I was checking through your in ugliness tag and I had a question: I understand the mentality of embracing ugliness, but at the same time calling things like my big nose, body hair, etc ugly feels like a betrayal to my semitic heritage and more like conceding to antisemitic/eurocentric beauty standards rather than freeing myself from them. How do you balance those things?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I certainly don’t have the answers that will work for everyone but here goes
I think…embracing ugliness and disregarding beauty standards is sort of the same thing and the difference is mostly what resonates. Like most religions in the world basically just say to not be a dick but just in different ways. I think at some points in life for many people it is a more healing and helpful thing to feel beautiful and trying to embrace your own idea of beauty and see the beauty in yourself, other times it’s easier and more freeing to say “heck yes I’m an ugly sonnabitch and I love it”, I think both are sort of parallel paths to the common goal of not worrying so much about what you look like and just enjoying life, and they can honestly be done at the same time.
because really……beauty is so completely nebulous and vague and constricting an idea and that’s why I kind of reject it entirely? the idea of what is beautiful is always dictated by the dominant culture as a way to encourage conformity and I’m just entirely disinterested in what society/other people think is beautiful/ugly, I don’t really care. I think beauty and ugliness coexist in everyone, in every quality and feature, and what I find ugly in myself is also beautiful, and what other people find ugly in me others can find beautiful and vice versa. It’s entirely subjective. It’s not about saying “oh my face is ugly, because it’s too __, if it was more like ___’s face it’d be pretty, but that’s ok because being ugly is good…” not at all not ever, you are just as ugly as everyone else and just as beautiful as everyone else, the words mean nothing, only the feeling matters.
the world is always going to judge you, there will probably always be a dominant oppressive culture and the labels and identities we are prescribed by the external world are mostly outside of our control, but the words and habits we use to define ourselves are more controllable and for me, personally, when I remove beauty as desirable at all, let alone the ideal, i free myself to live honestly, to experiment with myself as a form of art when I want to, or to put my appearance entirely out of mind as often as I can, to appear as i appear and as I like to appear and to hell with public opinion.
if “embracing ugliness” feels wrong to you, then don’t do it, or don’t use those words, because they’re just words. Bottom line, just let yourself exist, and enjoy your appearance on your own terms, while existing as yourself in the present, through your own eyes, not while attempting to see yourself through the eyes of others. That’s all. :p <3
