Ugly on the Internet

femme v3 / i3 // summer 17

Hello. I have to say from the beginning: I’ve worried that I have nothing to say. Gnashed some spiritual teeth. Avoided sitting down to write anything, concerned that when I finally did I would have to confront this gaping void of wordlessness.

Blinking cursor / blank page / hovering pen: metaphors of being forerever poised on the verge of thinking something

Some months ago I went through a depressive period concentrated on the fear that I have by now used up every idea I’ll ever have. Even when I’m feeling Okay or maybe even Pretty Good about most things, this particlar fear of being finished is a source of persistent, low-level anxiety. When I’m sad, though, this fear becomes both a cause and an effect of all the low, dark feelings. At those times, it blooms into a more acute kind of pain, one that lives in my guts. It’s always oozing through me, and my sad, turbulent body.

//The condensation of viscera and mood, exemplified in the term melancholia, is the subject of Gut Feminism//Elizabeth Wilson

I tend to read and write in cycles, alternately focusing on consuming or creating sentences. To get in touch with a variety of uglies--and to do something to unwind after drafting and editing for hours--I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about murder. (Ed. note: Also recently started listening to murder-related podcasts on my train commute. I’ve become a monster.) Ugly is everywhere. Dead bodies are ugly. The forces that drive someone to turn a person into a dead body are ugly.

Authorities do some ugly shit when reacting to suspicious circumstances re: dead bodies. It’s a themepark of confronting a variety of ugliness, its sinister potentials and weird escape routes. I want to make a joke here about Banksy’s Dismaland, but I’m not sure if there is such thing as a funny joke about Banksy anymore.

In any case, possibly buoyed by a weird true-crime euphoria, I’m feeling better. Things being the way they are, soon enough I will feel bad. My moods follow a sine wave and I’m try to ride the good while I can.

This is basically my diary, I understand, and I am embarrassed by this aspect. Making such predictable, confessional, female “art.” I’m embarrassed because teenage girl vulnerability is relentlessly mocked, pathologized, exploited, and commercialized, but rarely “taken seriously.”

The ways we speak, the media we like, the clothes we wear: young femmes are so often held up as indications of stupidity, laziness, hysteria, or vapidity. And we notice this: we can tell that you weren’t listening to us. I have this leftover adolescent adoration of Anne Frank, a girl who felt that everyone found her silly and annoying, who could say it best in writing to herself. It seeps into the shit I make as 27 yo person.

So who am I to say shit about ugly? Well, back when I was a teenage girl, I was resorting to another classic female coping mechanism. I first began dabbling in self-harm at age 15. I busted open a drugstore razor and scratched things like FAT and UGLY into my thighs. Shameful and hilarious confession, this absurdly literal expression of self-hate. But it’s true, I did that, and even though I’m older, I’m still living in the same set of bones that by now has endured much more than that.

The ugly is always there.

I wonder: How many people have to call you ugly for it to be true?

In between murder documentaries, I’ve been reading here and there about beauty and ugliness on the internet. It’s weird, but I think everything on the internet is weird. I guess I’m naive because I’m often surprised that even amidst the cacophony of internet voices, lots of people are still saying the same damn things.

Like: I went on Reddit for the first time, and found a thread where a young girl meticulously described every part of her body and what about it was ugly. This is why I’ll be lonely forever, she was announcing. I’m too ugly for love.

People were trying to be nice, and supportive, so the general responses were what people usually say when they want to make someone feel better about being ugly: I bet you’re actually not that bad, your personality can make up for it, don’t be so hard on yourself because looks aren’t everything, you’re still young so you could still become beautiful later.

Cliches that contradict each other, as cliches often do. As if throwing a variety of platitudes and hoping one sticks enough, irrespective of the content of the reassurance.

I also read some Men’s blogs that showed how feminism turns pretty girls into freakish crones, “something unhuman and beast-like.” So many folks holding forth on who and what is ugly and why, how people can try their best to neutralize their ugliness, and advice to ugly people for getting dates as well as advice to beautiful people for turning down ugly people who ask them on dates.

In contrast there’s also a substantial pocket of people on the inter net celebrating their various bodies above and against oppressive politics, and it’s a pocket with robust and variegated manipulations and reclamations of beauty. I stand in solidarity with movements aimed at expanding categories of health, physical attractiveness, sexual desirability, and human dignity. But I bristle at attempts to destabilize conventions of beauty when they seem to keep intact the implicit links between beauty and worth. All kinds of people can be beautiful, but what if they aren’t or don’t want to be?

