Beauty standards determine not only the bodies we are drawn toward romantically, but the people we allow into our closest circles.

We tell ourselves that platonic affection is less governed by the visual and more responsive to character and shared experience, but the same cultural training that teaches us whom to desire, also teaches us whom to be curious about and whom to invite.

Friendship cannot be disentangled from the politics of appearance. They are formed within a social world structured by unequal distributions of visibility and recognition.

These inequalities are reinforced through aesthetic hierarchies absorbed from the broader culture, hierarchies organised around thinness, symmetry, whiteness, able-bodiedness, and the particular arrangement of features that a given historical moment has decided to call beautiful.

To build the world we claim to want, we have to imagine a different distribution of attention. A world where no one is left at the edge of the room because of what their body has been made to signify.

A world in which our friendships express our values rather than our conditioning.

To move toward it, we have to unlearn the distortions through which we have been taught to see others, and ask who has been made invisible as a result.