Visible Changes
There’s this impossible space where everyone knows the system is broken but the machine keeps operating. France banned beauty pageants for children—everyone cheered—and then nothing changed because the pressure doesn’t care about pageants specifically. It just needs kids thinking about their bodies all the time, whether that’s through magazines or social media or what their friends are doing. The form keeps shifting. The content stays the same.
I learned about Michelle Sank’s work through photographs of young people who’d decided to stop waiting and just modify themselves. Not someday when they’re older. Now. Jade, twenty, got tattooed eyebrows and hair extensions. Amy had breast implants at eighteen. Hannah got Botox at seventeen. Ben shaves his legs. Jason built muscle like it was a project. Some of them transitioned—Jack, John, Campbell, Matt, and Jaye all decided their original body was the wrong assignment. Others developed eating disorders. Some had liposuction before they could legally drink. Sank documented all of it, and you look at the collection and feel the weight of the repetition—how many young people are simultaneously convinced that they need fixing.
What gets me is that you can’t actually parse intention from pressure anymore. Where does coercion end and genuine desire begin? Marc Jacobs sends minors down runways because there are child actors in Hollywood, so logically—but you can feel it skip a beat in your chest when you hear him defend it. Some of these kids probably felt better after their procedures. Some definitely felt worse and just buried it. Some were performing recovery from something that isn’t curable by surgery.
I grew up before phones had cameras and social media had algorithms. You could be strange and actually get away with it. There weren’t constant images of perfected bodies in rotation. The pressure existed but it had gaps. Now these kids are bathed in it. By the time they’re old enough to recognize what’s happening, they’ve already learned that their body is a problem to be solved. And that lesson doesn’t unlearn.