Ugly Acceptance.

I've joked about it before, but this time I'm serious: we need an ugly acceptance movement. I'm not really qualified to be the standard-bearer, for obvious reasons, but I see the societal need.

Some principles of this movement:

-There's no such thing as ugly. No one has "ugly molecules" physically in their skin; it's all in the eye of the beholders and beholders vary a lot more than you guessed. All those weird porn sites with 600-pound women, 80-year-old women, hairy women, bodybuilder women, ad nauseum? They exist because someone is paying money for them, and they're not forking out $30/month ($99/6 months, BEST VALUE) just for laughs. So to call a person "ugly" really only means "ugly to me;" it's nothing intrinsic to them. This isn't a value judgement but a philosophical statement; ugliness can never be an intrinsic quality.

-The fact that perceptions of beauty are not evenly distributed among all possible traits does not prove that beauty is objective. Everyone on Earth could agree that Alyson Hannigan is more beautiful than Carrot Top, and she still wouldn't be more beautiful.

-Most people (self included) need to get a serious human-decency adjustment in the way they deal with people who are ugly to them.

-Note from the examples that came to me that ugly-hatred is bound up with a lot of other, less acceptable hatreds: ageism, sizeism, ableism, often racism. Thinking that a person is ugly because they're old is ageist; thinking that they're ugly because they're old and therefore it's okay to be a jerk to them is what ugly acceptance aims to fight.

-Sexism is also an ENORMOUS factor here; the idea that a woman's beauty is her worth is tremendously sexist and tremendously pervasive. A woman's beauty (to you) may be her fuckability (to you), but there's a whole lot women can do besides get fucked. Ugly women are so often treated like less valuable women, without anyone even asking how good they are at baking or hockey or civil engineering.

-No, you don't have to fuck uglies. Really. That's not what it's about. Your sexual choice is absolutely inviolate, a pure example of "management reserves the right to refuse service" no matter how petty or non-PC or silly or cruel your reasoning--I would never tell anyone they had to fuck anyone and certainly not a person they weren't attracted to. You don't have to look at ugly porn either and you don't even have to proclaim sexual attraction for uglies.

-But you can accept people in a lot of non-fucking ways that still matter. Give ugly people an even shot at being your friend, your employee, your political representative, your service professional. Treat ugly people in social situations with respect and uglyblindness. Don't tolerate appearance-based joking or bullying in kids or adults. Don't use "ugly" as an insult, and call out people who rag on the ugliness of people they weren't going to fuck anyway. Don't talk or think about attractiveness as an intrinsic, objective quality; don't participate in the constant rating of everyone's attractiveness.

-Saying "but X is beautiful!" about unpopular physical features misses the point. The point is that maybe it's really not beautiful to certain people, but so what? If they're not screwing or photographing/painting the unbeautiful, these certain people have no right to care.

-As far as media representations: art and marketing both have justifications for featuring statistically-beautiful people more often, and I can accept that. However I cannot accept implications in the media that the statistically-beautiful are better people, or that beauty is a massively important quality in all walks of life.



The language usage here is super-awkward, because unlike with other acceptance movements, I don't recommend anyone self-identify as ugly. There is such a thing as "generally uglier to most people than most people are," (and that's what I meant when I casually said "ugly" above) but it's a fuzzy category, often severely mis-perceived by the subject, and not really a helpful designation.



Ugly acceptance is a tough, tough thing to conceptualize; the distinction between "ugly" and "pretty" enters our consciousness about the same time the distinction between "up" and "down" does, and we come to think of it as just as fundamental. Saying that pretty doesn't exist thus feels, viscerally, as wrong as saying "down" is a matter of opinion. But, you know... ask someone in Australia.

No one's ugly. No one's pretty. Fuck who you like, but everyone's a person. That's ugly acceptance in a nutshell.