the body became the resume.

Fez — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:42:38 GMT

I have been watching people my entire life.

Not studying them. Not researching them. Just watching. The way you watch rain without trying to understand weather. The way you watch fire without thinking about chemistry. Just watching because something in me never learned how to look away.

And for the last few years something has been sitting in my chest that I cannot ignore anymore. Something I see everywhere but hear almost nobody say honestly.

Something happened to women.

Not something they did. Something that was done to them. Slowly. Over decades. So slowly that even they didn’t notice it happening. Like a river that changes direction by a millimeter every year and one morning you wake up and the water is flowing somewhere completely different and nobody can remember when it turned.

I don’t want to write this with anger. I have no anger in me about this. Only a kind of sadness that doesn’t have a clean name. A sadness that sits between grief and confusion and just stays there. Quietly.

So let me just say what I see. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Go back far enough in history and you will find a woman somewhere sitting by a river crushing something red between her fingers and pressing it into her lips.

This is not a modern story.

Thousands of years before mirrors were invented, women were finding ways to see themselves and change what they saw. In Egypt they used kohl. In the Indus Valley they used turmeric and henna. In ancient Greece they used white lead on their faces, knowing it was poison, using it anyway.

Think about that for a second. A woman thousands of years ago putting something on her skin that she knew could kill her. Because looking a certain way mattered more than living a certain length.

That is not vanity. That is something much older and much sadder. That is a creature who learned, very early in the human story, that her survival depends on how she is perceived. Not what she can do. Not what she knows. Not what she feels.

How she looks. That is the original currency. And it was never chosen. It was inherited.

The same way a bird is born knowing how to sing before it understands why. A woman is born into a world that will evaluate her appearance before it evaluates anything else about her. And she knows this before she can spell her own name.

I don’t think most people understand how deep this goes. How early it starts. How invisible it is to the people it doesn’t affect.

Watch a little girl sometime. Just watch.

Watch what happens when she puts on her mother’s lipstick and walks into a room. Watch the faces around her light up. The laughter. The warmth. “Oh look at you. So pretty. So beautiful. Look at her.”

Now watch what happens when she brings home a drawing she spent three hours on. Or a test she studied all week for. The reaction is different. Polite. Expected. A nod. A “good job.” Then the world moves on.

She is four years old and she already knows.

She cannot say it in words yet. But her body knows. Her nervous system has already recorded the data. The loudest love I receive is for how I look. The quietest love is for what I do.

And this lesson repeats. Every day. Every year. In a thousand tiny moments that nobody thinks are important but together build the entire architecture of how a woman sees herself in the world.

By the time she is fourteen she does not need anyone to tell her that her appearance matters more than her mind. She has already collected ten years of evidence. The experiment has been run a thousand times. The results are always the same.

Pretty gets rewarded. Smart gets acknowledged. There is a universe of difference between rewarded and acknowledged. And every woman alive knows exactly what that difference feels like.

Then the screen entered her life.

And everything that was already difficult became impossible.

Before social media a girl compared herself to the girls in her class. Maybe the girls in her neighborhood. A small pool. Manageable. Painful sometimes but survivable.

Then the phone arrived. And suddenly she was comparing herself to every woman on earth. Simultaneously. All day. Every day. While eating breakfast. While sitting in class. While lying in bed trying to sleep.

And the women on that screen did not look like the women in her life. They looked different. Smoother. Brighter. Thinner in impossible places. Thicker in impossible places. Faces without pores. Bodies without gravity. Skin without history.

She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that it was not real. Filters. Angles. Surgery. Editing. She knew.

But knowing and feeling are different animals entirely. You can know the water is shallow and still feel like you are drowning.

And she was drowning. Quietly. In a comparison game that had no finish line and no winner and no referee and no one watching who cared enough to say stop.

Here is where I need you to sit with something uncomfortable.

