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Author Elise Hu shared the powerful messages from her book, “Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital,” during a Northeastern Women Who Empower event celebrating Women’s History Month.
Diane Nishigaya MacGillivray, Northeastern’s senior vice president for university advancement, was in an airport last October when she picked up a book.
The topic — how society and social media reduces people’s worthiness to their appearance — was one she immediately wanted to share with Northeastern’s students.
On Tuesday, author Elise Hu spoke about the powerful messages within the pages of “Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital” during a Northeastern Women Who Empower event on the Boston campus.
The talk, which was co-hosted by the Mills Institute, helped celebrate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day at the university.
“I read this book and I thought it was so deep, so multi-valence and so layered,” MacGillivray said. “Whenever I engage with something like that, I feel like I want to share it with our community.”
Hu explained to the large crowd how digital apps and filters — such as the ones used on Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok — spread artificial beauty standards that must be dismantled.
“If we are chasing digital standards, artificial standards … they only get more and more cyborgian,” Hu said.
In other words, a person’s appearance becomes a reflection of technology.
An estimated 80% of 13-year-old girls in the United States, Hu said, already use some sort of filter or photo editing to upgrade their appearance online.
“I don’t want this,” she said. “I don’t want my daughters growing up in a world in which their looks are the most important thing about them.”
While Hu admitted filters are unlikely to go away, attention should be placed on personal values and building a community of people with similar experiences, she said.
“We can change what this system is optimized for by challenging what it means to be beautiful,” Hu said. “Celebrate the differences and diversity that are inherent to the human experience.”
A journalist, author, podcaster and entrepreneur, Hu said the spread of new digital beauty standards are affecting everyone around the world, including those in South Korea, where she worked as the bureau chief for NPR from 2015 to 2018.
Hu said she visited Seoul for the first time as an adolescent and was immediately confronted with local beauty standards and a strong emphasis on an individual’s appearance.
Hu became estranged from her body because of that experience, she said.
Social media filters can slim down the face, smooth out skin, make eyes bigger and lips plummer, even add makeup. In some apps, Hu said, she couldn’t turn these filters off.
“This was a lot of non-consensual filtering, or what somebody called forced catfishing,” or fake online persona, she said.
That served as a powerful reminder of the phenomenon Hu writes about in her book — the technological gaze.
“Women have had to play to the male gaze forever,” she said. “But the technological gaze is a little bit more insidious, and it affects all of us.”
People of all genders, Hu said, experience technological gaze — an algorithm-driven perspective — and adopt it from using filters and posting endless content on social media.
Users internalize these demanding standards and feel like they have to use filters all the time, Hu said.
People begin to see the gap between their true appearance and their appearance using filters. That begins to dictate what they do to their bodies in real life, she said.
This is especially true in South Korea, Hu said, where there are four times more plastic surgeons per capita compared to the U.S.
Surgical changes are accepted and expected for “professional and personal advancement,” Hu said. People who don’t have surgery, she said, are often labeled as lazy or incapable and become marginalized.
But there are plenty of South Korean women, Hu said, who refuse to change their appearance or spend money on enhancements. In 2018, she recalled witnessing the largest women’s rights rally in South Korea’s history, with more than 90,000 people taking to the streets.
“A lot of them within the movement sought out each other themselves. And it’s a really powerful thing to watch,” Hu said.
Ashitha Joseph, a Northeastern student pursuing a master’s degree in regulatory affairs, attended Tuesday’s event and found Hu’s message very powerful and inspiring.
As a teenager, she said she used beauty filters on Instagram because women with lighter skin were considered more beautiful in her native India. She feels much more confident in her own skin now, she said.
“I wish people back in my country or some other countries were also comfortable in their own skin, especially the women,” Joseph said. “Because in India, there is a bit of discrimination in terms of skin color.”
Beauty is a never-ending target, said Olivia Livingstone, a Northeastern senior studying business and economics.
Women shouldn’t be so pressured, especially older women, Livingstone said. Instead, they should try to forge their own relationship with beauty.
“I think as you age, the requirements get steeper, and once you start [chasing the beauty standards] you can’t really stop,” she said.