I click on the ad, and a giant face invades my computer screen. The image appears as a simultaneous zooming-in and zooming-out: the model’s features are larger than life but stripped of detail, her poreless skin punctured by demurely parted lips. Stare at the picture too long and it becomes grotesque, unrecognizable—like writing the same word too many times and realizing the arbitrariness of its character combinations. “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline,” the image teases, refusing to betray the source of that ineffable “it.” The text seduces with the intimation of natural beauty, the promise that the model’s looks are real, authentic, and fully hers—then punctures its own illusion. Perfection and porelessness are, after all, impossible. The natural can only be posed as a question, as an indeterminate “maybe” rather than an affirmative reality. In its ambiguity, artifice becomes immaterial: indistinguishable from nature, makeup and Photoshop themselves become natural.

This paradox grounds the modern beauty industry, which goads women to buy in order to look more like themselves. These ads, hawking goods like “Clean Makeup” and “TruBlend Microminerals,” entice women to wear products in order to appear as though they are not wearing makeup at all. More than simply selling beauty, cosmetics companies are pedaling authenticity itself. Beauty, the message runs, can only be beautiful if it is effortless. Enlisting external aid is fine, so long as that aid reflects the natural and remains invisible. By this reasoning, Photoshop and foundation become problematic only when their effects are too obvious—when they assert their presence, rather than reveling in their own negation.

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Tucker Max, author of “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” fascinates me. Not only has he voluntarily defined himself as a “raging dickhead,” but he also epitomizes stereotyped masculinity. His self-construction as an unapologetic incarnation of the male id—that force that craves sexual gratification, whose libidinal energies know no economy and no limit—appears disingenuous, in part because it adheres so closely to cultural cliches. Regardless of the veracity of his sexist ramblings, Max’s beer-pounding, sex-crazed, female-objectifying persona seems too ready-made to be real. After reading one of his war stories, each of which features an incredulous diversity of bodily fluids and misogynous one-liners, the question inevitability arises: Is Max an actual flesh-and-blood human being, or a stock character from an unoriginal beer commercial populated with breasty twins? Even his name—Tucker Max—reads like a bad advertising slogan.

Max has pathologically appropriated every trope of steroid-supplemented masculinity imaginable. He has detached, unemotional sex; he objectifies women; he frequents strip clubs. As Max asserted in a recent interview, “There aren’t a whole lot of people in culture that are unapologetically masculine,” implying, of course, that he numbers among the lucky few. Claiming absolute ownership of the term “masculinity,” Max purports to speak for all heterosexual men. His appeal, it seems, lies in his ability to replay all of their sexual fantasies, frustrated by such inconveniences as feminism and statutory rape. Elevating hackneyed myths of masculinity to the status of reality, Max’s writing raises a salient question: What consequences ensue when our cultural Punch-and-Judys appear as actual, embodied people? Moreover, what happens when these walking stereotypes assume the prerogative to legislate the male ideal—and, by extension, the female ideal, defined as it is in relation to the former? And what does this say about the tenuous line our culture draws between reality and representation?

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The American obsession with fat is doing more than clogging our arteries—it is colonizing our culture. Incendiary reports on the all-consuming “obesity epidemic” saturate the media: According to the most recent statistics, two-thirds of Americans are overweight and one-third are obese. Shows like the “The Biggest Loser” place comically adipose contestants on display in their skivvies, while sites like thisiswhyyourefat.com showcase contributors’ attempts to pack as many calories onto a plate as possible. Apparently, just about anything can be deep-fried, doused in gravy, and served with bacon. The dieting industry counterpoises this delight in excess, raking in over $40 million per year from Americans’ bodily angst. When combined with the pin-thin ideal of beauty espoused by the fashion industry and heeded religiously in Hollywood, the situation becomes combustible. At once addicted to fast food and worshipful of heroin chic, American society has expunged the middle ground from its depictions of bodies. When it comes to weight, the center, it seems, cannot hold.

Recent efforts to combat the fat neuroses particularly virulent among American women do not seem to be helping. Take, for example, Glamour’s decision to run a single photo of plus-sized model Lizzie Miller in last year’s September issue. As Editor-in-Chief Cindy Levine gushed, the image did not feature a celebrity or a supermodel, but “a woman sitting in her underwear with a smile on her face and a belly that looks...wait for it...normal.” Yet a quick flip through the magazine’s other 193 pages of single-digit figures makes the abnormality of Miller’s stomach painfully manifest. Considered in the context of the issue at large, the photo appears more like a publicity stunt than a genuine attempt to challenge the size-zero standard. Miller is too obviously the exception, and Levine’s remarks sound self-congratulatory rather than sincere.

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