Why DO stars demean their sex by pulling X-rated faces?
It’s the new must-have selfie look — come-to-bed eyes and a half-open mouth. But, asks our columnist ...
Once upon a time, models, celebrities, film stars and so on had perfectly normal faces. Prettier than most of us, granted. But with normal expressions. A smile, perhaps, or even a laugh and a cheeky wink. Occasionally they would do sultry, which basically meant looking grumpy and a tiny bit constipated. But essentially, somewhere on the spectrum of normal.
Then, somewhere between the invention of the smartphone and the arrival of Snapchat, these women stopped looking like prettier, shinier versions of you or I, and started pulling the sort of faces on their social media that are more normally associated with top-shelf material.
chin tilted, head back, eyes half-closed in some kind of ecstatic reverie, lips full and slightly parted. Lashings of lipgloss and mussed-up, pillow-tousled hair. comically thick lashes. A vacant, slightly dopey look in the eyes. A half-bitten crimson lip, a strand of hair twirled around a finger.
In other words, a face that wouldn’t look out of place in a porn film.
A face that says: here I am, and I am yours. I am all of your fantasies come true, a torrid compendium of fleshly parts to
be devoured, visually or otherwise, by my lusty admirers.
And, of course, where celebrities go, others will follow. Take a look through photo-sharing website Instagram, and you’ll see thousands of young women — many of them graduates or with smart jobs — pulling exactly the same ‘porn face’ like a strange army of clones.
The site is awash with half-pouts and come-hither looks, with silk slips and dropped spaghetti straps.
It’s as though the entire universe was having some sort of collective orgasm. And it’s pathetic.
Pornography has already corrupted the normal perception of women’s bodies. Now, it has extended its toxic aesthetic to our facial features.
Porn face is the apotheosis of this, the blow-up doll made flesh. From Daisy Lowe to J-Lo, Karlie Kloss to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley: they’re all at it.
Its popularity is thanks to the fact social media often operates on approval: the more ‘likes’ and comments a picture gets, the more the feeling of social acceptance. Numerous studies have shown that on a primal level we’re attracted to fuller lips, ‘unthreatening’ doe eyes and symmetrical faces, so it’s these that often attract the most clicks.
Statistics show this generation of young women is the most anxious ever, many of them racked with the belief that they must live up to unachievable standards of perfection in their looks and careers.
No wonder they’ve succumbed to the vapid pursuit of chasing meaningless moments of validation. Never before in the history of womankind have females looked so impassive in so many different ways. Actually, that’s not quite true. There was one woman: Marilyn Monroe.
Monroe is the great-godmother of porn face, the first woman to spot the potential of bringing the Playboy aesthetic into the mainstream. She perfected that unique combination of vulnerability, vacuousness and voluptuousness that men seem to find so utterly irresistible.
She spoke in a permanent bedroom whisper, teetering around unsteadily as though perpetually on the verge of falling into her lover’s arms. Men worshipped her. Women largely thought she was ridiculous and irritating. Were she alive today, she would make Kim Kardashian look like a shrinking violet.
Alone, Marilyn was not enough to turn the whole of womankind into an army of simpering sex-bots. But thanks to the power of social media, you can be sure this lot of modern celebrities will.
Because if Daisy Lowe and Rita Ora are doing it, you can bet your last pair of silk panties that soon every teenage girl in the land is doing it too.
Well done, ladies. You must be so proud of yourselves.