ugly is the new punk rock.

(over 25, white, basically just hoping people can finally be free of the nightmare that is beauty culture, esp. the children/teenagers growing up in a world that seems even more painful and obsessive about beauty than the one i grew up in. kids deserve better. you all deserve better, no matter what age you are. <3)

[yesuglies]

log of experiences of possible lookism

red = likely lookism, black = unsure, could be other forms of prejudice. blue = likely to be other forms of prejudice but including it here anyway just in case.

11/04/26: went to a pub-restaurant with friends (both thin, conventionally attractive (cishet/white/able-bodied)). mostly fine but one member of bar staff was friendly and jokey with my friend when she ordered drinks - when she asked about an offer, did a jokey 'sorry, we don't - no, we still do that' - but when i later went up to order dessert was quite cold/dismissive in his/their tone - i don't know if he/they actually said 'what do you want' vs 'what can i get for you', but it was that kind of tone, and then said 'i can't hear you' in a fairly irritable tone.

i think i need to pay attention to what exactly happens in these exchanges, whether it's purely tone of voice/facial expression or word usage, so i can remember later on.

(like ik it's possible his/their day took a turn for the worse, but also maybe he/they just didn't want to be kind to someone he/they found unattractive or knew was socially considered unattractive & thus less worthy of kindness)

he/they did close up with 'thank you', but i was so miserable by that point it did not matter to me. (tbc this person did not use he/they pronouns to my knowledge, i'm trying to avoid assuming gender completely but also noting that based on hairstyle/clothing/facial hair i did assume they were a man.)

early march.

took off my mask (was outside, not esp crowded), and someone in a family group may have said 'put it back on'. i don't know if i'm hearing things or not.

early march (3 incidents): 1. went to a café with my friend (also fat but prettier than me - it's hard to tell actual conventional attractiveness when someone is fat but pretty bc fatphobia & lookism are so intertwined) and the difference between the way at least one member of the wait staff spoke to my friend and me at the checkout at the end was subtle but different & they were colder/harsher to me (& the same when i went up to order a dessert) - this was mostly tone-related and could have been more fatphobia than lookism - i ate a dessert and a milkshake with my meal whereas my friend just had a meal and water, and possibly they were judging me for the extra order.

2 & 3. including both because they happened at the same time - at the train station, wearing a mask when two men walked past me, one said 'oh my God' & the other turned back to look at me. then another man on the platform kept glaring at me.

unsure if the first was people being ableist/otherwise judgemental about masks (i rarely get criticism for masking on public transport/at the doctors/when shopping, but maybe the chickens have come home to roost), or possibly entirely unrelated. the latter i do think was likely hostility to my wearing a mask, but that may just be me being judgemental about middle-aged white men & their likelihood of being in the reform-voting mask-hating demographic. mask-wearing is odd because in a sense it protects me from lookism, but people can also be prejudiced because of fatphobia, which is visible anyway, or because they're judgemental about masks.

(the genders are again assumed based on clothing/hairstyles, noting when i assume people are men bc that is relevant w/r/t lookism given that men are granted the power of being the subject and judging the attractiveness of marginalised genders, who are cast in the role of object. obviously various kinds of privilege/oppression cast people in the same roles, but attractiveness is so tied to gender & femininity (inc abjected femininity) in general that i do think it's relevant here. apologies if someone is reading this and cringing at the clumsiness.)

december 2025: at a train station in my mask around a group of young, loud men, when one of them started talking about how he was going to 'ask for a tenner' from someone on benefits, because they 'earn more than him'? his friend was defending them in a somewhat convoluted way by saying something along the lines of 'actually it's miserable to not be able to earn money' (i think?), and then he came out with 'people on benefits just sit there and dye their hair blue and put on masks' and i, sitting right in front of him in my mask, felt very targeted. ('dye their hair blue' was undoubtedly dogwhistle transphobia.) since i did not look at them, although they said they were going in the same direction as me, idk if they were the people on the platform laughing or the people engaging in nightmarish misogyny on the train by talking about various fat women they'd slept with in degrading ways while taking up the entire space in front of the door so everyone had to walk past them before leaving.

not sure if this was ableism + anti-mask hostility (dk if he assumed i was on benefits because of my mask? i am, but not sure how he assumed that just from looking at me and the mask seems more likely than fatness or lookism in this case, but it's possible he thinks 'unattractive people = a particularly marginalised group of poor/disabled people') or if lookism and/or fatphobia was involved.

mid-may 2025: this one is uncertain purely because i wasn't sure if i actually heard the sound or misinterpreted it, but this one would be a case of full-on public harassment if so - someone making what may have been vomit noises at me from a car.

[bebsi-cola]

the countermeasure to dehumanisation is not sexualisation. the countermeasure is to treat the other person with respect and dignity actually.

