How Did It Come To This?

The purpose of my digital art remix was to take the commercial image of beauty and link it to addiction, but from a male perspective. We often hear about the damaging effects of commercialized beauty on women, but commercialized beauty hurts men as well. It encourages unreachable fantasies that while in small doses can be tolerable, in large doses can cause men to develop unrealistic expectations and cause men to disconnect from the actual women in their lives. But more to the point, I believe that the sensations and reactions that go off in the brain can be so pleasurable to the male mind that it can actually become addicted, and although the male may not look like the woman addicted to heroin, it can cause this to happen to the man’s livelihood. As more and more of the world’s population uses the internet and images of commercialized beauty become more and more prolific, the reality of more and more people spending more and more time on the internet becomes a bigger and bigger problem. In my digital remix, I also show men, boys, and a grown woman oblivious to space and time and spending their lives in virtual reality. And the last image of my remix shows a man suffering a fate similar to that of Narcissus, except that it is not his own image that paralyzes him, but the virtual reality that paralyzes him. And with many men already spending so many hours on their computers, on internet pornography, and on video games, the paralysis that ensues because of addiction to images of commercialized beauty could become much more common.