nothing is ugly
ozempic, body positivity, arenas of spectacle, zombified desires
Where body positivity rose to challenge the infrastructures of western beauty standards—it is easy to interpret the recent, ozempic-powered resurgence of noughtiesque skinniness as a failure of the movement.
Ugliness blooms in the psyche with such violence that some declare it a palaeolithic instinct. A 2020 social and clinical psychology study titled Ugliness Judgments Alert us to Cues of Pathogen Presence examines how “ugliness judgments are linked to the behavioural immune system, alerting us to objects that may contain potentially harmful diseases1”. Ryan P. Doran’s philosophical essay Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder offers “the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust2”, with disgust being defined as “a basic emotion which is characterised, paradigmatically, by feelings related to nausea”.
In early life, beauty and ugliness bifurcate crudely along a moral binary. Handsome, fairytale heroes—lily-white in face and/or teeth—become pristine bastions of justice. The damsels they save are dainty, beautiful pillars of the purest victimhood. Nursery rhyme villains are rendered physically undesirable, disfigured or dark in a fascinating ouroboros of cause and effect. (Scar just so happens to be the darkest and most maimed lion in the pride.)
With the binaries of beauty = good / ugly = bad fashioning the foundational pillars of western beauty standards (and all of these concepts having their own symbioses with oppressions like anti-Blackness and ableism)—rather than interpreting the “skinny comeback” as an end to the body positivity’s era—perhaps it is easier to understand beauty-based prejudices like anti-fatness as so terminally woven into the anatomy of society that any contemporary challenge can only provide their temporary remission. Is it? But we must do it. It is our responsibility, in the words of the great Kwame Ture.
At the risk of contemplating perspectives feminist scholars more learned have explored deeper, I find myself curious about the very battleground(s) where beauty standards have been challenged—specifically Instagram (and its other visual-based social media platform relatives).
The mind drifts to pastel-hued insta-infographics whenever I think of body positivity, which doesn’t accurately capture the length or breadth of the movement’s activity but is perhaps the most familiar access point for so many introduced to it.
In the same way Twitter seems socially engineered to reward riler-uppers and foster addiction to perpetual cycles of petty conflict, Instagram is socially engineered to supply a steady trickle of ✨ aesthetics ✨ —ornately plated food, greek-god physiques chiseled in luxury gyms, an endless pantheon of unattainable baddies—curating kernels of desire in reels and carousel images to rise to the apex of the algorithm™ to flood dopamine receptors and keep users hooked via the irresistible glamour of spectacle. With a near supernatural prescience, Guy Dubord reflects on the imagery of such spectacles in his 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle:
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.3
If we understand Instagram and other visual-based social media as arenas of spectacle—full to the brim with “concrete inversions of life”—perhaps we must consider how much a cultural attitude can be shifted through them? This is not an question reserved for body positivity’s fight alone but any social movement sharing its tenets through these arenas of aesthetics.
I suspect the complication of spectacle rendered body positivity less a challenge to beauty standards and more a commitment to expanding its borders. An eerie chill would roll over me whenever I observed a disabled person wheeling down a New York Fashion Week runway or an ad-campaign presenting a racially diverse group of differently sized woman. I’d shivered in the same way when George Floyd passed and every corporation decided Black people appear to matter and that it was finally time to take a bold, reparative step towards removing caricatured grins from packets of rice and bottles of instant pancake mix.
Symbolic changes are unsustainable. Or rather, they exist to coat infrastructures with fresher paints. When pressured to change, infrastructures eventually revert back to their traditional shape or, at best, subsume new data and make themselves vaster. Institutions and the societal standards they represent have an observable rhythm. The star-spangled banner vulgarity of Donald J. Trump appears as an inevitable chaser to the multi-culturally suave imperialism of Barack Obama. DEI begets DOGE. Body positivity begets Ozempic. The elasticity of these infrastructures (and on the topic of western beauty standards these include but are not limited to: fashion houses, magazines and advertising companies) can only bend so far until they bounce back into the values they’ve been formed from.
I won’t pretend to know how to snap the rubber. I suppose my goal is mostly to say, “that is a rubber band and you’re treating it like a brick.” There is no intellectual razor in this essay that will shred the band of beauty standards into elastic debris. However, I find myself wondering whether what sort of liberation lies in the guts of ugliness.
