Some people (not naming names) are born ugly.
I find no fault with the ugly among us – I even count myself among them. Don’t take my words as rote humility or self-deprecation. My nose is obtrusive on my face, I have genetic lines under my eyes that prematurely age me, and these features are placed haphazardly on acne-scarred skin. I am not tall. No one will ever mistake me for Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. Hell, no one would mistake me for Tom Cruise in that flick either.
Come in close, I am telling you this as a friend: chances are you are ugly too.
Everywhere you look you are besieged with reminders of your own inadequacy. Novel flaws are identified to sell novel solutions (the problems they purport to solve don’t actually exist). These flaws proliferated at a pace of about once-a-month in the era of ladies magazines (see: this article from the online-based Makeup Museum that covers the rise and retro resurgence of painted knees). Like in all arms races, the march of technology has expanded the battlefield. These peddled flaws are no longer purely cosmetic. Twenty years ago salaried bloggers wrote personal highlight routines. Now I can’t open the phone without an ageless1 blond suggesting my very bones are problematic.
You and I aren’t the first to notice the way the Beauty Industry worms itself into every intimate aspect of the self – every young woman who has read The Bell Jar has picked up the deleterious effect fashion magazines have on the soul; and despite the damage we keep picking up copies of Mademoiselle (keep scrolling through Instagram, keep flicking through TikTok) and asking if something in there will make us feel more like ourselves. But the era of ladies’ magazines is no more, and something more rotten has taken their place.
Girl Phrenology
Are you a blueberry girl or strawberry girl? Are you a dramatic classic? What’s your color season? Do you have movie lips? iPhone face? Are you a fox or a bunny? Who that isn’t you do you look like? Who that isn’t real do you look like?
Our biological preoccupation with pattern recognition is once again being used for evil. Every week or so a new phrase emerges, giving name to a previously overlooked part of the human body. And like a colonial geographer traversing a river unknown to western maps, when you find something you get to name and define it. And when you define something, you get to erect the standards to which everyone measures against. Take “violin hips”, a common and benign sloping of muscles around the hips that are the result of natural variation in the bones that make up the pelvic region. They are, to many, an aesthetic flaw that must be defeated by body modification in the form of targeted exercise or plastic surgery. They are, therefore, to many, a source of anxiety, frustration, and hopelessness. This unfortunate manifestation of your anatomy, a dip in your hips, marks you as some unattractive, unlovable thing whose very biology is grotesque, like a scarlet V sewn onto either pocket on the seat of your pants. If this is you, I need to let you in on a hot tip: learn to not give a shit. God knows I need to.
Learn not to give a shit about the trendy faces of the hour. The shape of your lips can just be the shape of your lips. They don’t have to be m-shaped (made up by aestheticians to upcharge lip injections (which should be 10000% illegal btw. Super illegal. They should make a new category of punishment for doctors who tell women that if they want to feel confident they should pay out of pocket thousands of dollars)). And you certainly don’t need to overline your lips to give the illusion of shapely lips without the surgical price tag.
Every week it feels like there is something new wrong with me. That my body is flawed in an immutable way, everything to its very essence is malformed, like an apple rotting from the core out. The way I try to make my friends laugh, the ways I try to be a good person in an evil world, they don’t matter, not as long as someone can identify a gap in my personal maintenance routine. Or, worse yet, not as long as someone can point to one of my genetic, inherited facial features and cast me as too-hideous-to-take-seriously. I never talk about it, but in my professional capacity as a video producer (among many other things I do for work), I would love to star in more of my own videos, but too often comments only reflect the distaste viewers have for my face, rather than what I have created. Being a woman on the internet is a disorienting, dizzying experience of self-loathing; being an ugly woman on the internet is much the same, but with people dangling their sympathy like a carrot. If only I got a nose job, they would think I’m pretty. If only I fixed my face, they might give my personality a chance.2
Like any good feminist, I can trace this emphasis on physical form and goodness back to the Ancient Greeks. The Greeks were concerned with proportion and symmetry in all things, with great emphasis placed on the divine dimensions of the human body. Soon money was brought into the equation, with more proportionate (and therefore beautiful) art and parcels of land fetching prettier sums. This was the beginning of “beauty standards”, or those slippery little things that are oft-invoked but nary-defined3, until they can be used as cudgels.
There is an entire economy veiled from men based on these ancient principles, patented by the centuries-past forefathers that were among the first to practice patriarchy as a verb. Cosmetics alone, the average American woman can expect to spend a cool thousand-or-so a year on aesthetic enhancement. A few hundred thousand more dabble in surgical and injectable treatments ranging from $15 per unit of botox (and the average treatment requires upwards of 20 units), to high end, highly specialized invasive procedures like the $8000 facelift. Men are not expected to invest the same.
What returns do these investments portend? In South Korea, plastic surgery has become a resume item, with the Ministry of Employment and Labor counting a “preferable appearance” as a chief consideration for jobseekers. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons suggests that an increase in eye lifts for men is due to “a competitive job market”4, something that rhymes neatly with a post-2008 global financial crash surgery spike in China:
When the hospital surveyed patients, it learned that about 50% of the cases were job-related. Of them, one group is college students about ready to graduate, Liao says. The other: “White-collar employees after being laid off are having surgery so they are more attractive for the job search,” says the retired pediatrician. Most patients are women.
