This is the Culture Study podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.

And I'm Arabele-Sikardi. I write, oh, it's such a long name. I need to workshop, but it's,

you've got lipstick on your chin on substack, and it's all about beauty and power and just beauty gossip, I guess.

So one thing that you've written a lot, or I've seen you reference a lot, is that beauty is

terror. Yeah. So can you explain this a little bit? Of course. So I have been chanting this

probably since I was in college, so easily 15 years.

It's its own teenager by now.

And I've always been really obsessed with the connection between beauty and capital and crisis

and the things that we do to ourselves and to each other

for just like a little bit more power, a little bit more ease, a little bit more comfort

in a world that punishes ease and punishes rest.

And I've always kept an archive of the different ways that beauty is used to punish or demean people

or to subjugate and create a more carceral world, like a crueler landscape.

So beauty is terror is basically shorthand for the fact that we punish each other and ourselves all the time

for this ideal that we're

never, ever, ever, ever going to reach or achieve.

But sometimes we let our fears control us, right?

It's just the way that we are as humans and how we're raised and that fear also breeds innovation within us.

Like, I mean, from the very beginning, it's like, are we afraid of the dark?

We bring fire.

Like, you know, like, it's literally built into our DNA to find different ways to navigate the things that terrify us.

And the way that we pursue beauty, I think, has so much to do

...