Velociraptors

I have a young friend from Greenland named Freya. She is an aspiring pilot, half-Inuit, half-Icelandic. She is strong and with beautiful almond-shaped eyes. She can fish with only a knife in the icy waters of Greenland, steering her boat quickly slaloming among the icebergs. And she can work with iron and wood.
The other day she sent me a photo of herself with her lips swollen with hyaluronic acid, tattooed eyebrows and false eyelashes, and the following message ‘I have plumped up my lips! Now I look like you!”. Terrified, I asked myself why such a beautiful girl, bequeathed with such a unique sort of beauty, so different from mine, would ever cut, paste and pierce her face to look like a southern European with completely different facial features from her own.

The other night I went to a Club in France populated by 20-year-old XXs, and not a single one had normal lips which had not been swollen by injections.

Then I realised: it was time to write an article denouncing the danger of the Pandemic of the Velociraptors.

‘One is not born, but becomes a Woman’ The second sex, Simone de Beauvoir

‘One is not born, but becomes a Velociraptor’ Medium, Evelyn Amaral Garcia

Standard Velociraptor, painting by Evelyn Amaral Garcia

1. How to recognise a Velociraptor:

• The velociraptor is for now usually XX but I don’t rule out that the beauty market won’t soon extend its clutches to the XYs as well.
• The Velociraptor has claws, which usually she ticks impatiently on the smartphone. The Velociraptor snorts because she can’t type, without thinking that she should trim her claws so that her fingertips can touch the touchscreen.
• The Velociraptor has very thick plastic eyelashes attached to its eyelids with glue. The Velociraptor blinks repeatedly, attempting to be able to see something between the shadows of the eyelashes.
• The Velociraptor has lips like rubber dinghies thanks to acid injections and usually colours them beyond the edges with lipstick so that the dinghies look XXL.
• After the age of 30, Velociraptors become less empathetic, because the Botox injections paralyse the facial muscles. This prevents them from reproducing the micro-expressions of the people with whom they converse, which is essential to feeling empathy.
• The Velociraptor is usually very skinny, with silicone or fat injected into its buttocks and breasts, which work well as floating devices, should she fall overboard.
• The Velociraptor has perfectly tattooed eyebrows with a few hairs here and there.
• Apart from the eyebrows, the Velociraptor has no body hair, thanks to several laser sessions.
• Despite all the cosmetic retouches and snips here and there, the Velociraptor still uses beauty filters on Instagram to look even more standard in photos.
• Velociraptors see themselves as old even when they are 20 and it is never too soon to start correcting invisible wrinkles or sagging cheeks.

2. Velociraptor customs:

• They are big fans of fast fashion, always in the latest fashion launched (literally) seconds ago by the Velociraptor influencer on duty. Lately, they all wear their hair very straight with a part in the middle.
• They spend copious amounts of time on social media, now colonised with photos of Velociraptors all looking the same, where they are followed by several XYs whose atrophied genetic radar fails to understand that if they breed with a Velociraptor their offspring will not inherit its phenotype.
• Velociraptors upload photos of colourful food that they pretend to eat and then spend hours seeing who has viewed the photo.
• In the photos, the Velociraptor keeps its torso tilted and one leg forward. It opens its eyes wide and pouts its duckbill-like lips into a pose.
• Velociraptors don’t seem to know that in the animal world, it is the XYs who are colourful and make all the effort to reproduce. Therefore they spend hours making themselves look pretty and sighing because the XYs don’t reply to messages or watch stories.
• When the Velociraptor travels, she likes to carry around huge pink suitcases, grimacing in fatigue with pursed lips, until some poor passing wretch realises that he has to carry it for her. Usually, the velociraptor carries around a U-shaped pillow because her head only gets mysteriously heavy on planes. She seems unaware that on intercontinental flights the airline provides you with a pillow. She gets up to stand in line for half an hour as soon as the boarding gate opens and gets up to stand in line another half hour as soon as the plane lands. While waiting she puffs or takes selfies.
• Velociraptors cannot move easily, limping on high heels, cramped in tight-fitting clothes, and having to carry around kilos of silicone.
• Velociraptors are very romantic and do not believe in age limits and ugliness in love. The Velociraptor does not even seem to believe that being with a man she does not like in exchange for being kept for is considered prostitution and not love.
• The Velociraptor seems to have a lot of money per month to maintain her Velociraptor parameters, but none to pay for her dinner, which XY has to take care of.
• In video calls the Velociraptors always unnaturally have their hands on their faces, so that everyone can admire their claws.

