Conspicuous Mimicry and Blurry Botox

A story about mimics, filters, and fillers

Tastes like chicken

Do not eat the brightly colored animal.

This is not a bad ground rule if you’re stuck on a deserted island. Animals are vibrantly colored for one of two reasons: as a warning or to attract the opposite sex. It’s probably best not to take a chance unless you have no other options. “Oh, look, an adorable golden frog¹. Let’s add it to the soup for extra flavor.” Everyone dies. Terrible movie.

I lied; there is another reason animals can be brightly colored — tricksters abound in nature. When two species that are not closely related look similar in shape and coloration, biologists label it mimicry. There are different types of mimicry, but I want to introduce you to Batesian mimicry, in which a harmless, potentially tasty, species mimics a ‘touch me and you’re dead’ species.

For example, one of these four snakes is bad news. Its venom contains neuro- and myotoxins; a single bite can turn both your brain and muscles into mush. The other three are Batesian mimics. They are nonvenomous and probably taste like chicken².

All pictures from Wikimedia Commons (photographers clockwise from top left: LA Dawson, Mike Pingleton, and twice Glenn Bartolotti.)

In other words, Batesian mimics pretend to be something they’re not.

Aww, like people. (I know, smooth transition.)

What’s particularly interesting about Batesian mimics is that they use their bright colors to hide their true nature, almost as if they wear garish costumes as camouflage. We usually don’t think of camouflage as something conspicuous. Quite the opposite, it sounds like a contradiction in terms: conspicuous camouflage.

Runaway mimicry

Carnival, Halloween, Mardi Gras… Most cultures, past and present, have festivals that include conspicuous costumes.

Spanning a few decades in the second half of the 20th century, the work of British anthropologist Victor Turner focused on rituals. Every ritual, he thought, has a liminal phase during which regular rules no longer apply. He saw festivals as rituals that test the limits of normal social rules and subvert them. Around the same time as Turner, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin proposed social role reversal as a core component of carnivals and other festivals (especially in his dissertation-turned-book Rabelais and His World). Children become monsters, strict Catholic cultures emphasize sexuality, and propriety becomes debauchery. Both Bakhtin and Turner emphasized the community aspect of festivals. The collective use of masks, music, and costumes allows us to hide who we are in normal life.

Today, we no longer have to wait until a festival comes around. Skin blemishes? There’s a filter for that. Your stomach looks flabby when you sit? Hop, a filter. Not muscular enough? Log in to Photoshop and, abracadabra, you are shaped like a Marvel hero. This is not quite the social role reversal Bakthin had in mind, but what about a guy whose dating profile photos include a fake Rolex and a luxury car that isn’t his? Or the male tendency to round up your height one or two inches until you have the good fortune to start it with the number six (in freedom units)? If that sounds silly, remember that height is correlated with perceived social dominance, workplace success and income, and - for guys - romantic attractiveness and reproductive success³.

But, because social media is ubiquitous, we run into another issue. Let’s call it the peacock problem. More technically, it’s known as the Fisherian runaway — a runaway process of sexual selection that accounts for conspicuous (often male) ornamentation, like the peacock’s tail or these peacock spider dudes whose amazing musical and dance skills would not be out of place during Mardi Gras (skip to 1:45 and 3:10; you won’t be disappointed — also, did anyone else feel the pain at 2:13?):

Here’s how we’re running away with ourselves on social media: it’s not just about not looking like ourselves, it’s also about looking better than others. It’s debatable how much ‘sexual selection’ this involves, but sex, snacks, and status⁴ are powerful drivers of our on- and offline behavior.

Remember the 10,000-calorie challenge on YouTube a few years ago? Soon, it became 10,000 calories in eight hours. Exclamation mark. Then, 20,000 calories. Double exclamation mark. We don’t know how much those aspiring influencers actually consumed (and kept in their stomachs), but the point is the drive to outdo others on tasks that, let’s be frank, don’t really have any beneficial outcome except social status, which we increasingly count by followers and likes. (Like this post while you’re at it.)

Blurry botox

That 10,000-calorie challenge is also a reminder that the virtual and physical realms have blurry boundaries. Put differently, the behaviors we exhibit in virtual mimicry can bleed into our physical lives. If you eat 10,000 calories for a viral video, that will have effects on your real body.

