Injected Lips = Mega Trucks

The supersizing of American gender

So, Middle America (which lives in the midst of us in Anywhereville, really) is uneasy about trans and queer people. Maybe because people between or beyond standard definitions confuse and/or terrify those who demand binaries?

Meanwhile the outer extremes of the binaries are…biggering, leaning in. In a time of gender blurring and sexual spectrums of unlimited shades, we are also simultaneously experiencing the exaggeration of traditional male and femaleness, caricatured in a major way across every public platform in proportions unrivaled since the Venus of Willendorf (tiny but exceedingly curvy Paleolithic figurine from 30,000 years ago). Does one phenomenon beget the other in retaliation? Probably. Gender plasticity meet plastic.

Witness the dance of these two weird planets (Venus/Mars) as exemplified in the expired dalliance between Kim Kardashian (nothing but the sum of her hips, lips, boobs, care of some celebrity surgeon and paid for with unlimited dollars) and Pete “BDE” Davidson, goofy Staten Island/SNL stoner who is famously well-endowed. Not a meeting of the minds but surely meant-to-be (momentarily) for no other reason save for their complementary (giant) sex parts whether natural or performed.

Whether Jeff Bezos projects similar BDE from his boxer-briefs hardly matters when your defining quality is world’s biggest bank account. Then a woman in your thrall can transform in front of the public’s gaze from attractive to freakish with a heightened version of the sculpted and injected new standard of beauty we somehow seem to both fetishize and condemn in the same breath. We can’t look away if we try, yet we not-so-secretly don’t want to look away. Are men attracted to this fakeness? Supposedly not. But how did this trend come to be if men don’t like it? Here are the standard silhouettes of the women chosen and anointed by the media, the “big” men, and the masses, again and again. Until it becomes normal. No one claims to like this, yet still it seeps into everything we do and aspire to.

I’ve been sitting on the early rumblings of an essay topic for a while, trying to find the meatiest bit for me to sink my teeth into when this hit me in mid-drive, talking it through to my captive teen children audience. Oh my gosh kiddos, turning Phantogram down on the stereo, lips equals trucks! Ok mom if you say so, turn up the song!

First I wrote an essay on plastic surgerized Barbie (were we to try to mimic a doll in real life) and the supposed Alpha-ness of Trump and his male minions. Then, I stumbled this week upon a big bad truck post that had me back in the junk drawer of my imagination. Sierra Echo Charlie’s article is my favorite kind because it has fun with these Big Truck Energy dudes but also offers supporting charts. And boy do I love a chart. (Click story link below to see.) Can we chart the same upward line through modern time for implant size (either butt or breast) and lip injection as for the size of our engorged trucks? I’m certain we can.

Clownishly Large Trucks & the Men who Need Them

The author’s theory on why the evolution of pick up truck height and weight from 1975 to 2025 has nearly doubled is:

I propose that the swollen truck fetish provides a veneer of old-school masculinity, and that modern white American males need this emotionally. It helps fill the void between their own cushier lives and the silent, real-world work ethic of their forefathers and foremothers.

“Veneer” here being the key word.

But all this Halloween dress-up amounts to nothing more than a fashion statement. Phony masculinity checking its hair and makeup in the rearview mirror.

There’s a hollowness in the trappings of so-called gender we are padding ourselves with now more than ever. A falseness that doesn’t bother with the pretense of caring to appear real. The boobs aren’t shaped right, they don’t feel like breast tissue. You could pay for them to be more lifelike but that’s not the point. The superstung lips don’t resemble a human pout. Everyone knows there are alien blobs under the skin responsible for this but somehow this internal invasion of our actual bodies and glomming onto our cultural norms are totally ok…until we shun the poor ones who seem to dip into mental illness during this journey to achieve the perfect glorified version of these ideals. The damned who take the joke too far.

There’s Almira of Sweden who appeared in my feed (of ever recycled posts) the other day and looks to me like the saddest person on earth, yet she claims she’s super-happy being a hyper-surgerized self-labelled “bimbo.”

From a NYPost article about her:

“The ideal look I want to achieve is the most plastic, fantastic over-enhanced sex doll,” said Almira, 33, adding that she has found the surgeries to be “addictive.”

Despite having had multiple cosmetic procedures already, Almira says that she doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon—even though it costs her nearly $2,550 to $3,820 a month.