A woman posts a photograph of herself reading a book. She looks happy. Genuine. Warm. She gets a few hundred likes. Maybe some kind comments. The world pats her on the head and moves on.

The same woman. Same account. Same day. Posts a photograph that shows more of her body. Nothing explicit. Just more skin. More shape. More of what the algorithm was designed to reward.

The numbers change. Not a little. Dramatically. Thousands of likes. Comments flooding. Shares multiplying. The algorithm notices. Pushes it further. More eyes. More attention. More of the only metric the modern world taught her to value.

She did not write that algorithm. She did not design that system. She did not sit in a boardroom and decide that skin gets more attention than intellect. That was decided for her. By engineers she will never meet. In buildings she will never enter. For reasons that have nothing to do with her wellbeing and everything to do with profit.

But she learned. The way all living things learn. Not through textbooks. Through consequences. Through the simple brutal feedback of what gets rewarded and what gets ignored.

And one day she stopped posting the books. Not because she stopped reading. But because the world stopped caring when she did.

This is what nobody says when they talk about empowerment. That the choices women make on social media are not made in freedom. They are made in a feedback loop designed by corporations that profit from female insecurity and call it engagement.

She is not choosing to show her body. She is choosing the only option the system made viable. There is a world of difference between those two sentences. And that difference is where the entire truth lives.

I want to tell you something I saw when I was younger. Something that planted a seed in me that grew into everything I am writing now.

I was living in a hostel. A student hostel. The kind where the walls are thin and the food is bad and you study under a light that flickers because nobody has fixed it in two years. I was trying to build something. Trying to become someone. Trying to justify the money my family was spending on the idea that education would change my life.

Near my hostel there were girls’ hostels. Several of them. And I watched. The way I watch everything. Without intention. Just with eyes that were open.

There was a girl. I never knew her name. She came from a small town. I knew because I recognized the look. The same look I had when I first arrived. That mixture of wonder and terror that small town kids wear in big cities like an accent they cannot hide.

Her father drove an auto rickshaw. I heard her mention it once on the phone. She was speaking in a voice that was softer than the one she used with her friends. The voice you use with parents who love you so much it makes you careful with your words.

Within a few months she was different. New clothes. New phone. New confidence that looked expensive. She started going out with a guy who had a car. Then a different guy who had a better car. Then someone else who took her to restaurants where one meal cost more than what her father earned in a day.

I am not telling you this to judge her. I am telling you this because I cannot forget her father’s voice on the other end of that phone call. A man who probably skipped meals so his daughter could have textbooks. A man who believed that sending his girl to college was the most important thing he would ever do.

And his daughter was not a bad person. That is the part that keeps me up at night. She was not cruel. She was not heartless. She was a girl who arrived in a city that showed her, within weeks, that what she brought from home was not enough. That her intelligence was invisible. That her father’s sacrifice was invisible. That the only thing this new world could see was what she looked like and what she was willing to trade for what she wanted to feel.

She did not invent that trade. The city taught it to her. The phones taught it to her. The older girls in the hostel who already knew the game taught it to her. By the time she made her first bad decision she had already been shaped by a thousand forces that nobody in her small town could have prepared her for.

The system was broken before she arrived. She just walked into it. And it did what broken systems do. It found her. Used her. And one day it will discard her. And then the same world that shaped her will turn around and call her the problem.

And she was not alone. That is the thing. She was not an exception. She was a pattern.

I watched other girls in different hostels do the same thing in different ways. Some traded openly. Some traded quietly. Some did not trade at all and were judged anyway just for existing in the same space as those who did.

And the boys. The boys were part of this too. Every transaction needs two sides. The boys who showed up in their cars and paid for the dinners and bought the clothes. They were not innocent bystanders. They were customers in a marketplace they helped create. Offering resources in exchange for access. And calling it dating. And calling it love. And calling it normal.

Nobody’s hands are clean in this. Nobody.