[bebsi-cola]

i don't care if you wanna fuck fat people or hairy people or trans people or the elderly or disabled people or whatever. can you treat them like human beings

[liondrakes]

Evergreen!👇🏾

Race isn’t mentioned in this post, but I’m sure it applies regardless. Take the screenshot in context to both that and the groups mentioned above.

[yesuglies]

View this post on Instagram

[xenasaur]

we talk about how cis people are just handed a gender and accept it without thought but I think what we fail to mention is that the same happens with sexuality

[xenasaur]

this extends beyond the bounds of simple heterosexuality. it's also about being told that you enjoy skinny white cis women with button noses and straight hair and no stretch marks and no cellulite etc. lotta gay people never let go of that one!

[decompose1]

you are all too comfortable with implying a lack of intelligence is a moral failing and your intelligence and/or academic skill makes you in some way superior/a better person, sometimes even going as far as ""joking"" about "natural selection", that the nebulous "stupid people" should all die. this is a eugenicist thought pattern and you sound like a fascist, just so you know.

[decompose1]

cognitively & intellectually disabled people are real, more common than you think, and exist in online, in real life, and in your communities. we see it when you say things like that. not only do you have no way of knowing if the person you're talking about is one of us or if they're some kind of "acceptable target" to you, but when you equate intelligence to morality, you hurt us all the same. make space for the intellectually disabled in your activism or admit you're a fascist like the rest of them

[yesuglies]

Our self worth, inseparable from our success at gender, depends on our desirability — our value determined by how well we mold ourselves into a unit. The story of the Couple tells us that another being can complete us, make what is incomplete whole. It is fixed within the feminized ‘private’ sphere of the home, painting as shameful betrayal the seeking of support or intimacy outside of the unit.

Kill the Couple In Your Head

[yesuglies]

As Artaud has asked us “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” (Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu), let us be done with the judgment of men.

Against the Couple Form

[yesuglies]

coping with harassment/fear of others

the 'it's them not you'/'i don't receive that' method - putting their concerns, their disgust, their judgement, back with them. it's their problem, not yours

the alok method - seeing strangers as potential friends, another person to love, figuring out how to love harder, how to have compassion for everyone + responding with compassion when people are cruel - 'how lonely, hurt, tired you must be to respond to another human being that way' (nb: you do not owe your harassers compassion or sympathy, this is just a more extreme/militantly compassionate way of reframing it as their issue - it's their sadness or loneliness or fear about sexgender/fatness/disability that makes them lash out at strangers, whether to bolster their own place in the hierarchy or to try to forget the ways they don't measure up/create a scapegoat so they feel secure in their position in the hierarchy & safe from being targeted by systems of oppression.)

plan your response to negativity before it happens - prepare to comfort yourself, prepare to challenge the person

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

I'll die on the hill that expecting women to remove hair that men are not expected to remove is misogynistic body policing.

Your body is your own. Body hair and facial hair do not become "unhygienic" or harm anyone, just because they belong to a woman instead of a man.

Every woman who doesn't do the hair removal demanded of her is participating in staking the feminist claim that women's bodies exist for ourselves, not to fulfill the aesthetic preferences of people with power over us.

I'm grateful to every woman I ever knew who showed me that it's possible to just stop removing body hair and (for many women in many situations) it's literally fine. No one in my life even comments on my pit hair or leg hair, except for a kid once in awhile, which gives me the chance to say things like "Most grownups grow hair there! Some grownups remove it, but I don't want to."

I'm also grateful to the transfeminists who taught me to see the gender role enforcement in the demand that women have no facial hair.

Even when the removal of certain hair feels necessary for safety from harassment or abuse, understanding that the stigma against female facial & body hair is misogynistic (and frequently specifically transmisogynistic and racist) can make it easier to identify the structural problem, instead of buying into the propaganda that there's something fundamentally wrong with your body if you grow this hair at all.

You have every right to decide what purely cosmetic work you will spend time, money, and planning on, and what isn't worth doing. Regardless of what you decide, you should have the right to live free of harassment, discrimination, and other forms of body policing. So should everyone else.

If people treat you badly in attempts to enforce this gender role, that's because they're misogynistic, not because you're doing anything wrong.