It’s hard to find data on plastic surgery and job competitiveness for American women. (But yes, attractive people do have a better time on the job market) Our particular plastic surgery taboo means no matter how much work you have had done, you can never admit to having work done – like a gold standard, beauty’s moral currency is backed best by its organic occurrence. Not to give oxygen to an online-only phenomenon, but you see it almost every day with people falling over themselves to implicate morality in their celebrity fandom: see, this is how you age when you are unproblematic [followed by a photo of someone with several thousands of dollars of cosmetic surgeries and treatments]. But – ladies, and I know you’re ladies because I have follower statistics – is that what we believe? That ugly faces conceal ugly hearts? This brings us back to the Greek tragedy: beauty and goodness are conjoined twins.
Escaping the Loop
You and I, we are not supposed to talk about who’s had what done to their face because it is potentially embarrassing to the object of discourse. Every bad buccal fat removal is explained as a casualty of fat loss in the checks with age and/or exercise. And as a country, I suppose, we were not ready for the first woman president: Joe Biden. His maintenance facelifts weren’t fooling anyone.
I think we should work together to remedy this – we need to call out plastic surgery when we see it. We should not let the less literate among us (i.e. sixteen year olds on Twitter (hi btw)) come to believe that you actually do age differently depending on your fan war allegiance. We won’t point and laugh at what’s been botched, but we can remind people that Simone DeBeauvoir is right: that no desire is immune from background radioactive ideas of what someone should desire. Like let’s be grownups here and say it: that plastic surgery is not empowering. Empowerment is not a cover for a weakness of moral spirit. For selling out your sisters so you can feel good about yourself, rather than harbor a real, correct hatred toward the panopticon flashing endemic belief in women’s inferiority in your eyes.
In an embarrassing work of apologia for plastic surgery (and embarrassing triumph of Janet Radcliffe Richards in mainstream feminism), former investment banker (barf!) Robin Levin Shobin asks if it is so wrong to “not want to age and to want to look younger”:
But one thing feminism (and my feminist friends) seem to be telling me is that my vanity is bad. Very bad. And that making changes to my body and face to fend off aging, is, in fact, against the values of female empowerment.
Suddenly I find myself ashamed to care so much about my crow’s feet and dulling skin. Apparently putting any sort of injection in your face in the pursuit of softening lines and adding volume means you’ve crossed the line: you’re no longer a “feminist”.
Levine Shobin’s reduction of feminists critiques of (and let’s call her self-prescribed microcurrent facials, Botox, filler, lasers, and Ulthera, what they are) aesthetic surgical body modification to “vanity” reveals how popular feminism is indistinguishable from the patriarchal forces it claims to be against. Levin Shobin – who is not even 40 at the time of writing – goes on to argue that keeping plastic surgery usage hush-hush (again, a useful misunderstanding of the feminist critique) is just as bad as “beauty magazines [that] airbrush and photoshop models to create unrealistic standards of beauty.”
I agree with her in one sense, that the hushed tones we use when talking about plastic surgery fortifies the myth of natural beauty against-all-odds; but why break open a taboo to flaunt its inequities more? You want more women to come clean about aesthetic surgery to… encourage more women to get aesthetic surgery? Wow, we should have more frank and honest discussions about the social pressures surrounding women’s bodies to, uhhh, tell them making irreversible changes to your body in complete capitulation to these standards is girl power. Give me a break.
My honest opinion, as an uggo: beauty is the refuge of the talentless. It is the failsafe by which the uninteresting are elevated to godliness. Strive to be something more.
Read more
I’m More Fuckable Than You (Feministly) from Cartoons Hate Her
Aging & the Double Standards of Feminism by Robin Levin Shobin for Jones Road Beauty
Appearance as a Feminist Issue by Deborah L. Rhode
Reading our Lips: The History of Lipstick Regulation in Western Seats of Power by Sarah E. Schaffer
Social Media Use May Help to Empower Plastic Surgery Patients
- Older women inject fillers to appear younger – plump cheeks and full lips code as youthful. When young people get the same treatments, they tend to look like an older women cosplaying a younger woman. So, no, you don’t need to start filler when you are 23, it is aging you! ↩︎
- When I was in my mid-20s I had my heart broken by the thing I loved the most. It was a lifelong dream of mine to play and win on Jeopardy!. I was lucky enough to fulfill that dream, but upon the airing of my episode, I got dozens of unsolicited messages and public comments “helpfully suggesting” I use my winnings to fix my nose. And then some people opted to just tell me I’m ugly. Very classy thing to do: tell gameshow contestants they are not up to your aesthetic standard. It’s trivia! Not a beauty contest. ↩︎
- I wrote about this previously with a special focus on kpop and neoliberalism ↩︎
- I desperately want to see the data broken down by sexual orientation ↩︎
Underwire 
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