The Hyperpalatable Human
The Hyperpalatable Human
What AI-generated burger adverts tell us about male-to-male transsexuals
On TikTok, @mrbrokenbonez has been documenting his “six-month journey from 5’5” to 6’0” using limb lengthening surgery. Here’s a montage of what’s involved:
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A recurring theme in my work (and the subject of next week’s talk at NatCon UK) is the wider social and political implications of a profound cultural shift in the consensus view of what a person is. This shift is not new; it began in the 1960s; but it’s been radically accelerated by the digital transformation and advances in biotech, and is now discernible everywhere.
Under the old order, the underlying belief is that humans have a nature, normal “health” exists, and the aim of medicine is to restore or repair with a view to returning them to a shared gestalt understanding of normal “health”. Many conservatives are still doing politics on the premise that this remains the consensus. They are wrong.
Under the new order: human nature is the baseline. “Health” is a social construct, “natural” is no longer a consensus but a tendentious stick to beat outliers and minorities with, and the aim of medicine is less restorative than expressive: helping individuals (as doctors at the recent Trans Health Summit in San Francisco put it) in “achieving their embodiment goals”. Within this paradigm, there is no theoretical limit to how far we are all go, in upgrading ourselves.
And if, as many now believe, it’s obviously true that everyone “deserves” to “align” their body with felt inner identity, we might ask: why should this apply only to people who feel that their natal sex is out of kilter with how they feel on the inside?
The transgender movement affords a wealth of case studies in how this fantasy measures against reality. But it’s a mistake to think this is the only terrain where the paradigm plays out. And if, as I prefer to argue, the target for critique isn’t trans people as such but the paradigm that legitimises the path of (often botched and unsatisfying or outright harmful) self-modifications, we need to extend the critique well beyond gender identity. To, for example, leg-lengthening, which we might characterise as ‘gender-affirming care’ for male-to-male transsexuals.
Invariably when I write about surgical self-modification, I find myself disoriented. I don’t think that’s just me: when you set out to rewrite not just the surface of things but the underlying templates themselves, it has a scrambling effect not just on culture and politics, as we are seeing with trans rights, but on the symbolic field in its entirety.
This unsettling mood has already percolated into cutting-edge aesthetics, as in this still from a recent AI-generated junk food advert:
Watching it again while writing this, I found myself thinking there’s a clue here, in that junk food serves as a metaphor for thinking through what’s happening when we seek to ‘upgrade’ the human template.
When you look at people who have ‘upgraded’ themselves in line with identity, one source of the disorientation becomes clear: trying to bring bodies closer to a normative ‘ideal person’ has the paradoxical effect of destabilising the ideal itself. Cosmetic surgery may start out with normative beauty in mind, but the power to perform it, has a receiprocal warping effect on normative beauty itself, which grows radically uncertain.
The cumulative effect becomes evident in those cases of surgery addiction grown grotesque - in some cases even killing the patient, as in the case of the late model Ashten Gourkani.
Surgery addict Mary Magdalen
The AI burger advert, and images of surgery addicts, both capture the eerie sense of all matter - including the human form - grown protean. And both junk food and extreme female-to-female surgical alterations such as these make sense as variants on the same theme of ‘hyperpalatability’. This term was coined in 2019 to describe synthetic foods that exaggerate naturally-occuring signals of nutritional density, such as sweetness, in order to create an intense appeal.
We might think of cosmetic surgical enhancements as aiming at (or, in the case of addicts, some way past) the hyperpalatable human: synthetically enhancing appealing signals with an evolutionary (usually reproductive) basis. The catch, though, in both hyperpalatable foods and hyperpalatable humans, is that synthesising the signal tends to come at the expense of what the signal was for. Hyperpalatable foods cause obesity because they taste delicious but don’t fill you up or offer much nutrition. And similarly, even those medical interventions that artificially create or exaggerate primary and secondary sex characteristics without shading into the grotesque often damage the organismic functions those fertility signals refer to.
Silicone breasts deliver a fertility signal, while degrading the role played by breasts in the normative biological pathway that fertility signal implies, namely feeding a hypothetical baby. And as height is associated with physical dominance, surgically lengthened legs may deliver a masculinity signal. But even after a long and painful recovery, with months of physiotherapy, legs that have been broken and then lengthened with steel rods will never be as strong as those never injured in the first place, and are at risk of thrombosis, chronic pain and ankle arthritis.
Paradoxically, too, where people set out to remodel themselves in defiance of ‘normal’, even as this warps normative aesthetics it also re-inscribes other aspects of our organism that are baked deep into our organisms: the evolved desire for sweet foods, for example, or our desire to display (or respond to) evolved reproductive signals. But even as these desires reappear, again and again, in the very act of trying to master them - just re-ordered to, and exploited by, the market. Denatured and ultra-processed exaggerations of important organismic signals: the hyperpalatable human, engineered to re-direct his or her own appetites (and those of others) from life in common to sterile, un-satisfiable desire.
It’s easy to shrug and say ‘people should be free to modify themselves’. But assenting to this order isn’t assenting to greater freedom for anyone or anything, except desire: the ultimate prison, and the ultimate profit centre.
Steroids are another very clear example of this phenomenon, and if anything even more poignant as the hypertrophied muscles are nominally functional, even if pursued by most users for primarily aesthetic reasons. Their availability has distorted concepts of what the ideal male body is, to include a comic book musculature that is simply not available with baseline human biology. Further, while it is meant to signal hypermasculinity, the endocrine damage it does actually degrades one's masculinity in the long run - so again we have the signified being damaged by exaggeration of the signifier.
As a former health professional I always want to ask “how much responsibility must the medical profession (doctors) take in driving these trends?” So much for ‘do no harm’.