Hell Is Other People’s Likes: The Digital Discipline of Beauty

At work, in school, in the street, our appearances are always being judged and ranked. Especially for women, their beauty is treated not as a personal choice but as a duty. People always insist women should wear make-up, dress up properly and so on, and most of women always do so.

“Facebook: The Panopticon of Modern Age” by iLifeinicityis licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The motivation of this duty is not fashion or self-pleasure in general. It is a discipline for women in a patriarchy society. The discipline here could be understood as unwritten rules to shape how they dress, how they walk and how they present their bodies. The discipline is subtle but powerful. Women may not notice them until someone breaks them. When someone calls you unprofessional for not wearing makeup or sloppy for a shirt without ironing, you might be curious about why beauty is a responsibility.

The term ‘discipline’ is used by Michel Foucault to describe how power works on bodies and everyday life. He argued that power works not only through laws or punishment, but through everyday practices that train the body. A disciplined body is one that can be “subjected, used, transformed and improved”. The beauty fits this logic. It is less about individual choices than about regulation; less about self-expression than about fitting into social norms. In other words, many women have no consciousness to dress themselves to fit in these social norms because they survive in this society and society told them to do so.

The Panopticon design, Image via politicaleconomyproject.org.

Foucault also used a model of the Panopticon to show how discipline works through visibility. “The major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” In this system, people regulate themselves, because they know they are being watched. Beauty works in the same way. Women learn to monitor their own appearance, not only when someone is watching, but even when no one is.

Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre’s line “Hell is other people” captures the same logic. What makes other people “hell” is not their existence, but their gaze, which could be understood as the gaze outside the Panopticon. For women, this gaze is especially heavy. Once they know they are being looked at, they become objects in others world. They anticipate the judgments, and they adjust themselves in response. This is the way how a disciplined body can be subjected, transformed and improved.

On social media, women exposing themselves to others lead to more and more gazes from global users. Their presence online “stems from the idea of being looked at”. Every post, like and comment turns them into something to be judged. For creating a perfect persona on social media, some people watch themselves through the imagined eyes of others. They delete what does not get enough approval from others and adjust what might. In this sense, Sartre’s “hell” becomes the daily reality for women online. It is an endless gaze that disciplines them into performing beauty all the time.

“Facebook: Self-constructed digital identity and academic performance” by iLifeinicity is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

However, the gaze or discipline on social media is not only due to the structural problem rooted in gender dynamics. Of course, gazes originates from other people or male users. But what makes it so overwhelming is the logic of the platforms. For example, take filters on Instagram or TikTok. Most of them enlarge the eyes, slim the face and smooth the skin, etc. Then the algorithm rewards these filtered images more views and likes. These presets seems harmless, but they quietly teach women the standard of being beautiful. Thus, narrow aesthetics are normalised by the “algorithm of beauty”.

Gonzalez argues that beauty is increasingly understood as a reproducible pattern, one that can be broken down into symmetry, proportion, and other measurable codes. This logic fits perfectly with the needs of algorithmic systems. By ranking adn recommending, platforms must first translate beauty into data. Filters on TikTok or Instagram perform this work by encoding a narrow ideal can be endlessly copied. What looks like a playful tool is actually a machine for standardization. As Gonzalez puts it, beauty becomes a reproducible algorithm. Millions of women may feel they are enhancing their individuality, but in fact they are aligning with the same invisible template.

One clear examples of how algorithms amplify beauty norms is the “A4 Challenge” that spread across Chinese social media in 2016. The rule is if a woman could hide her waist behind the width of an A4 sheet of paper (21 cm), she wins the challenge. The challenge began as an advertisement, but it quickly went viral. Celebrities, influencers and ordinary users all posted photos of themselves holding the paper in front of their bodies to invite comparison, likes and comments. What seemed like a playful meme was in fact a standardised test of thinness, circulated and amplified by platform algorithms. Jackson and colleagues found that women were far more likely than men to know about and attempt this challenge. Women who “passed” often reported fewer worries about weight and less pressure from peers or media, but this was largely explained by their lower body mass index. For average sized women, the A4 paper was simply another reminder that their bodies did not match the aesthetic standard. For women already dissatisfied with their bodies, viewing A4 images only intensified their negative feelings. Therefore, the challenge did not create new insecurities, but it reinforced and magnified the existing ones.

“Waist measurement” by Petr Kratochvil is marked with CC0 1.0.

The A4 Challenge illustrate how digital platforms use one popular culture meme to spread the narrow standard of beauty. Foucault and Sartre’s concepts are visible. The A4 challenge is another form of discipline, when the body is measured and normalised against an arbitrary standard. Women post these images knowing they will be judged, and their sense of self shifts under the weight of the gaze. Also, popular culture is another factor that this challenge can be raised. In popular culture, trends like the A4 Challenge thrive because audiences feel playful and engaged. Joining in is about not being left behind rather than individual choice. Everyone want to follow the trend. Thus, it was not enforced by formal rules, but by the soft pressure of participation, the sense that everyone else was doing it. This vicious circle push women to move to the same standard which their whist can fit in the A4 paper, and those women who cannot fit in need to lose their weight to achieve it.

