The Ugly Truth: Reclaiming Ugliness in a Looksmaxxing World
We are currently witnessing a cultural obsession with looksmaxxers, an online community predominantly composed of men who engage in extreme measures like facial hammering for jawline enhancement and meth use for weight loss. This group has become the subject of widespread media shock and trend analysis. Looksmaxxers fascinate because their motivations are painfully clear: they recognize that society favors the beautiful, and they pursue this advantage through dangerous, self-destructive means. Their logic is both horrifying and understandable, making the emergence of two new memoirs that embrace ugliness all the more startling and compelling.
Memoirs of Ugliness: A Counter-Movement
Journalist Stephanie Fairyington begins her forthcoming book Ugly with the bold declaration, "I am an ugly woman." Similarly, poet and artist Moshtari Hilal opens her memoir Ugliness by stating she learned fourteen times over at age fourteen that she is ugly. Both authors perform the same calculation as looksmaxxers: life is easier for the beautiful, and they are not conventionally attractive. However, instead of resorting to hammers or needles, Hilal and Fairyington choose to interrogate the culture itself.
In their works, they navigate complex questions about ugliness: Is it a product of personal insecurity or an objective truth? Can objective beauty standards even exist? They delve into the millennia of racism and misogyny that have shaped our collective understanding of ugliness. The authors ponder whether reclaiming the label "ugly" is an act of self-empowerment or self-hatred. Hilal expresses doubt after dedicating poetry and photos to her nose, feeling it is too large, while Fairyington admits the tenderness in acknowledging how beauty impacts lives.
The Malice of the Word and Defensive Reactions
Reading these memoirs, one might question if the authors have resolved these issues more than looksmaxxers. The word "ugly" carries such malice that attempts to reclaim it can seem like self-loathing. Readers, including this journalist, often feel defensive, looking up author photos to fact-check their claims. Upon seeing images of normal-looking women, the instinct is to declare, "Not ugly at all!" Yet Fairyington explicitly rejects such compliments, noting that people, especially women, interrupt her to assure her she is not ugly.
She argues that this interruption stems from a societal fear of ugliness, a fate women are trained to avoid. Avoiding the word, she believes, deprives individuals of the language needed to describe their lived experiences. While calling someone ugly feels aggressive, both memoirists and looksmaxxers agree on one point: those who are not conventionally attractive face mistreatment. Denying someone the vocabulary to name their reality is perverse, yet "ugly" remains a cruel term. The provocative, unanswered question is whether applying it to oneself can become an act of self-love.
Ugliness as Otherness: Race and Queerness
Accusations of ugliness often originate externally, with both Hilal and Fairyington recalling being called ugly as children by family, authority figures, or peers. Crucially, the traits labeled ugly were markers of their otherness. For Hilal, an Afghan-born woman in Germany, it is her racial features—her long nose and dark body hair—that are deemed ugly. Her family pressures her to erase this otherness, with her aunt advising facial hair bleaching and her sisters undergoing rhinoplasties to gain paternal approval.
For Fairyington, a butch lesbian, her refusal to present as femme marks her as ugly. She writes that it looks like an active repudiation of what women are called to do to attract men. As a child, her mother's friends were baffled by her tomboyish energy, with one contemptuously questioning her identity. Fairyington felt that her queerness, not just her face, made her unattractive. The trappings of boyhood on her became wrong and ugly.
The Historical Contingency of Ugliness
Both authors explore the long, intimate history linking race, gender, and beauty philosophies. This historical analysis begins to dismantle ugliness as a stable category, revealing its gruesome political biases. If an aesthetic system deems people of color and queer individuals inherently ugly, what value does that system hold? Hilal delves into the history of plastic surgery, showing how it aimed to erase racial differences.
In the 19th century, an American surgeon developed nose jobs to anglicize "Irish noses," while in the 1930s, the German Jewish inventor of modern rhinoplasty offered discounts for "Jewish noses" to aid passing. Hilal also examines how early researchers linked looks to temperament, such as associating facial asymmetry with insanity or criminality with specific features. Fairyington cites a recent study showing people are more likely to believe those with "ugly faces" have acted immorally, a finding that resonates with looksmaxxers' claims about facial symmetry.
Reclaiming Ugly: A Fraught Endeavor
For both authors, being called ugly creates distance from their bodies and loved ones. Hilal imagines an idealized "other woman" with a more acceptable body, while Fairyington fears her ugliness might make her less lovable to her conventionally attractive daughter. Most people experience similar insecurities, with conventional advice urging self-acceptance and rejection of the beauty/ugly binary.
Fairyington and Hilal experiment with these ideas, with mixed results. After coming out, Fairyington felt desirable for the first time, as her masculinity appealed to queer women. Studying queer theory opened possibilities for cultivating "ugly" or transcending beauty standards. She wore flip-flops year-round to expose her "ugly feet." Yet, her optimism about "radical ugliness" is tempered by underlying tenderness and insecurity.
Aging, Mortality, and the Magnificence of Ugliness
Aging presents new challenges, with Hilal realizing the hardest ugliness to confront is that of old or sick bodies, which remind us of mortality and evoke disgust. She concludes with shame that much of her project aimed to enter "the realm of beauty" through ethical and aesthetic arguments. More productively, she embraces writer Mia Mingus's call for a shift from a politic of desirability to one of "ugly and magnificence."
Mingus's magnificent bodies are non-normative: shaking, spilling, needing help, limping, drooling. This framework helps Hilal reconcile with ugliness as a reflection of human frailty. She writes, "I learned to respect ugliness: as an enduring reflection, not just of myself in the mirror, but of our humanness." Ugliness bears witness to vulnerability and the limits of imposed ideals.
Conclusion: The Honesty of Ugly Bodies
Looksmaxxers strive for inhuman symmetry and hypermasculine ideals, pushing toward beauty with violence as if their new bodies will never die. In contrast, embracing ugliness is fraught with self-loathing risks, but as Hilal shows, a body reconciled to ugliness acknowledges its mortality. It is an honest body—and perhaps, in that honesty, there is something truly beautiful. These memoirs challenge us to rethink our cultural obsession with beauty and consider the profound truths hidden in what we label ugly.
