WHO AM I IF I AM UGLY?
We’ve never truly evolved out of our baby brains, object permanence—I love myself in the eyes of others.
If I were to have a cosmetic genie offer me three wishes, I’m sure I would replace all my skin, starting with my face, making sure it extends all the way to the bottom of my feet. Then, it would likely be bariatric surgery. I’d want to shrink down my stomach to half the size of a fist and wedge it behind my ribs so everything can lie flat. For my third wish, probably laser hair removal—it’s the economical option.
I was sold the beauty myth from a young age. I was told that it was bad, but that it was necessary. That I should strive to be smart or driven or kind, but if nothing else in the world, I would be beautiful. The Dorian Gray phenomenon of beauty, however, is that beauty is an asymptotic achievement. There is no one Platonic ideal of beauty. Fundamentally, it is more of a binary, but it’s treated as a scale. When we talk about someone’s appearance, the distinctions of “kind of beautiful,” “beautiful,” and “very beautiful” melt away. Thus, we all fail to be beautiful, and yet, we all succeed. With enough zhuzzing, you can make anyone beautiful—even yourself.
The other thing about beauty is that beauty is tenuous. It is temporal. I liked the way I looked in front of other people:it’s easy to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be attractive in front of someone. We’ve never truly evolved out of our baby brains, object permanence—I love myself in the eyes of others. I don’t love myself, necessarily, in the mirror, when I’m alone, when I’m sleeping, when I’m not posing. Accepting this is a condition of life; although, much to my chagrin, I rediscover it all the time.
But the beauty myth has a sharper edge— one that goes beyond just “I like my hair in someone else's dorm room.” It is one that asks how committed you are to being around people who will affirm this identity. This is the appeal of hook-up culture. The critiques of hook-up culture have already been enumerated by people more articulate than me: it’s bad for women, it’s bad for your bodily health, it’s bad for your mental health, it’s evil. But to “hook up” with someone is a tacit endorsement of one’s own desire to be wanted. The unspoken agreement in a hook-up is that your beauty is enough to supplant the desire for “getting to know someone.” It is one of the few instances where beauty is isolated as a determining factor.
This, of course, is a two-way street. We want our sexual partners to affirm our beauty, but our partners want the same from us. We want to be beautiful, and we want our partners to be beautiful; we expect others to live up to our standards. When I was recovering from a low-grade eating disorder, the hardest part wasn’t unseeing calories or just eating more, it was not judging others for their eating habits. I assumed that people who ate more than me were, first, less disciplined than me (which lent me an insidious moral superiority) and that they were, second, less beautiful than me. This ideology is self-indulgent, but that’s the only way that it can survive.
The libratory ideology here is obviously to assume a stance where beauty doesn’t matter. The true radfem stance says, “So what if I am not beautiful?” There are likely better women than I who do the work to truly untangle themselves from these ideals, but when we (everyone, but especially women) are groomed into beauty, it is easier said than done. The larger question here is “What does it mean to be ugly?” I would like to live in a world where beauty doesn’t matter. I would like to raise a daughter in a world different than the one my mother raised me in. But it is ultimately a waiting game. To renounce beauty as a point of being is to, in some ways, separate yourself from society—I will change, but only when everyone else does first. I choose to be beautiful—to make myself beautiful—to fit in. To be ugly is to betray beauty, and the desire to fit in.
For a long time, I thought these feelings were tied up in hook-up culture. It was an easy prognosis. Now, I am in a relationship. I still shave twice a week, I still work out, I still worry that my skin isn’t clear. My fear is now not that people don’t believe I am beautiful, but rather that they will find out that I am a liar. This cannot be the other side. I am worried that I have made myself into a Dorian Gray waiting to be found out. Beauty is temporal, it is binary, it is the means by which I have come to understand myself. Who am I if I choose to be ugly? Who am I if I am ugly?
One of the big signs I outgrew my eating disorder was when I stopped looking at what other people ate. I watched a girl I babysat eat three granola bars after her gymnastics class, and I didn’t stop to question whether she really wanted to eat all of that. Honestly, I didn’t even think of it until later. It made me feel good to be nonchalant about it. Perhaps this is the other side.
AUTHOR: Emerson Rhodes
ARTIST: Amy Park