This push toward slimming promoted by the algorithm of platforms. Once thinness is normalised as an acceptable standard, women begin to search for faster and more reliable ways to achieve it. Some turn to diets or extreme exercise, while some even seek pharmacy to help. Recently, Ozempic has gained many attention on TikTok, and the hashtag #Ozempic already has over 600 million views. Normally, it is a diabetes drug which contains one active ingredient — semaglutide imitates a natural hormone called GLP-1. It influences the parts of the brain that control hunger and eating. By making people feel satisfied sooner, it often results in weight loss.

“Ozempic (Semaglutide) Weight Loss Pen Stop” by chemist4u is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This has led to Ozempic being widely promoted online as a “miracle” solution for dieting. Influencers post dramatic before and after videos, and the drug is presented as a shortcut to a perfect shape of body. The demand for Ozempic grew so quickly that it caused shortages for diabetes patients who actually relied on it. Through this way, the discipline of the platform extends beyond images into the body reshaping. What begins as playful imitation in popular culture becomes a stronger compulsion to push women follow the norms by reshaping their bodies with injections.

The obsession with reshaping the female body also appears in cinema. The recent film The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) offers a sharp metaphor for the same logic. In the film, an aging actress is offered an injection that allows her to grow a younger and more beautiful version of herself. The substance promises a shortcut to eternal youth like Ozempic promising a shortcut to slimness. However, two bodies have separate awareness. Every seven days, two bodies have to take turns. If this cycle is broken, both bodies will decay.

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Like the viral Ozempic trend, the film shows how beauty is framed as both a choice and a duty. The protagonist believes she is freely choosing the injections, but in reality she is trapped by the gaze of others including directors, audiences and the industry that values only her youthful appearance. The protagonist’s older winkled and aged body is judged as unfit for visibility. The injection to produce second herself actually is a symbol of discipline training the body to stay in line with the norm. It is a question about how we consume female bodies and how women are conditioned to mutilate themselves for youth and beauty. The false economy of appearances reminds us that beneath the make-up, injection and fillers is always going to be an imperfect body in a process of natural decay. Elisabeth’s pursuit of the injection like the trend of Ozempic is both salvation and doom. In this interpretation, the horror of The Substance lies not only in body horror, but also in its illustration that the serious effort to preserve beauty is what destroys the self.

Up to this point, I have shown how beauty is framed as discipline under various gazes in nowadays digital lives. But does that mean every woman who dresses up or puts on make-up is performing is because of the discipline? The ambiguity is the answer. Beautification can also be a source of pleasure. As Ann Cahill reminds us, women may find pleasure, creativity, and even solidarity in practices like styling hair, painting nails or experimenting with make-up. To reduce all of these acts to oppression would erase the agency that many women feel when they beautify themselves. At the same time, in digital culture, freedom and discipline are rarely separate. Christopher Kelty calls this the “fog of freedom”, which is a condition where empowerment and control overlap. A woman might believe she is freely choosing to post a selfie or join a trend, but her choice is shaped by the gaze of others and the algorithm that rewards certain kinds of beauty. The line between beautification due to pleasure and beautification due to discipline is blurry.

“London fog” by koen_jacobs is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Above all, the demand for beauty in digital culture cannot be reduced to either freedom or discipline. Platforms amplify the gaze of others; algorithms turn beauty into data; popular culture promotes the pressure as trends. At the same time, people can find pleasure and engagement in beautifying themselves. That ambiguity or “fog of freedom” is the condition we live in. We are caught in a paradox under this system. Each act of beautification may feel like empowerment, yet it is also shaped by disciplines. The line between self-expression and discipline is not fixed but constantly shifting, negotiated in every post, every filter, and every body. What remains is the uneasy truth: in our digital lives, beauty is never just a choice, but a demand that follows us everywhere. So while we should always be aware of how systems shape and enforce standards. If doing something around your appearance truly makes you happy. Just do it. Just do so with awareness of the forces that push you, and with space to say no when it stops feeling like your choice.

Reference List

Duboust, O., & Huet, N. (2023, March 2). TikTok turned a diabetes drug into a weight loss hit. Is it safe?Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/03/02/ozempic-how-a-tiktok-weight-loss-trend-caused-a-global-diabetes-drug-shortage-and-health-c

Foucault, M. (n.d.). DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH. Retrieved May 1995, from http://www.politicaleconomyproject.org/uploads/4/4/2/7/44276267/michel-foucault-discipline-and-punish-the-birth-of-the-prison.pdf

How The Substance uses body-horror in a feminist critique. (2024, September 27). Uts.edu.au. https://www.uts.edu.au/news/2024/09/how-substance-uses-body-horror-feminist-critique

Jackson, T., Ye, X., Hall, B. J., & Chen, H. (2021). “Have You Taken the A4 Challenge?” Correlates and Impact of a Thin Ideal Expression From Chinese Social Media. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.669014

Kelty, C. M. (2014). The Fog of Freedom. Direct.mit.edu. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9042.003.0014

Spratt, E., & Elgammal, A. (n.d.). Computational Beauty: Aesthetic Judgment at the Intersection of Art and Science. https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~elgammal/pub/Spratt_Elgammal_VisArt2014.pdf

Vara Ashita Raturi. (2021, April 13). “Hell is Other People”: Social Media and the Gaze of the Other. Thewire.in. https://livewire.thewire.in/livewire/hell-is-other-people-social-media-and-the-gaze-of-the-other/