Mia Mingus’ essay, Moving toward the ugly: a politic beyond desirability, confronts ugliness and poses questions to it that I’ve found myself asking for years:
We all run from the ugly. And the farther we run from it, the more we stigmatize it and the more power we give beauty. Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot. What would it mean if we were ugly? What would it mean if we didn’t run from our own ugliness or each other’s? How do we take the sting out of “ugly?” What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel?4
As I pen this essay, I feel ugly. In the three month window of spring, I suffer from intense hay-fever symptoms.
It was so bad when as a kid that teachers would send me out of class. Pollen would inflame my asthma and we found my respiratory symptoms would settle down if I stayed in the library in the middle of the school. On my worst days, the office staff would call my mum and she’d leave work early to take me home but most of the time I’d just camp out in the library under a teaching assistant’s supervision for the afternoon—eyes and nose streaming unceremoniously—sniffling and engorging myself on books.
I’d leak an unholy potion of tears and Optrex drops into one tissue, Beconase and snot onto another, until exhaustion or forgetfulness would meld the two tissues into one. Some point down the line, I’d finally give up trying to plug the leaks altogether and set the allergy fluids free to drizzle on book pages.
Aptly, this is how I acquired my first Harry Potter book. The teacher’s assistant supervising me likely assumed keeping a book with dried booger pages broke a hygienic code of conduct so she told me I could keep it in its allergen-mangled state.
As an adult, I don’t fair much better. I’ve tried many remedies. Every anti-histamine you can name, neti pots, steam baths, local honey. I’ve heard rumblings of mysterious immunotherapy injections the NHS keep in the centre of a booby trapped temple of bureaucracy. I’m yet to secure it.
When spring arrives, I treat it like mammalian winter. I go into pseudo-hibernation for a few weeks so I may sniff and leak and wheeze and rub my eyes in relative peace. It has presented a strange, seasonal relationship to my own body and how it (not I necessarily) is perceived. “I feel ugly”. There are weird weight distributions the word “ugly” is carrying. My most immediate feelings are discomfort and vulnerability, overcast with a relative inability to focus. Ugliness clasps its claws around an essence beyond those feelings because, ultimately, it speaks to feeling undesirable.
How can we mention beauty standards without the entropy of desirability? Western beauty standards are governments of desirability, funded liberally by the libidinal economy5 of what bell hooks affectionately names “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.
Desire is a messy ecosystem. Want is as present as shame. Fear seeps into attraction. Euphoria as woven as despair. It is as much about being as wanting. Desire presents, or perhaps evolves, at a pace and with a ferocity too wild for western ideals to contain into the rigidity of its traditions and infrastructures. The result is contortions and fragmentations—amplified grossly in the arenas of spectacle.
When Ashton Hall’s videos recently stoked virality to thinly-veiled admiration and hollered ridicule, I was most fascinated by how his routine felt spiritually indistinguishable from Patrick Bateman—aesthetically pleasing, religiously performed yet functionally devoid of any soul. At a time when the average person’s quality of life is palpable declining, Hall’s videos struck me like well-orchestrated capitalistic monuments to nothing.
Nevertheless, Hall’s spike in popularity reveal him as an ideal—satirically or seriously—in the arenas of spectacle where masculine desirability is ulteriorly geared towards courting aspiration from other men. Gone is the age of the principled, rugged every-man. Metrosexuality has won out; ascending to the gold-medal podium of manhood with the traditional desire of conquest remaining—especially in regards to women.
In that respect, Hall’s videos are perfect odes. His muscularity dwarfs Bateman’s; with his Blackness positioning a fetishistic lens unto his ritualistic upkeep of an aesthetic self/lifestyle that careens into utter illogicality (like—does bro step out the lift, set up the camera, go back in the lift, close the door, then record himself stepping out the lift?). The wordless, ASMR presentations of daily activity are accentuated tastefully with a faceless, servant-wife who’s revealed only in obliging body parts to infuse his videos with an puzzling air of authority.
