TOPICS COVERED
- Where the male gaze actually came from and why it didn’t disappear, just shifted form
- The female gaze and why peer-to-peer beauty pressure is harder to push back on
- The algorithm gaze: when the audience is no longer human at all
- Three patterns every aesthetic practitioner sees in consultation rooms
- Why men get to walk in and just say “I want to look better” without the cultural negotiation
- How Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z each carry different beauty standards
- Snapchat dysmorphia and what happens when patients bring filtered selfies as a goal
I Do It For Me (Do You Though?)
She books the appointment. She sits in the chair. She says the words almost every practitioner has heard ten times, a hundred times. “I just want to feel like myself again.” But here is the question almost nobody asks out loud. Which self? The self before the lines? Before the breakup? Before she started spending forty minutes a day on an app that showed her a version of her face she has never actually had?
This episode goes somewhere a little uncomfortable. The question that lives underneath every consultation, every before-and-after, every “I do it for me.” Are women getting work done for themselves, or are we still performing for an audience we just stopped naming out loud? Did the male gaze die, or did it just get a rebrand?
Where the Male Gaze Actually Came From
This is not a gender studies lecture. The term was coined in 1975 by film theorist Laura Mulvey. Her argument was simple but devastating. In cinema, the camera is not neutral. It has a male eye. It lingers on women’s bodies. It frames them as objects to be looked at rather than subjects doing the looking. Women on screen existed to be seen. Men existed to act.
The concept did not stay in cinema. It seeped into advertising, fashion, and the beauty industry. Quiet, persistent messages that a woman’s value is tied to how she appears, specifically how she appears to men. For decades, that was the conversation. Feminists pushed back. Consumers pushed back. By the 2010s, a new story had taken hold. Women are doing this for themselves. The beauty industry is female-led, female-driven, female-celebrated. Self-care era. Skincare as therapy. Aesthetics as empowerment. The language genuinely shifted.
There is real truth in that shift. But here is where it gets interesting. At the same time the language was changing, the aesthetics industry was exploding. Botox bookings. Filler appointments. Skin treatments. Procedures that did not exist twenty years ago, now booked casually over a lunch break. So the question Dr. Eisenstat keeps returning to: did the male gaze actually die, or did it become so embedded in the culture that we stopped being able to see it? There is a difference between a woman choosing freely and a woman choosing freely within a system built to make her feel like she is never quite enough. That difference is what this episode is pulling apart.
The “I Do It For Me” Reflex
Every practitioner in this industry has heard the line. It is practically a reflex. Someone asks why you got work done, and before they have even finished the sentence, the answer is already forming. “I just do it for myself.” “It makes me feel confident.” “It’s just self-care.”
To be clear: that is not a lie. For many women, it is completely genuine. Feeling good in your skin is real. Confidence is real. The joy of liking what you see in the mirror is real and it matters.
The uncomfortable part is the next question. Where did your idea of “feeling good” actually come from? None of us grew up in a vacuum. We grew up with magazine covers, movie posters, and now, infinitely more powerful than either, social media feeds algorithmically designed to show us an idealized version of the female face roughly four hundred times a day. We absorbed what beautiful looked like before we were old enough to question it. A lot of what we absorbed, the smooth skin, the lifted brows, the defined jaws, the full lips, maps almost perfectly onto what has historically been considered attractive to the heterosexual male gaze. So when we say, “I do it for me,” who taught us what better looks like?
This is where the conversation usually goes sideways. People hear this and think the argument is that women cannot genuinely make their own choices, that every decision is internalized oppression. That is not the argument. Choice and conditioning can coexist. You can genuinely want something and have been shaped to want it. Those are not mutually exclusive, and pretending they are in either direction is where we stop telling the truth.
The Female Gaze, the Algorithm Gaze
The male gaze is not the only gaze in the room anymore. There is also the female gaze, and increasingly, the audience women are performing for is not men at all. It is other women. The comment section. The friend who notices your skin looking incredible. The before-and-after that gets ten thousand saves.
What makes the female gaze more complicated than the male gaze is that it is wrapped in the language of support. “You look amazing. What did you do? Tell me everything.” There is no obvious villain. The pressure is distributed across thousands of small, warm, seemingly positive interactions. A community holding each other to a standard nobody actually voted for. Women are now holding each other to the same standards the male gaze created, which in some ways is harder to escape. When pressure comes from the outside, you can push back on it. When it comes from inside the community, from people who look like you and sound like you and say they are doing it for themselves too, where do you even begin to question it?
