Biologists call this ‘supernormal stimulus’; show a mother bird a giant plastic egg, and she’ll incubate it instead of her own real eggs. Madison Avenue has saturated our environment with this kind of stimuli, this visual drug. Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we’re seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.
How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can’t compare to supermodels. Two-dimensional images are bad enough, but now with spex, advertisers can put a supermodel right in front of you, making eye contact. Software companies offer goddesses who’ll remind you of your appointments. We’ve all heard about men who prefer virtual girlfriends over actual ones, but they’re not the only ones who’ve been affected. The more time any of us spend with gorgeous digital apparitions around, the more our relationships with real human beings are going to suffer.
We can’t avoid these images and still live in the modern world. And that means we can’t kick this habit, because beauty is a drug you can’t abstain from unless you literally keep your eyes closed all the time.
Until now. Now you can get another set of eyelids, one that blocks out this drug, but still lets you see. And that’s calliagnosia. Some people call it excessive, but I call it just enough. Technology is being used to manipulate us through our emotional reactions, so it’s only fair that we use it to protect ourselves too.
Right now you have an opportunity to make an enormous impact. The Pembleton student body has always been at the vanguard of every progressive movement; what you decide here will set an example for students across the country. By passing this initiative, by adopting calliagnosia, you’ll be sending a message to advertisers that young people are no longer willing to be manipulated.
From a broadcast of EduNews:
Following NCA president Walter Lambert’s speech, polls show that 54% of Pembleton students support the calliagnosia initiative. Polls across the country show that an average of 28% of students would support a similar initiative at their school, an increase of 8% in the past month.
Tamera Lyons:
I thought he went overboard with that cocaine analogy. Do you know anyone who steals stuff and sells it so he can get his fix of advertising?
But I guess he has a point about how good-looking people are in commercials versus in real life. It’s not that they look better than people in real life, but they look good in a different way.
Like, I was at the campus store the other day, and I needed to check my e-mail, and when I put on my spex I saw this poster running a commercial. It was for some shampoo, Jouissance I think. I’d seen it before, but it was different without calli. The model was so – I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I don’t mean I felt the same as that time I saw the good-looking guy in the cafeteria; it wasn’t like I wanted to get to know her. It was more like… watching a sunset, or a fireworks display.
I just stood there and watched the commercial like five times, just so I could look at her some more. I didn’t think a human being could look so, you know, spectacular.
But it’s not like I’m going to quit talking to people so I can watch commercials through my spex all the time. Watching them is very intense, but it’s a totally different experience than looking at a real person. And it’s not even like I immediately want to go out and buy everything they’re selling, either. I’m not even really paying attention to the products. I just think they’re amazing to watch.
Maria deSouza:
If I’d met Tamera earlier, I might have tried to persuade her not to get her calli turned off. I doubt I would’ve succeeded; she seems pretty firm about her decision. Even so, she’s a great example of the benefits of calli. You can’t help but notice it when you talk to her. For example, at one point I was saying how lucky she was, and she said, ‘Because I’m beautiful?’ And she was being totally sincere! Like she was talking about her height. Can you imagine a woman without calli saying that?
Tamera is completely unselfconscious about her looks; she’s not vain or insecure, and she can describe herself as beautiful without embarrassment. I gather that she’s very pretty, and with a lot of women who look like that, I can see something in their manner, a hint of showoffishness. Tamera doesn’t have that. Or else they display false modesty, which is also easy to tell, but Tamera doesn’t do that either, because she truly is modest. There’s no way she could be like that if she hadn’t been raised with calli. I just hope she stays that way.
Annika Lindstrom, second-year student:
I think this calli thing is a terrible idea. I like it when guys notice me, and I’d be really disappointed if they stopped.
I think this whole thing is just a way for people who, honestly, aren’t very good-looking, to try and make themselves feel better. And the only way they can do that is to punish people who have what they don’t. And that’s just unfair.
Who wouldn’t want to be pretty if they could? Ask anyone, ask the people behind this, and I bet you they’d all say yes. Okay, sure, being pretty means that you’ll be hassled by jerks sometimes. There are always jerks, but that’s part of life. If those scientists could come up with some way to turn off the jerk circuit in guys’ brains, I’d be all in favor of that.
Jolene Carter, third-year student:
I’m voting for the initiative, because I think it’d be a relief if everyone had calli.
People are nice to me because of how I look, and part of me likes that, but part of me feels guilty because I haven’t done anything to deserve it. And sure, it’s nice to have men pay attention to me, but it can be hard to make a real connection with someone. Whenever I like a guy, I always wonder how much he’s interested in me, versus how much he’s interested in my looks. It can be hard to tell, because all relationships are wonderful at the beginning, you know? It’s not until later that you find out whether you can really be comfortable with each other. It was like that with my last boyfriend. He wasn’t happy with me if I didn’t look fabulous, so I was never able to truly relax. But by the time I realized that, I’d already let myself get close to him, so that really hurt, finding out that he didn’t see the real me.
And then there’s how you feel around other women. I don’t think most women like it, but you’re always comparing how you look relative to everyone else. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a competition, and I don’t want to be.
I thought about getting calli once, but it didn’t seem like it would help unless everyone else did too; getting it all by myself wouldn’t change the way others treat me. But if everyone on campus had calli, I’d be glad to get it.
Tamera Lyons:
I was showing my roommate Ina this album of pictures from high school, and we get to all these pictures of me and Garrett, my ex. So Ina wants to know all about him, and so I tell her. I’m telling her how we were together all of senior year, and how much I loved him, and wanted us to stay together, but he wanted to be free to date when he went to college. And then she’s like, ‘You mean he broke up with you?’