The Women Reversing Their Plastic Surgery. Plus. . .

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss on the rise of “leg hair harassment.” Kat Rosenfield on a helicopter parent’s worst nightmare. Amanda Knox on a chatbot’s false confession. Rafaela Siewert sits down with a Brooklyn DJ who’s on Vladimir Putin’s most-wanted list. And more!

But first: The truth about the plastic surgery backlash.

On social media, there’s a new trend: Women are talking about removing their breast implants, dissolving their filler, undoing their plastic surgery. They’re talking about what the pursuit of beauty cost them: One describes blood and pus “actually pouring out of a hole in my ass” after getting butt filler; another recalls her “nightmare” appointment getting chin filler. Meanwhile, capitalism is catching up: Clinics are advertising “buccal fat restoration” to reverse the procedure of sucking fat out of the cheeks—which, until recently, was all the rage.

When I texted our columnist Freya India about this trend, asking her to write about it, I thought she’d be over the moon. After all, earlier this year she published a book in which she argued that social media had made a generation of girls believe they had to inject their faces with toxins in order to look okay—and called on women to rebel against this idea.

Had the resistance begun?

But a couple of days into her reporting, Freya texted to say this wasn’t a story about women seeing the light and realizing they’re fine the way they are. It was something much darker. A lot of the women she spoke to, or watched online, said they’d had awful experiences with implants or injectables or unnecessary surgery—but they were still considering going back for more.

“There’s a part of me that is still interested in the idea of looking young and beautiful longer,” one 29-year-old told Freya, even though her face had swelled up so much after getting Botox that she could barely see, and was left “angry,” “scared,” and “extremely insecure.”

It disturbed Freya that all these women were anxious to sound nonjudgmental, saying things like “I’m not here to judge,” or, as one TikToker put it: “I think everybody is obviously entitled to do what they want with their bodies.” This is a woman who experienced digestive issues and breathing problems after getting breast implants. (Last week, an NYPD officer died in the Dominican Republic after suffering complications from her removal.)

“I met many young women brave enough to risk it all for beauty,” writes Freya, “but not one brave enough to say this to others: Don’t do it.” —Freya Sanders

Rafaela Siewert • Two Drinks

Egor Cherniuk doesn’t always feel like a liberal—even though he’s so passionate about liberalism that he’s been to prison on its behalf. “By Russian standards, I’m as lib as one can get,” according to the 28-year-old, who once worked for Vladimir Putin’s archnemesis, Alexei Navalny, and says he’s now on the Russian president’s most-wanted list. But in Brooklyn, where he works as a DJ in exile, he feels politically homeless. “To bicker about pronouns when you don’t have a free press or when you don’t even have independent courts sounds so fucking ridiculous,” he tells Rafaela Siewert over two coffees.

Kat Rosenfield • Things Worth Remembering

According to one poll, a majority of 14-year-olds in America aren’t allowed to go further than their own street without adult supervision. Kids are smothered by extracurriculars, and their parents track their every move on an app. Some struggle to believe that, as recently as the ’80s, adolescents could roam freely with their friends. They need to watch Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” argues Kat Rosenfield in this week’s Things Worth Remembering. In this classic coming-of-age film, which turns 40 this month, but is set in the ’50s, kids smoke cigarettes, tote a gun, and look for a dead body in the woods—and “growing up,” writes Kat, “is a thing kids could only truly do in moments when they were on their own, out of adult view.”

Amanda Knox • Culture and Ideas

Amanda Knox’s one-woman show, which she’s currently performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has a question at the heart of it: How am I going to explain to my kids that, as a young woman, I went to prison for a gruesome murder I didn’t commit? It’s been met with a storm of backlash, and a Change.org petition demanding the sold-out show be canceled out of respect for the murder victim, Meredith Kercher. (Those who’ve seen the show say it’s deeply respectful.) To understand the story Amanda is telling onstage, read her recent piece for us, about an experiment in which a criminologist coerced a chatbot into a false confession—just as, Amanda writes, she was manipulated nearly 20 years ago in an Italian police station.

Brad Pitt is drinking again—and Suzy Weiss is not surprised. “He has a movie coming out where his co-star is a German shepherd,” she points out. It’s enough to ruin anyone’s sobriety. In the latest episode of Second Thought, Suzy and her co-host Dan Ahdoot get into the actor’s apparent existential crisis, plus the rise of “leg hair harassment” in Japan, and a new movie about sex in which all the sex scenes were cut—because apparently Gen Z doesn’t like seeing actors in the nude. . .

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch below. (And to keep up with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!)

This week, Arthur Brooks admitted, “I’d literally rather electrocute myself” than take all of August off, like his Spanish wife is wont to do. Also, Christina Buttons wrote about why she went “no contact” with her parents, and Kara Kennedy spoke to the young people who think dating apps suck—but, instead of giving up, are trying something new:

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on our site! Click here to meet a youth circus rigger; a surfer bro in Sin City; or an Italian architect. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our editor Rick Brooks for his recommendations…

📚Read . . . Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen. Whether you love or hate bicycles, Rosen’s book is a lively exploration of both extremes, plus everything in the middle, going all the way back to the invention of the first prototype more than 200 years ago. If you are a hater of Citi Bike and the people who use it, the “disgrace and odium of Dandyism” that spoiled the velocipede, as one writer put it in 1819, will sound familiar. What I enjoyed most are Rosen’s stories from places like Dhaka, Bangladesh, the three-wheeled, pedal-driven rickshaw capital of the world.

(Speaking of books: On August 24, we’re kicking off our new Free Press Book Club with East of Eden! Sign up for email updates here, and follow along on The Free Press Forum.)

🎵Listen . . . to the album How the West Was Swung by Tommy Morrell and the Time Warp Tophands. Shout-out to Natalie Weiner, whose Don’t Rock the Inbox online newsletter (which I have recommended before) recently mentioned the revival of the pedal steel guitar, which bends musical notes like a fun house mirror, and who gushes about Morrell, who played his pedal steel with everyone from the Texas Playboys to Talking Heads. Morrell died in 2007, but his Western swing lives on in How the West Was Swung. The album has 15 volumes! Choose one and press play.

🦐Eat . . . Calabash shrimp. Anyone who grew up in North Carolina or drove hundreds of miles for a week’s vacation at a beach house there can tell you about their favorite spot for catching this mainstay of summertime dining. Lightly battered and fried shrimp, crisp and hot, is piled on a Styrofoam plate next to hush puppies, and washed down with ice-cold beer, preferably cheap. This weekend, I’ll be back at the North Carolina beach for the first time in forever—and looking for Calabash shrimp. The next time this craving strikes while I’m far away, I’ll reach for this recipe from Our State magazine. Give it a try before summer ends.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

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