But I keep coming back to the parents. The mothers and fathers in small towns who packed their daughter’s bags with prayers and saved money and borrowed money and believed so deeply that education was the door to a different life.

They sent their daughters into a world they did not understand. A world that had changed so fast that their own experience was useless as a guide. A world where the rules they taught their children were overwritten within months by a new set of rules that nobody voted on and nobody agreed to but everyone follows.

Those parents did everything right. And it still was not enough. Because the system is bigger than any parent. Bigger than any family. Bigger than any love.

And that might be the saddest sentence in this entire essay.

Let me talk about relationships now. And I want to be careful here because this is where observation can easily become accusation if you are not honest with yourself.

There is a pattern in modern relationships. I have seen it. You have seen it. Everyone has seen it but most people do not say it because saying it makes you sound bitter or jealous or old fashioned.

A woman is with a man. He is decent. He works. He provides what he can. He is not perfect but he shows up. He tries.

Then someone else enters the picture. Someone with more. More money. More confidence. More of whatever the current culture says a man should have.

And something changes. Not always dramatically. Sometimes it is just a shift in energy so small you would miss it if you were not paying attention. A slight withdrawal. A new criticism that did not exist before. A distance that has no name but takes up the entire room.

I have watched this happen to friends. Good men. Men who did nothing wrong except not being enough in a world that keeps moving the definition of enough.

And I want to be very clear. This is not only something women do. Men leave women for younger women. Men trade loyalty for novelty. Men are just as capable of this particular cruelty. Perhaps more so.

But I am writing today about what I have observed from one side. Not because the other side is innocent. But because honest observation requires focus. You cannot look at everything at once and see anything clearly.

What I see is a generation of relationships built on conditions that nobody states out loud. I will be with you as long as you are the best option I can see right now. That is the unspoken contract of modern love. And it is brutal. And it is honest in a way that makes everyone uncomfortable. And it is not how love was supposed to work. But it is how the marketplace taught us to operate.

Dating apps put a thousand options in your pocket. Social media shows you what your partner could be if only they were richer, taller, funnier, more ambitious. And the result is a generation that cannot commit. Not because they are flawed. But because commitment requires closing doors. And the modern world taught us that closing doors is failure and keeping them open is freedom.

But that is a lie. Because a door that never closes is just a hallway. And nobody has ever built a home in a hallway.

Now let me talk about the blueprint that changed everything. And I am going to talk about it without using names because this is not about one family. This is about what one family proved to an entire generation.

A private tape was released. Whether by accident or design depends on who you believe. What followed was a masterclass in turning scandal into empire. A reality show. Then beauty products. Then fashion. Then apps. Then billions.

The message to every young woman watching was delivered without words. Your body is startup capital. Your private life is content. Your scandal is a launch event. And if you play it right the world will not just forgive you. It will fund you.

I am not here to judge the morality of that. People build empires from whatever materials are available. That is human nature.

But I need to talk about what it did to the millions of eyes watching.

It created a blueprint that young women could see and touch and measure. A step by step guide that said forget the degree. Forget the slow grind. Forget being invisible for ten years while you develop a skill nobody cares about yet. Here is the fast lane. And the ticket costs exactly one thing. The willingness to make your body public property.

And here is the truly heartbreaking part. It worked. Not for most. But visibly enough for the survivors to become proof of concept. And in a world that worships proof of concept above all else that was enough to reshape an entire generation’s understanding of what a woman’s path to power looks like.

The old path was education, skill, patience, mastery, slow recognition, eventual respect. The new path was visibility, body, attention, followers, brand deals, empire. And the new path was faster. Louder. More visible. More rewarded by every metric the modern world uses to measure success.

And when you put those two paths side by side and ask an eighteen year old girl to choose. Honestly. Without pretending. Without performing moral superiority.

Which one do you think she picks. Which one would you pick.

That is not a failure of women. That is a failure of every system that made the fast path more rational than the slow one.

I want to talk about beauty now. Not the concept. The industry.