“I don’t think I will ever stop having surgery,” contemplated the blond bombshell. “It is a huge part of bimbo-fication.”

“There is no perfection in my mind,” continued Almira. “It’s just a matter of growing and evolving, and every year, you become more and more plastic.”

The professional bimbo later added that “bimbos don’t age, they just become more plastic.”

She claims outright my exact prognosis in my opening paragraph above, as an anti-feminist who believes women and men should not be equal, when she says:

The OnlyFans star claims that gender roles have become so blurred that many people in society are trying to be something that they are not.

“I wholeheartedly believe in traditional gender roles and I believe in embracing my feminine qualities,” said Almira.

Alongside the highway of every pink plastic Corvette which will melt eventually in the global warming heat, there is a megawheels Tonka trunk that can just roll right over that crap.

We have these dudes driving around in trucks worthy of Armageddon right here in the metro NYC area—so far from Texas!—where we aren’t at all in a war zone or need a tank. Maybe this makes a little more sense when I go to the mountains but there are limits to what’s practical and necessary and what’s for show. I’m dabbling in weekend life in the Catskills all year long, doing just fine on my gravel driveway tunneled by torrential rain rivets or packed in snow-ice, with a low rider Tesla sedan of 2013. I haven’t cowered as far into my Elon shame as getting a “vintage Tesla, predating the madness” sticker (knowing how all things are temporary and he’d bounce back..to some baseline we’re more familiar with), but I do keep my “comma-la” Kamala sticker there subtly giving a gentle middle finger to these guys who could squash my car like a bug if they didn’t stop on time behind me at the Woodstock turn signal.

There was a Mad TV skit back in the early 2000s of someone driving around in a big SUV (a 2003 “Earth Destroyer” to be precise) who continues for miles not realizing she had run over an old lady pedestrian. The senior was just hanging out down there in the undercarriage having a great time enjoying the spacious digs. But that thing was a mini compared to the Hummers we have to road rage with now.

What is going on here? These big-truck men invariably cover themselves in the trappings of the MAGA movement. Their cars-on-steroids boast gun stickers and confederate flags to announce their affiliation in case there was any question. But my deeper question about this is: how the heck did these all these supposed masculine qualities get linked up with someone who is a con artist, a rapist, a convicted felon, overweight, out of shape, small of hand, scant of hair, (rumored to be) slight of male organ. A bully, the weakest type around who’s all for show. But that’s it: the show. People bought it in The Apprentice—they believed the character or at least really wanted to.

The reality show rules our inner psyche and charts the new American dream-nightmare. BDE abounds, whether or not that relates to real measurements, only the projection of size actually matters. (Never mind that women tend to think that if someone is overcompensating in these ways, then he must be miniscule in others.)

And then in fembotland, there’s the ongoing reality show of the Kardashians. A whole gaggle of interchangeable girls who grew up in the public eye and couldn’t be pretty or popular enough without dragging every influencer with them. There’s a look now that they spawned that has infected everyone of all ages. A face. A body. And the body has now also weirdly merged with the MAGA crowd. The Palm Beachified rich white female version of the Kardashian in MAGAland has the same sort of wrong dimensions but she is just blonder and less ethnic looking.

Do these enlarged body parts also follow the trajectory of our country’s ever-escalating porn addiction? I think porn addiction (and yes I just told my daughters this too in the very same car ride) is the secret crisis of our times that no one is talking enough about. I worry for the young boy candidates that might become their future partners. Every male teen has already clocked in thousands of hours training to kill people (in video games) and then watching people have sex (in highly accessible online porn) in increasingly extreme ways. Because it’s not enough to be sexy and have sex any more; you watch enough and you become numb so the kink must get kinkier, the hot parts larger.

Back to Kim’s lips/chest/butt and Pete’s BDE. A match made in heaven? No. Of course it wouldn’t last, but while it did it was social media gold. And so I’m sure they both benefited in dollars. Trump has attracted the lost men who need a club to join. He has sold them on his coins and his crypto and his flags and his mugs and his poster of being shot, ear bleeding in a grand show of masculinity and amazing self-healing body parts.

Our bodies are broken. Our body politic is broken. And the political body loves mucking with the personal body. The new barely-human we’re forming from the wreckage of this is a Frankenstein of deep tread tires, Barbie boobs, metal and plastic, likes and numbs clicks, insomniatic blue screens and every more cash.

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]