If you were to argue Hall’s visuals are peacockings to intrigue women within or aspiring towards a certain socio-financial tax bracket, I’d dare not disagree. The assertion his videos are carefully engineered to make the traditional male mind nod in appreciation is also hard to argue with.
Desire has fractured along lines of commodity in the same way beauty/ugliness fractures along moral lines. Whether Hall is peacocking for women or trying to get a head-nod from the boys, the overarching truth is that he is trying to make money—for capitalistic success is synonymous with survival. He performs in the arena of spectacle; locked in a perpetual state of getting ready as a source of entertainment and/or distraction and/or inspiration, his own body, a currency.
This, of course, is not a new or surprising transaction. We all barter our bodies in some way under capitalism. What is perhaps new about it all is how we’re dealing with the modern evolutions of spectacle. The epidemic of sexlessness in film that Raquel S. Benedict identifies in her essay, Everyone is beautiful and no-one is horny extends beyond the silver screen to the little blue one in our pockets. There is a profound disconnect between a man looking at a beautiful woman on Instagram—vivid and curated—and wanting her. We watch sex behind thicker plates of glass than ever before. An even further disconnect exists between wanting her libidinally (as an sex object) and wanting her whole (as a potential partner). Each are fundamentally incomplete desires unto themselves.
Where desire for a public sex symbol may have—at one point—been once-removed (a psychic death onto itself), it is now divorced along a mobius strip of unattainability. To patronise an Onlyfans model is a contract of distance, the illusion of potentially “having her” in any real way is completely removed by the very transaction of subscription. I could never say whether this transaction of desire is worse or better, simply that it is warping us all into inhabiting more voyeurism than ever before.
With desirability dictating how well we are treated in society—a reality that undoubtedly affects women and femmes in more pointed ways than men—it seems the masculine mind is tearing itself apart trying to fathom the chasm that is now between themselves and a Kardashian vs. the gap between an average young man in the late 1950’s and Marilyn Monroe. In the arenas of spectacle, the men’s heterosexual relationship with desire is zombified—or as @lilgnar has stated more poignantly and succinctly: “niggas was never meant to see this many bad bitches, social media got us fried. our ancestors used to only see 10 like baddies in dey whole life.”
It would be foolish of me to try to articulate how this voyeuristic pressure is affecting women from any vantage point other than flawed and incomplete observation. Anecdotally, I know Black women’s existence outside of the western beauty standard is already fraught with too many conflicting tensions to house in one essay. It is in the arenas of spectacle where the BBL procedure, based on a psycho-sexual exaggeration of Black women’s stereotypical proportions, was adopted by non-Black women of the Kardashian ilk and elevated into a quasi-western beauty standard. With the caricatured Black feminine form reduced a trend; the libidinal colonialism of a body type brings just as much casualty in the “skinny resurgence” as the body positivity movement. That is: to discard a body type that certain women are born with as a trend is the iniquitous work only made possible by the rigidity of westernisation, and I am sure someone more tuned in to pop-culture than me will note the reversion of the Kardashians, specifically, towards skinniness aligns with a socio-economic climate that is careening towards a cataclysmic global recession.
Beauty is a buttonhole that desire attempts to fill. My orientation as an artist should dictate an undying fealty for beautiful things, right? But when Susan Sontag speaks about the differences between prose and poetry in The Aesthetics of Silence, I find myself undergoing a cognitive recalibration:
The aim of prose is to communicate, the use of language in prose is perfectly straightforward. Poetry, being an art, should have quite different aims: to express an experience which is essentially ineffable; using language to express muteness. In contrast to prose writers, poets are engaged in subverting their own instrument: and seeking to pass beyond it. Insofar as this theory assumes that art is concerned with Beauty, it isn't very interesting. (Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon this essentially vacant concept. As if art were "about" beauty, as science is "about" truth!)6
Poetry—although often stumbling into beauty, is in search of an “effable experience”. We could reductively call this ineffability “a species of truth”. A truth the pursuit of beauty can often get in the way of fully discovering.
When Mingus writes, “there is only the illusion of solace in beauty. If age and disability teach us anything, it is that investing in beauty will never set us free. Beauty has always been hurled as a weapon. It has always taken the form of an exclusive club; and supposed protection against violence, isolation and pain, but this is a myth. It is not true, even for those accepted in to the club. I don’t think we can reclaim beauty,” I know I am not alone in feeling trapped by a world governed by beauty. There is an imposition as both a desirer and a desiree, an uninteresting imprisonment of the need to be satisfied.