Velociraptor and normal XX, painting by Evelyn Amaral Garcia

3. Incredible Velociraptor Facts

• Having only recently gotten past the slavery of marriage, motherhood, cooking and cleaning, the XX, to make sure she doesn’t lose the habit of being a slave, has committed herself to the new slavery of Having to Be a Velociraptor. Now we have the obligation to ‘take care of ourselves’. We now WANT to cut off body parts and we are FREE to do so. Not like those XY villains who force XX girls to undergo female genital mutilation, they are villains. We, on the other hand, are free to be slaves to unattainable standards dictated by the pornography market.
• Velociraptors are highly contagious: it is easy for a Free Woman surrounded by Velociraptors to feel that she has no eyelashes, lips or breasts. It is easy for her to think that she will never enter the reproductive and job arenas and it is easy to give in to the temptation to become a Velociraptor. Being a Velociraptor is now the new minimum standard of unattainable beauty without which you are no longer female. It matters little if the standard is dictated by people with entire teams of hairdressers, trainers, photographers, photoshop experts, filters and social media managers.
• Velociraptors are not born, they are made: thanks to the monthly work of underpaid immigrants who in the Velociraptors Factory lengthen eyelashes and nails, swell lips and breasts. While the economy falls apart, the Velociraptors’ Factories are always booked up and Velociraptors’ Factories spring up like mushrooms after the rain. To remain a Velociraptor, nails have to be done every fortnight, eyelashes every month, eyebrows every four months, hair re-dyed every month (as the grey comes in), and lip injections every year. If you stop paying, in a snap you go back to being a horrible normal XX.
• It is estimated by very clever people (me) that by the time most XXs are Velociraptors, capitalist society will have unearthed new parameters needed to become a Velociraptor 2.0. It is estimated that Velociraptor models will continue to come out like new iPhone models, and Velociraptor 5 or Velociraptor 6 will be automatically excluded from the job and reproductive market, if they dare not spend all their paltry salaries, only half the XY’s, to maintain the latest Velociraptor status.
• Velociraptor standards intersect with racist and colonialist standards of beauty. The Velociraptor also has a very small nose, straight hair, large eyes and pale skin. Anyone who is not like that is considered ‘out of place’. The first time I went to work with my beautiful curly hair at an international trade fair, my boss told me ‘I feel like combing your hair’. This increases work and frustration for non-white XXs and leads them to snip at their eyelids, burn their hair, and bleach their skin.

HOW TO BREAK FREE

The first step towards freedom is to acknowledge that we are victims of a marketing ploy and of unrealistic standards that have created new unattainable parameters and imposed them as mandatory needs. As Harari says in Sapiens:

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can’t live without it. Over the few decades, we have invented countless time-saving machines that are supposed to make like more relaxed — washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.”

― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The author of this article dyes her grey hair every month so as not to feel old, she has had semi-permanent nail polish for a year and for months she bears her ‘bare’ nails with some disgust, just to fight her Anti-Velociraptor war.

The standards imposed on every modern micro-target are not only aesthetic, the market has developed extreme standards of ‘perfection’ to push consumers to spend, targeting and speculating on category-specific fears. For example, Google’s stupid algorithms believe that I am an old millionaire male, and continually offer me products and courses to get six-pack abs, even if it believes I am over 70.

The revolution can therefore only be personal. We need to move away from those who impose voluntary slavery on us and love ourselves for who we really are. If we cannot delete all social media, (spoiler: we can and should) we can follow the profiles of XXs who have chosen to BE themselves instead of trying to just appear as a Velociraptor. Instead of channelling the energy of our money into looking like everyone else, we could invest it into projects that will lead the world to a better future. We could dedicate our time to important projects, uninterrupted by notifications telling us How We Should Look, projects that bring us closer every day to who we really are. Unique and each uniquely beautiful, inside and out.

We can fight against our constant fear of not being good enough XXs, of not being attractive enough, of not having a good enough career, of not having enough children, of not having an XY as a mirror to reflect us and make us feel we exist. I know it is a struggle, but we can do it even if we fight without claws. Let us take ourselves back, we are all we will ever have.

‘I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself’ ― Simone de Beauvoir