There is one more layer worth naming because we are living inside it right now. The algorithm gaze. Increasingly, the audience women are performing for is not people at all. It is a machine. An algorithm that rewards certain faces, certain aesthetics, certain combinations of symmetry, smoothness, and youth with reach, with visibility, with the feeling of mattering. Nobody told you to look like that, but the system has been quietly, statistically rewarding it for years. Humans respond to reward. That is not weakness. That is just how we are wired.
So we have gone from the male gaze to the female gaze to the algorithm gaze. What is striking, and a little sobering, is that the standard at the center of all three is roughly the same. That is not a coincidence. That is a system. This is not a criticism of women. It is a criticism of the water we are all swimming in. The most honest thing this industry can do is stop pretending the water is not there.
What Practitioners Actually See in the Room
Everything we have talked about, the conditioning, the standards, the “I do it for me,” eventually lands in one place. A consultation chair. A practitioner across from a patient. A conversation that is almost never as simple as it looks.
When you ask practitioners off the record what really drives their patients through the door, the answers are consistent. Yes, there are women who come in completely self-directed. They know what they want and why they want it. They leave looking and feeling exactly how they intended. That is real. But there are also patterns.
The first one Dr. Eisenstat calls the relationship appointment. A woman books in quietly after comments from a partner. Nothing dramatic. A throwaway remark about looking tired. A photo that caught her off guard. A creeping suspicion that something has shifted in how she is being seen at home. She just wants to look refreshed. She says she is doing it for herself, and by the time she is in the chair, maybe she genuinely is. But the door that brought her there is worth paying attention to.
The second is the divorce appointment. A woman comes in at a specific moment. A relationship ending. A new chapter beginning. The energy is different. Not quiet. Charged. There is something there to be reclaimed. Honestly, this is sometimes the most empowered version of “I do it for me” the industry ever sees. That is a woman who is not performing for anyone. She is rebuilding. That is a completely different thing.
The third pattern does not get talked about as much, but it is increasingly common. The preemptive appointment. This one is subtler. A woman, often a young woman, comes in before anything has visibly changed. She has not lost anything yet. She is not there to correct. She is there to prevent. To stay ahead of something she is afraid of losing. When you really listen to what she is afraid of losing, it is rarely about health. It is about being seen. About continuing to be perceived a certain way. About not crossing some invisible threshold where the world starts looking at her differently. That appointment is doing a lot of emotional work, and it does not come labeled that way.
This brings up an emotional tension the industry does not talk about enough. When a practitioner suspects a patient is sitting in that chair because of external pressure, a partner, a comment, an algorithm, an insecurity planted by someone else, what is the practitioner’s responsibility? Do you ask? Do you proceed? Do you refer the patient elsewhere? Most practitioners are not trained psychologists. They are not there to therapize their patients. But they are, whether they signed up for it or not, the last line of conversation before a needle goes in. That is a weight this industry does not name nearly enough. The most skilled practitioners Dr. Eisenstat has ever encountered do not just understand faces. They understand people. They read the room. They know the difference between a woman who is choosing and a woman who is coping. Sometimes the most powerful thing a practitioner can do is put the needle down.
The Other Side of the Room
Most of the cultural weight on this topic falls on women, but it would be a disservice to the conversation to skip the other side of the room. Male aesthetic patients exist, and they are one of the fastest-growing demographics in this industry. When you ask them the same question, who or what are you doing this for, the answer is fascinating. They almost never say, “I do it for me.” Not because they are not doing it for themselves, but because the cultural permission structure is completely different.
Men in the aesthetic space tend to frame things in functional or competitive terms. “I want to look sharp in meetings.” “I’m back in the dating market.” “I want to look as good as I feel.” The language is achievement-oriented. There is almost no equivalent in male aesthetic conversations of the soft, vague, emotionally complex “I just want to feel like myself.” Men have not been given the same cultural script, the one that teaches you appearance is both deeply important and something you are not supposed to openly want.
Women have been given two contradictory messages their entire lives. Look perfect, but do not let anyone see you trying. Men can walk into a treatment room and say, “I want to look better,” without that layer of cultural negotiation. The discomfort is not about vanity. It is about permission. Women have not been told that wanting to look good is wrong. They have been told that openly admitting it is what is transgressive. You can get the work done. You just cannot need it. “I do it for me” is not really an answer. It is a permission slip. The fact that women need to give themselves that permission and men do not tells you a lot about who this industry was built around and which messages get absorbed the deepest.
Three Generations, Three Different Stories
The relationship women have with beauty does not look the same across generations. Dr. Eisenstat says this as a millennial who has watched the landscape shift in real time.
The generation before, Gen X, came up in the era of supermodels, of heroin chic, of being handed a magazine and told implicitly, explicitly, constantly, that this is the standard. You either meet it or you do not. There was no nuance. The male gaze was not something anyone was naming yet. It was just in the air. For a lot of those women, aesthetic treatment came later in life. It was corrective. Private. You did not talk about it. You quietly looked after yourself, and the shame was built in.