[yesuglies]

will try to id properly later, but for now:

uglification, noun: a social weapon that mobilizes people to fear, detest, support the oppression and marginalization of, or feel superior toward other people, beliefs, locations, causes, behaviors, desires, objects, or a specific individual

[example (about environmental manipulation by fisheries) not transcribed]

a tool, ideology, and type of oppression that designates some bodies as more or less worthy of love, respect, access and dignity

[example not transcribed]

uglify, verb: to stigmatize a person, group, location, or trait as undesirable, unattractive, immoral, unwanted, unlovable, wrong/bad, or monstrous because of prejudice, fear, ignorance, anger, malice, or social conditioning

[example (about parental homophobia/transphobia) not transcribed]

[ten more definitions and examples not transcribed, including ridiculing/bullying/spreading disinformation, justifying oppression, diminishing worth, social punishment for failure to conform to expected behavior or appearance, critical perception of oneself or others, creating social hierarchies & deciding treatment of others, stigmatizing bodies & appearances, & three others I'm too tired to even summarise right now]

uglified, adjective/description: a body, body part, individual, group, object, belief, desire, behavior, experience, or location rendered as undesirable or immoral by others or oneself

[example (about encampments) not transcribed]

Photos from Reclaiming Ugly: A Radically Joyful Guide to Unlearn Oppression and Uplift, Glorify and Love Yourself by Vanessa Rochelle Lewis.

[disabledfurry]

what if we stopped giving characters strabismus as a funny joke. what if we stopped? what if we stopped. what if we stopped

why the fuck do i even need to say this. "it's googly eyes" no, real people look like that. and you know they do. i know you know they do

ID: a graphic titled "strabismus (misaligned eyes) by Cleveland Clinic. there are 4 types of strabismus, each represented by a drawing of a person with it.

Hypotropia: eye points downward.

Exotropia: eye points outward.

Hypertropia: eye points upward.

Esotropia: eye points inward.

end ID

[disabledfurry]

i've only seen it in the tags just once, but because it happens every time i mention strabismus jokes, i want to preemptively say:

this joke when it appears in media is not usually just "hey this person has a weird eye" it's "hey this person is disabled", specifically, 99% of the time, "this person is intellectually disabled and either has or potentially has brain damage". (alternatively, rarely, "this person is mentally ill", such as fiddleford mcgucket and his glass eye, and a handful of cartoon villains i saw growing up for some reason)

strabismus jokes are not harmful because they "wrongly associate strabismus with stupidity", they are harmful because they are making fun of disabled people, especially intellectually disabled people and people with brain damage, who often do have strabismus, because many congenital and neurological conditions cause strabismus, intellectual disability, developmental disability, and cognitive disability. so while they think our eyes "look funny", that is only part of it

the strabismus jokes i see are generally about exotropia or esotropia. i see them on tv in comedy skits, i see them in cartoons both new and old, i see them in just random peoples's fucking art, i see them in reaction images often, i see them in memes often, i see them in emojis in discord servers, i see them in new media like fionna and cake (candy queen) and dungeon meshi (most notably marcille's "if i'm not useful to anyone" scene, laios, and an orc are all portrayed with exotropia as a joke at least once.)

there is a tv tropes term for this: fish eyes. and another! comically cross-eyed. the second even mentions this:

"In Real Life strabismus is a serious condition and poking fun of it is likely to offend some people, as it's a relatively common disorder. Despite this it's still an Acceptable Target in most circles, and mockery of strabismus is surprisingly common even in modern media."

but why are we considered an acceptable target? is it so normalized to make fun of people with visible differences, especially facial differences, that you need someone on a condemned social media platform to tell you it's not ok?

how do you "not know" that people with strabismus exist? stop putting that on my post. how could you not read between the lines when you see characters take a blow to the head and suddenly become cross eyed, speaking and walking like they're drunk? when things fall out of their hands and they drool? i always remember patrick going "wall eyed" and drooling and spongebob snapping his fingers. how could you not see what was being made fun of? did you not have disabled kids in your schools? have you never seen people with strabismus outside, even though there's at least 13 million of us? i just can't wrap my head around it- how could you "not know"?

someone i know recently said that people with visible disabilities are so hyper-visible that we've become "invisibilized". inconsequential. i'm hidden in my house and a shadow at my mother's heels, a flea bitten bad dog who does not speak unless i'm spoken to, does not try to take or want more than i have been graciously offered, and does not challenge the way things are

i refer back to the ugly laws- that unless we were there for the purpose of entertainment (jokes, inspiration porn, "feel good" stories that dehumanize us and shower praise upon able bodied people for being so kind as to take care of us or to take us to prom or to dance with us or to fucking... take us to a strip club, because we are also desexualized, and degendered, rendered entirely fucking inhuman and only existing for able bodied consumption, even in our day to day irl interactions) or reminding people to be repulsed by us (horror, villains, "undesirable" characters like loser nerds or stalkers), we were not to be seen in public.

this is also a call to like, think about what you're seeing and what's being depicted and what's being implied by what you're seeing depicted. think about what's being implied by marcille with her wide apart eyes and her childish voice and limited vocabulary. who might sound like that? who might look like that?

