be understood not just as cultural phenomena but as mechanisms of ontological erasure—designed to strip women of their temporal, subjective depth and render them immediately consumable.

Flattening Time, Flattening the Subject

The human face, untouched by intervention, is a palimpsest—a layered history of expressions, microgestures, and the silent accumulation of time. It carries the imprint of experiences, emotions, and movement through the world. The fine lines of laughter, the slight asymmetries of expression, the dynamic interplay of light on skin—all of these elements contribute to the richness of subjectivity. However, aesthetic procedures such as Botox, fillers, facelifts, and even the uniformity imposed by makeup trends function as erasures of this layered temporality.

By smoothing the face, freezing expressions, or reshaping features to adhere to an externally dictated ideal, the body is no longer a lived entity—it becomes a static, curated surface. This process disrupts what Merleau-Ponty describes as the pre-reflective relationship between self and world, where one’s body is an open-ended, evolving expression of subjectivity. Instead, the face is transformed into a signifier—coded, pre-processed, designed for immediate recognition and classification.

The Economy of Readability

In patriarchal visual economies, the most dangerous thing a woman can be is difficult to read. The pressure to “enhance” one’s appearance is not merely about looking younger or more attractive; it is about reducing the need for interpretation. A face that resists immediate legibility—that carries the depth of lived experience—demands engagement. It requires effort to understand, to map, to contextualize.

A woman who allows her natural complexity to remain visible forces the observer into an active role, making him work for comprehension. But in a culture where men have been conditioned to believe that access to women should be immediate and effortless, this becomes intolerable. The ideal feminine subject, then, is one that does not disrupt the male gaze with the burden of depth. The less time a man has to invest in decoding her, the more she fits within a consumable, interchangeable category.

The Infantilization of Women

This erasure of temporal markers does not just remove signs of age—it manufactures a fiction of inexperience. A face stripped of lines, untouched by the evidence of past emotions and experiences, performs a kind of regression. It creates the illusion of a woman who has nothing to teach, only to learn. She becomes the blank slate onto which a man can project his knowledge, his experiences, his superiority.

This is why the aesthetic ideal of hyperfemininity is not merely about beauty but about positioning women within a hierarchy of power. The perfected, ageless face—achieved through medical intervention, strict grooming rituals, and digital filters—conveniently aligns with the trope of the naïve, moldable woman, one who has not been marked by the world, one who has no authority over her own subjectivity. In this way, aesthetic conformity is not just about attractiveness; it is about compliance.

The Resistance of Opacity

The alternative to this erasure is the refusal to become easily legible. To resist aesthetic homogenization is to remain complex, to force interaction beyond the surface level, to insist on one’s status as a subject rather than a spectacle. This resistance is not simply a rejection of beauty standards but a philosophical refusal to be consumed on first glance. It is an insistence on remaining an evolving, unfolding being—one whose history cannot be erased for the comfort of the observer.

In an era where the body is increasingly subjected to optimization, where technology facilitates the flattening of identity into marketable aesthetics, the decision to maintain one’s natural complexity becomes an act of defiance. It is an assertion that true engagement requires effort, that understanding a person is an investment of time and energy, and that no one is entitled to the instant gratification of a fully decipherable, compliant subject.

As Merleau-Ponty suggests, perception is always an interplay between what is visible and what must be inferred. The insistence on keeping women immediately readable is a refusal to acknowledge their full humanity. To disrupt this expectation is to reclaim the right to be an opaque, sovereign entity—one whose depth is neither reducible nor immediately accessible.