Then there are millennials. The in-between generation in every possible way. Pre-social-media childhoods, then coming of age inside it. The first generation to see their own faces reflected back to them constantly. Tagged photos. Front-facing cameras. The jarring reality of what we look like from the outside. Millennials responded by becoming the generation of informed choice. We researched treatments. We asked questions. We built a language around empowerment and self-determination that felt like a genuine departure from what came before. But we also grew up wanting to be the cool girl, the low-maintenance girl, the girl who “just woke up like this.” So even as millennials were booking the appointments, many were also desperate to look like they had not. The natural result became everything. Not because we wanted to look natural, but because we wanted to be seen as women who do not need it. That tension is deeply, specifically millennial.
Gen Z is where it gets really interesting. On the surface, Gen Z looks like the most liberated generation yet. They are louder about body positivity, push back on diet culture, and call out filters and unrealistic beauty standards with a confidence that is humbling. And yet, Gen Z is the fastest-growing demographic in the aesthetics market. They are booking consultations younger than any generation before them. Not to fix something. Not to correct. Preventatively. Before the lines have even shown themselves.
Part of what is happening here is something researchers have started calling Snapchat dysmorphia, and Dr. Eisenstat wants to be careful here because this is a clinical observation, not a judgment. Snapchat dysmorphia is what happens when someone spends years looking at filtered versions of their own face. Smooth skin, enlarged eyes, lifted features, a jawline their actual jawline has never produced. Then they look in the mirror. The mirror has not changed. The baseline has. Practitioners are now seeing patients come in with their phones out, pointing to filtered selfies and saying, “I want to look like this.” The face in the photo is not a real face. It is a composite. An algorithmically enhanced simulation of what an app decided would be a more attractive version of you. The aesthetics industry is being asked, more and more often, to close the gap between a human face and a digital rendering of one. That is fundamentally new.
Gen X wanted to look younger. Millennials wanted to look like their best natural selves. Gen Z, in some ways, wants to look like their avatar. The broader pattern is that Gen Z has done something sophisticated and a little contradictory. They have rejected the language of beauty standards while completely absorbing the pressure of them. They do not want to be told they need to look a certain way. They also grew up on TikTok, where algorithms decide whose face gets seen. The clean girl, the “that girl,” the effortlessly symmetrical girl gets rewarded with attention and reach. Gen Z just found a new way to perform the same standard, and they have done it so fluently it does not even feel like a performance anymore.
Across three generations, the silence of Gen X, the informed empowerment of millennials, the vocal yet conflicted freedom of Gen Z, the through-line is the same. The standard has not really changed. Only the story we tell ourselves about it has.
So Who Are Women Really Getting Work Done For?
Dr. Eisenstat has sat with this question for a long time, and she does not think there is a clean answer. She does not think there is supposed to be. The truth is probably all of it, all at once, in different measures on different days.
Some days, it is genuinely for you. Completely, purely, unapologetically for you. That is valid. That is enough. Nobody gets to take that from you. Some days, it is for the version of yourself you want the world to see. The one that feels confident and polished and in control. That is valid too. And some days, if we are being really honest, it is because the world has spent a very long time making women feel like their face is a problem to be managed. We are all, to varying degrees, still navigating that. None of those things cancels out the others.
What matters is awareness. Not guilt. Not shame. Not the kind of overanalysis that makes you second-guess every decision you make about your own face. Just awareness. The willingness to ask the question and sit with it honestly, even when the answer is complicated. Even when it implicates systems bigger than any of us. Even when it implicates ourselves.
The women in this industry, the physicians, the practitioners, the patients, the ones building businesses, and the ones sitting in the chair, they are not passive. They are not victims of a beauty standard. They are sharp, self-aware, complicated human beings making real decisions in a world that is genuinely complicated. The most powerful thing this industry can do, and this entire conversation can do, is stop pretending the question does not exist. It does. The male gaze may or may not be dead. The conversation about it is very much alive.
| “There’s a difference between a woman choosing freely and a woman choosing freely within a system that was built to make her feel like she’s never quite enough.” — Dr. Carol Eisenstat, The Line Eraser Podcast Ep. 6 |
If this episode made you think, made you uncomfortable, or made you want to call someone to talk about it, that is exactly what it was meant to do. Dr. Eisenstat would love to hear from you. Find her on Instagram, send a DM, or leave a review. The conversation matters, and it is one this industry has not been brave enough to keep having out loud.
For anyone curious about what a thoughtful, physician-led approach to aesthetics actually looks like in practice, the team is at Line Eraser MD in Livingston, New Jersey.