[yesuglies]

really don't like that dropout did that 'two uggos' sketch. i know they have much more serious issues (copaganda collabs, lack of trans women in the cast), but idk. it just sucks when 'progressive' groups/people decide a certain group of people are worth laughing at & aren't worthy of respect or kindness. & it's to be expected bc they're happy to erase & ignore people of colour & trans women by accepting copaganda collabs & failing to expand the cast, but ugh. sucks.

[puppygirllaika]

one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal is the ability to be normal about stuff. be normal about sex. be normal about bodies. be normal about sex work. be normal about peoples kinks. and then, most importantly, when someone gets prudish, or puritanical, or conservative, recognize that you are the normal one in the conversation, and act like it.

"You think she should be ashamed? that's weird man. why do you care so much. You think that's gross? okay... kinda weird that you care though. you found out about her kinks? what are you, like, stalking her or something? what, you think her job sucks 'cause it involves sex? what's it got to do with you? you're really obsessed with other people man, it's kinda creepy."

the duality of shame and normalcy is not static. you get to decide what is normal and what is shameful, and you can do it by your own standards. If you let someone else make that decision for you, you're ceding more ground than you could possibly know.

[strawberry-crocodile]

there's a post where someone said "can you respect trans women who look like men" and someone responded something like "hell yeah I love people who fuck with gender!" and like... yeah that's cool, but in a lot of spaces "trans woman who looks like a man" is a lot less likely to be someone who is intentionally comfortably presenting masculine, and a lot more likely to be a girl who hasn't started transition, or can't safely, or just didn't or couldn't put in the effort to pass as fem today, and a lot of them will just look like schlubby dudes and not a radically presenting queer person. and you should be able to respect that.

[undeadentropy]

Also, and I can't emphasize this enough. Are you cool with trans women who aren't hot? Like, if she's a solid 3, do you think she still has rights? Because a lot of people fail this test. Most people, in my experience.

[strawberry-crocodile]

no @leddzephyr youre so fucking correct thats basically what i was trying to dance around in my original post

[adriagan]

it fucking sucks being a disabled person who can't work and having to see these fuckass posts where someone's like "ahaha jobless people have no life and that's why everyone shitty online has No Job" and everyone and their mother reblogs it joyfully onto my dash for me to see. yes unemployed and unemployable people are truly without exception dogshit people with no hobbies and no redeeming qualities. you're so right. anyway if you'll excuse me i have to start my shift at the I'll Never Be Employed Because Of Permanent Disability And I Love Knowing How You Really See Me store

[adriagan]

if ur able to work can u reblog this i am seriously SO sick of it.

[adriagan]

btw this isn't solely a disability rights issue or an issue about people who are entirely unable to work. you should also be thinking about the people who are regarded as unhireable. transfems are hugely discriminated against in this way, people of color are passed over for less qualified white people, anyone who has any difficulty playing the interview game is less hireable... frankly anyone who made the mistake of pursuing the things they love and now has a degree for a niche field. if you still joke about Jobless People it's because you've fundamentally connected the worth of people to their labor, and specific labor, work that you see as valuable. and while i'm at it stop making fun of people who still live with their parents. asshole.

[closet-keys]

whenever the conversation on desirability politics via dating "preferences" comes up--

in the sense of someone categorically being uninterested dating someone for being part of some stigmatized demographic (e.g. trans, fat, racialized, disabled, etc.) even if they were fully into someone before learning they are part of that demographic

--it's always reframed as a debate around if it is prejudiced to not date the person.

I think this is such a frustrating direction for the conversation to go. obviously losing interest in someone purely for their social position within a marginalized demographic is something that emerges from prejudice. but where people absolutely lose the plot is the implication that covering up prejudice and is the same as actually unlearning it. if they were to keep dating that person just to avoid being considered transphobic/fatphobic/racist/ableist/etc that it still prejudice!

the prejudice exists whether or not they date the person. so they probably should not, because any relationship that emerges is almost guaranteed to be abusive towards the marginalized person, as it's founded on bigoted resentment.

if you lose attraction to someone because of a stigmatized characteristic, you shouldn't date them. but you are still prejudiced, and you should still work on that. not for the purpose of widening your dating pool (who cares!) but because you impact other people in the world as you move through it.

when you view demographics with disgust and discomfort, it matters. these biases are never contained to sex and romance. someone identifying this prejudice is not saying "fuck me or you're a bigot" they are saying "leave me alone, and also please care enough to grow as a person."

[manuciruja]

I think it's insane that even in the most leftist and "progressive" spaces the idea of equating morality with looks is alive and present and no one fucking bats an eye at it. like racists and mysoginysts are always portrayed as fat and hairy and generally unkept, as a contrast to the morally good and attractive leftists of course; people will have no problem being genuinely fucking awful about someone's appearance if they're deemed to be a "bad person". and the worst part is you point all of this out and people act like you're reading too much into things like no dude you gotta start using your brain more