Do you know how much money the world spends every year on making women feel like they are not enough as they are. Trying to put a number on it feels obscene but the number exists and it is over five hundred billion dollars. Every year.

I do not want you to think about that as a statistic. I want you to think about it as a feeling.

Five hundred billion dollars flowing from the pockets of women who woke up this morning looked in the mirror and felt that what they saw was insufficient. Not ugly. Not broken. Just not enough.

And that feeling. That specific not-enough feeling. That was not born inside them. It was planted. Carefully. Professionally. By an industry that cannot survive unless women feel incomplete.

Every advertisement for a beauty product is a tiny act of violence. Not physical violence. Something quieter. The violence of telling someone that their natural state is a problem to be solved. That their bare face is a rough draft. That their real skin is something to be corrected.

And it starts so early. So impossibly early. A girl sees her first makeup commercial at maybe five or six years old. She watches a woman transform from ordinary to extraordinary with a product. And somewhere in her forming brain a connection is made that will never fully disconnect.

Ordinary is what I am. Extraordinary is what I could be. The distance between those two things costs money. And I will spend my whole life crossing it.

That is what five hundred billion dollars buys. Not beauty. The belief that you do not already have it.

I want to say something now that might make some people uncomfortable. But I think it is the most important thing in this entire essay.

We did this.

Not women. Not men. Not any single generation or industry or technology.

We. All of us. Together. Slowly. Over centuries that became decades that became years that became the last ten minutes of scrolling on your phone.

We built a world that evaluates women on their appearance and then we act surprised when women invest everything they have in their appearance.

We built platforms that reward female bodies with attention and then we act disgusted when women use their bodies for attention.

We built a dating culture that treats relationships like shopping and then we act heartbroken when people treat us like products.

We built an economy that turns everything human into a transaction and then we grieve when love feels transactional.

We did this. And the saddest part is not that we did it. The saddest part is that we keep doing it. Every day. Every scroll. Every like. Every click. Every purchase. Every glance that lingers on a body and slides past a mind.

Every single one of us is feeding the machine. And then complaining about what the machine produces.

There is a word I have been avoiding in this essay and I want to say it now.

Sacred.

The feminine was supposed to be sacred. And I do not mean that in a religious way. I do not mean it in a way that puts women on a pedestal or locks them in a role or tells them what to be.

I mean it in the most human way possible.

The ability to carry life inside your body. The ability to feel pain so deeply that it changes the room you are standing in. The ability to love in a way that terrifies and transforms and costs everything and still feels like not enough. The ability to hold space for someone else’s breaking without needing to fix it. Just holding. Just being there. Just existing as a safe place in an unsafe world.

That is what the feminine was. Not a body type. Not a beauty standard. Not a brand. Not content. Not a product.

A force. A quiet devastating necessary force that the world cannot function without.

And we took that force. And we packaged it. And we put it on a shelf with a price tag. And we sold it. And we bought it. And we consumed it until we forgot what it tasted like before it was processed.

And now we live in a world where the feminine is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Everywhere as image. Nowhere as substance. Everywhere as content. Nowhere as connection. Everywhere as product. Nowhere as person.

And if that does not break your heart a little bit then maybe you have not been paying attention.

I did not write this to change anyone’s mind.

I wrote this because it was sitting inside me and the weight was becoming difficult to carry alone.

I do not hate women. I grieve for what we turned them into. I grieve for what we turned ourselves into. I grieve for the distance between what human connection was supposed to feel like and what it actually feels like when you open your phone and see what we have become.

This is not an attack. This is not advice. This is not a solution.

This is just a man sitting with what he sees and trying to say it as honestly as he knows how.

If you made it this far then maybe you see it too.

And maybe that is enough. Not to fix anything. Not to change the world.

Just to see it clearly. Together. For a moment.

Before we scroll past and forget again.

First Principles Human

A+B won't pay you.

the blank human letter.

the body became the resume.