What do we lose when we erase ugliness? |
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What do we lose when we erase ugliness?
Beyond the beauty binary.
We’re in a moment of cultural fascination with looksmaxxers. That too-online community, made up mostly of men who claim to do things like hit themselves in the face with hammers for a stronger jawline and snort meth for leaner bodies, has become the object of shocked trend pieces and news coverage.
Looksmaxxers are fascinating in part because their motivations are so understandable. They have observed the simple fact that in our culture, life is easier for people who are beautiful, and they have made their plans accordingly, self-mutilation and hard drugs and all. The calculus feels both horrifying and comprehensible, which is why I found it so startling and exciting to find people moving in the other direction in the form of two new memoirs by authors who both call themselves ugly and have no plans to change their appearances.
“I am an ugly woman,” begins journalist Stephanie Fairyington in Ugly, forthcoming in May. “At fourteen I learned fourteen times over that I’m ugly,” writes the poet and artist Moshtari Hilal in Ugliness, published last year.
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These memoirists are essentially performing the same calculation the looksmaxxers have: Life is easier when you are beautiful, and I am not naturally a person whom others consider beautiful. But rather than reach for the hammer or the needle, both Hilal and Fairyington have chosen to explore the culture instead.
In each memoir, Fairyington and Hilal navigate what they think about ugliness: to what extent their own ugliness is a product of their own insecurities and to what extent it is objective truth; whether any sort of objective truth around human beauty is even possible; and the millennia of racism and misogyny that have defined our shared sense of ugliness. They consider whether there is value to be had in calling themselves ugly and deciding not to care what anyone else thinks about that, or whether embracing such a label would be an act of self-hatred.
“I cannot reconcile myself to ugliness through aesthetics and verse alone,” Hilal frets, after devoting pages of poetry and photographs to the nose she feels is too big for her face. “It feels too tender to admit that our beauty or lack thereof impacts, even shapes, our lives,” writes Fairyington.
As I read these books, I wasn’t always sure the authors had things figured out that much more than the looksmaxxers did. The malice in the word ugliness is hard to neutralize, to the point that an attempt at reclamation can sometimes seem like self-loathing. Indeed, I found myself feeling defensive on the part of both authors, compelled to look up an author photo and fact-check their claims about themselves. “Not ugly at all!” I declared both times, after I was presented with an image of a perfectly normal-looking woman.
Mogging, -maxxing, and Clavicular, briefly explained
Yet Fairyington, at least, makes it clear she doesn’t appreciate such compliments. She notes that any time she describes herself as ugly, people (especially women) interrupt her and assure her that she isn’t.
“Women can’t let a thought like that hang in the air without vigorously swatting it away because it’s the fate they’re chronically trained (and trying) to avoid; it’s very nearly the worst thought to think of oneself,” Fairyington writes. She thinks trying to avoid the word, however, is a mistake: it means depriving her of the words she needs to describe the way she walks through the world.
To call someone ugly feels so malicious, so aggressive. But these memoirists and the looksmaxxers appear to agree on at least one thing: people really are treated badly by the world if they are not as conventionally attractive as their peers.
To deny someone the language to name their own reality feels perverse. And yet ugly feels like such a cruel word. The provocative and never-quite-answered question of these memoirs is whether turning it on yourself can become an act of self-love.
Accusations of ugliness come from the outside first. Both Hilal and Fairyington write that they were called ugly as children, either by family members, authority figures, or other kids. Crucially, the first qualities that other people told them were ugly........