Tag Archives: ugliness

Ugliness in All Its Glorious Complexity

Debbie says:

The topic of “ugliness” has fascinated me for many years now, and I’ve never heard it discussed better than in this YouTube video by karakamos.

The video is over seven minutes long, and the follow-up video Kara posted after this started getting attention is eight minutes long. Both are worth your time. I’m not going to transcribe the whole thing, but here are some key quotations.

“I think of myself as ugly, and I don’t think of that as a bad thing. A lot of the time it’s just something that I can accept and be cool with, and get on. … I don’t want to call myself ‘unconventionally pretty.’ I am happy a lot of the time to think of myself as ugly. I think ugliness only becomes a problem when you let it get in the way of your life and of living. I can’t say that I’ve never let that happen, but it’s something that I’m dealing with and I’m generally okay with.

“When my appearance really gets to me and I’m feeling really gross about it, I try to remember a few things. One is that I am beautiful in some way because I am a living thing, and I think living things–to me at least–have some inherent beauty. …

“Another way that I console myself or deal with it is by putting things, again, into perspective. I think about the universe and I think about human beings as a species, and how actually ridiculous we look. Other mammals have fur and they’ve got four legs and they have some kind of really elegant gait … whereas humans are covered in hair, but you can’t see most of it, you just see like stuff that comes out of their heads randomly …

“I think about that and then I come back to my face in the mirror and, god, I wish I just had cheekbones or some kind of facial definition. …

“I never want to get into this place where I feel that what I look like is more important than what I do. And it seems like it’s a lot easier to let myself not do anything and to hold back because I don’t feel that I have a certain appearance. For some reason, that exempts me from having to do things, that it makes me any less capable. But it doesn’t. It might make it harder and it might take work on my part. But being beautiful is not an accomplishment. And being ugly doesn’t have to stop you from making accomplishments.”

She goes on to talk passionately about the YouTube series “My Mad Fat Diary” and what it taught her about being okay in yourself, whatever that self may be, leading to her conclusion:

“I can be things, and I can do things, and I don’t have to let my body or my insecurities about it get in the way of what I want. And sometimes I feel beautiful, and I think that’s an important thing to recognize too, that whether anyone else can see me that way, that I can. And ultimately, feeling beautiful or feeling ugly can feel like the same thing, as long as you don’t feel like either one of them has to get in the way of who you can be. Because they shouldn’t, and they don’t, and that is something that I am trying to remember always.”

I love Kara’s willingness to admit all of her contradictory and inconsistent responses to being ugly. She has the rare ability to look at herself from very far away and very close up at the same time, and to speak without artifice about what she sees.

If you follow the link to the second video, you’ll see that other people have uploaded their own responses and are sharing their reactions to ugliness. This has to be one of the first times that ugliness has ever been given its own stage, and it’s touching a valuable nerve in a lot of people. I’m not a YouTube kind of a girl, but I still find myself thinking “I wonder what I would say.”

(Also, while I respect Kara’s preference for being called ugly, she reminds me of my beloved friend Jenny, who died in an accident at 16, almost ten years ago now. So looking at Kara makes me feel warm and special, unrelated to how anyone else in the world might see her.)

Ugliness In The Eye Of The Beholder

Laurie says:

In an article in the NY Times, Natalie Angier talks to scientists in the field and discusses why we perceive some harmless animals as ugly.  Some of the explanations for our reactions are very problematical, but I thought the subject was fascinating. Our culture is obsessive about beauty and rarely considers anything more than biases when (not) thinking about ugliness.  We get nitpickingly specific about beauty and almost never considers ugliness.  It’s one of those things that everybody knows.

…Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

…Among the all-star uglies are the star nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away.

Clearly the second look matters. I don’t know how I’d feel about a star nose mole in life, but on second glance I rather liked it.  The nose seemed more sea anemone-like than repulsive, and the badger-like claws are attractive.

..As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.

…We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.

It’s interesting that so many of the creatures that are deadly or dangerous to us, we find beautiful.

…The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.

…Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.

…Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.

Looking at what different cultures eat, and ‘appetizing’ strongly includes visuals, it seems obvious that standards of ugliness – i.e. I wouldn’t put that in my mouth – vary greatly. Examining all of this I’m still struck by how shallow and circular these explanations are.  It strikes me as the very beginning of a conversation I’d love to see developed.