In the yearly, bear-cave retreat of springtime where I resign myself to the throes of ugliness—allowing myself only to be seen by loved ones and eschewing any of the performances of desire altogether—I find myself beside a thinning veil, drawn closer to understanding how the arenas of spectacle are door handles to a more fractured sense of humanity.
In looking beyond desirability, Mingus affirms ugliness is a conduit for magnificence.
“Magnificence has always been with us. Always been there in the freak shows—staring back at the gawking crowd, in the back rooms of the brothels, in the fields fresh with cotton, on the street corners in the middle of the night, as the bombs drop, in our breaths after surviving the doctor’s office, crossing the border, in the first quiet moments of a bloody face after the attack is done. Magnificence was there.”
I consider how the arenas of spectacle is lined with complicating ground, a metaphysical quicksand, whereby way of presentation and performance we attempt to beautify. I participate even now—even here. The point of sharing anecdotes about my allergies was to present a scenery of ugliness, which is perhaps overshadowed by the fact I’ve taught myself to write with a resolve and rhythm that’ll always be artistically pleasant for me to read back even if I wince at the subject matter.
The paradox of spectacle.
The ugly, in its centring on the stage, is reified into a contorted beauty. Perhaps, the most magnificent thing that ugliness can be is divorced from the paradigms of spectacle altogether, rendered not egregious nor triggering of disgust but simply a realm of everyday discomfort, like stubbing a toe or missing a bus.
When I thought of this piece and titled it—I assumed it would conclude with a desire to reclaim. But there are so many ways that reclamation can be a trap; a way to reposition elements of the oppressed through oppressive dynamics.
Something else has been happening as I’ve been writing, too. This is a topic I feel shaky about, unqualified to speak with any authority, and so I’ve let my mind meander in a manner that I don’t typically allow. I am freestyling because, on the immense topic of western beauty standards, the holes I’d usually jam my feet into are not clear, there is no angle I concretely have, no set path that I can hand to you as a polished nugget of knowledge.
No.
On the topic of beauty standards—maybe beauty itself—I am searching for a truth that shifts as perpetually as the surface of the sun. A way of seeing and accepting things as they are, how they appear and what they could be all at once. I peer at ugliness, not as something greater or less than beauty but simply a different texture, a texture that isn’t indistinguishably tethered to immorality but signpost seeking to clarify our own assumptions of evil, disgust, or weakness. Ugliness as a confrontation of the spirit.
There is a potential destruction in the euphoria of beauty, when desire begins to button it. Such pursuits have guided me towards, and indeed torn-down, the most memorable relationships and experiences. There are violences in beauty, nestled beneath the perfect symmetries and fuzzy feelings, that ugliness could never commit. And if we only ever fixate on the beautiful, it is inevitable that we mistake those violences for ugliness.
This piece reminds me of a piece in the New York Times by Toni Morrison where she (lovingly) critiques the "Black is Beautiful" movement:
"But the more disturbing aspect of “Black Beautiful” was avoided: When the strength of people rests on its beauty, when the focus is on how one looks rather than what one is, we are in trouble. When we are urged to confuse dignity with prettiness, and presence with image, we are being distracted from what is worthy about us: for example, our intelligence, our resilience, our skill, our tenacity, irony or spiritual health. And in that absolute fit of reacting to white values, we may very well have removed the patient's heart in order to improve his complexion."
Something about how y'all both wrestle and sit with the complicated nature of physical beauty and its function in our current society is appreciated. It's vital that these conversations continue because the actual doing is so difficult when we are constantly being bombarded with visual rules to follow.
My view is generally that it’s always better to assert oneself as a subject than declare yourself a beautiful object— because a beautiful object is still an object, and I can’t feel very positive about that.
I wouldn’t say I’m positive about my body at all; I think being a body in a world full of body-destroying things is very horrible. But being an image of a body; that’s even worse! I don’t think a movement that says “now every body is an object of desire” could ever be emancipatory really