What happens when the lines between the real and the virtual consistently blur?

Filters become fillers.

Even if we rationally know that the influencers (or, sigh, hyperreal AI influencers) on our feeds are often filtered and photoshopped, it remains emotionally challenging to see those mimics of generalized ideals get more engagement than our heartfelt posts in which we share a tiny part of our real selves. Men see exogenous testosterone-fueled mountains of muscle or square-jawed, perfectly suited finance guy superheroes and they feel ugly and unworthy; women see flawlessly smooth and perfectly curved girls who stepped straight out of a fashion magazine or anime cartoon and they feel ugly and unworthy. We’re not that different, despite the women vs men rhetoric polluting the virtual airwaves.

A little cycle of testosterone can’t hurt, right? Or maybe some lip filler? A squirt of botox? When I wrote about self envy and social media tragedies, I referenced a recent study that found a correlation between social media use and more positive attitudes toward cosmetic surgery. Other studies find a correlation between social media use and decreased body image satisfaction⁵. By being constantly exposed to the conspicuous camouflage of our (social) media ‘stars’, we feel (even) worse about our appearance and are more likely to resort to surgical procedures to change it.

I’m very much a ‘your body, your choice’ guy, but all surgeries come with risks. Are they worth it? Seemingly simple procedures, like smoothing wrinkles with botox can have unintended consequences even if everything goes to plan. For example, a (small) 2018 study I recently became aware of thanks to Jessica Defino’s ‘Everyone Is Botoxed & No One Is Horny’, found that:

… BTX treatment of laughter lines was associated with increased depression scores. Further, BTX treatment was associated with reduced emotion recognition ability and sexual function.

Translation: On average, facial botox injections make you more prone to depression, less empathetic, and less likely to enjoy sex. Caveat emptor…

Here, I want to tread carefully. Of course, you can choose to have cosmetic surgery, beauty treatments, wear makeup, and so on. For example, I can imagine that preparing for a night out, doing hair and makeup, and selecting a head-turning outfit can be fun for some people⁶. Perhaps we can even see this as the liminal phase in one of Turner’s social rituals. There might hide a modicum of peace in taking pride in your appearance — whatever form that takes for you.

We can’t help but mimic others; it’s how we learn as a social species. Everything from tying our shoelaces to becoming a functional member of society to building (un)healthy relationships is, to an extent, based on mimicry⁷. But just like there are many types of mimicry besides the Batesian kind, we could (try to) choose which people and qualities we mimic.

We don’t have to mimic the masks others wear on social media.

We already have enough masks to wear.

Consider this post my peacock dance. I do it all for the sex, snacks, and status. Wait… did I write the quiet part out loud? You didn’t see anything, okay? Click buttons!

(If you’re a fellow newsletter writer and think your readers might appreciate my writing, you can recommend Subtle Sparks, if you are so inclined…)

1. The golden poison frog, or Phyllobates terribilis (what’s in a name…), is one of the most poisonous animals alive — a single frog has enough poison in its two-inch body to kill a dozen people.

2. The top left is the killer, or the Texas coral snake. The others, clockwise from the top right, are the red milk snake, scarlet kingsnake, and scarlet snake. There is a mnemonic, ‘Red touching yellow, kill a fellow; red touching black, safe for Jack’ to help you recognize the venomous snake. Fun fact: the rhyme is not as accurate as you may think. Outside of the US, it’s probably not the best guideline and even in the US, snakes can have pigmentation variations and regional differences that make them less clear-cut than in the rhyme.

3. I know male height is a boring, stereotypical, and lazy example. Sometimes, however, researchers like stuff that’s relatively easy and quick to measure, so we have quite a bit of studies focusing on height's (non-)importance in various contexts. Keep in mind that average preferences are not individual preferences and stated preferences are not revealed preferences — internet arguments often seem to forget these two caveats.

4. Awesome band name.

5. Recently, a preprint identified specific brain changes (reduced neurite density along the vertical occipital fasciculus bundle, for all you neuroscientists) in people with body dysmorphic disorder. This affects how you subjectively experience watching yourself.

6. This sentence is non-gendered, by the way.

7. An interesting Aeon essay suggests that a lot of human cultural learning (including via mimicry) is embodied — take that, AI?