The Visual Society.

I recently published “The Gorgeous War”, a short story on Amazon.com about a product which allowed the great majority of people to be, effectively, beautiful. I wrote it primarily because it’s a subject which fascinates me, in the fact that our society, especially with the rise of handheld devices, is so incredibly visually orientated.

That orientation has had all sorts of curious effects on our society, from the manufacture of political candidates (look at Forza Italia) to the arguable reversal of feminism and the rise of the WAG, to the recent Abercrombie and Finch row, where a business suggested that a selective approach to seeking custom based on the physical attractiveness of their customers might well be a reasonable business model. Odious as it is, I’m not sure they were wrong in their  analysis.

There are those who despair at it, who question the fact that we seem to value the beauty of a world class model over, say, a world class research chemist. I’m not so sure: after all, is it right to differentiate between a person who inherited DNA which made them physically attractive over a person with DNA which made them intelligent? Probably not.

Then, of course, there is the reality that physical attractiveness as a general rule has a shorter lifespan than intelligence.

But what would happen if we could manufacture beauty cheaply?We can do a lot now, of course, with plastic surgery and weight  reduction surgery, but supposing we could do it at a cost that permitted pretty much everybody to access it?

What if we could all be the beautiful people?

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