No matter who it’s coming from, though, a lot of what people have to say about ugly on the internet is boring. Suggestions range from performing physical labor in order to mitigate your ugliest part, to performing emotional labor in order to see your ugliness as beautiful. Proclamations that “flaws make you beautiful,” and other efforts toward body positivity maintain that the only way to embrace our ugliness is to render it otherwise.

Fuck that. I want to pursue my ugly for what it is: freeing, expansive. Sometimes I intentionally wear clothes that are unflattering, or makeup that’s sloppy and weird. Most of the time I aim to look explicitly unnatural, altered, or playful.

Embracing being ugly means being less concerned with what strangers on the bus or in the bar or at the bookstore might think, and more focused on what feels right for me.

//I know beauty when I see it. All I can say is that I had a few good photographs taken where I look better than I do in real life. Beauty is fun. It has a place. But don’t mistake it for self-worth.

If you have to be beautiful, do beautiful things for someone other than yourself.//Joe Dallesandro

I try to occupy a space where the ways I look can say something about myself at that time which I wouldn’t otherwise be able to express. To many people that probably looks like ugliness, or strangeness. I’m interested in resisting beauty, in rejecting the idea that “beauty” is what we’re all aiming for when we put ourselves into the world.

Sometimes I’m aiming for androgynous adolescent with good taste in socks, some days art girl pajama chic. It sounds childish but that’s kind of the point: I still feel like I’m playing dress up when I get up and go through my closet, dye my hair, put on eye shadow.

And the more I think about being ugly, ineveitably, I wonder if I should be saying anything at all about this.

Can I be ugly on purpose if my body already adheres to several contemporary standards of beauty? I’m white and femme, thin and mobile, able-bodied, generally “healthy” (at least right now) with all my teeth and eyes and a typical arrangement of arms and legs, fingers and toes. I’ve worn glasses since I was a kid, but they’ve been trendy most of my adult life, so the myopia barely registers as an ailment.

I know that I can afford to shirk certain beauty standards because I’m already fulfilling others. I can go without shaving my legs or armpits and still be publicly gendered as female by strangers, even if they think my femininity is bizarre or a failure. My safety isn’t compromised if I step out in a dress without makeup, or wear pants into the ladies’ room.

I’m trying to make more room for other kinds of femme presentation and the free passes I enjoy as a white cis woman afford me some latitude to do that, to experiment with aesthetic variations that are aiming for something other than pretty. I’m not sure if that’s enough.

People have called me ugly to my face, and undoubtedly people have said it in my absense. I’ve told myself I’m ugly, of course, as many of us do at some point.

But I think by now I’ve just gotten tired of it. Instead of using my powers of imagination to fabricate different ways that I’m gross and unlovable, I have been trying to imagine and perform ways of decorating and costuming my body that are satisfying to me. And now I try to marvel at, observe and consider the ugly things about my body that I encounter, without placating ugliness into palatability. I let the ugly be ugly, and I can work with that.

For example: this tender pale skin is vulnerable: to sunburn, to acne, to bruising and scabbing and bleeding, to pruritus and urticaria, to general inflammation and irritation. I feel like I’ve got an encyclopedia of skin ailments by which to organize my life, and recently I’ve been plagued with strange itching spells. Every few days or so, various areas of my skin get agonizingly itchy: the back of my neck, my forearms, my eyes, the inside of my nose, my scalp, the tops of my thighs, the backs of my hands. I try to hold out but eventually I scratch the area, during which it feels briefly awesome but them immediately agonizing. The scratching releases a bunch of histamine, making everything itchier, and also creates long, searing welts in the paths of my fingernails.

Then those burn and itch, too.

When an itching spell hits, I feel like a freak because there’s no discernible source of the itching and my scratching can get a little fiendish, and anyways it’s a weird symptom to have, to talk about. I’ve become enough of a spectacle that my friends and coworkers now routinely ask, How’s your itching? It seems almost benign because it sounds silly, like a chronic case of hiccups. But hiccups can hurt, and itching can too, and it does, savagely.

At work I see patients nervously eye the angry red wheals peeking out of my collar or sleeve, confused and anxious about possible contagion, and sometimes I feel ugly for it.

The thing is, though, I want to thrive in that space of ugliness. Sometimes feeling ugly means owing nothing to strangers and feeling exuberant in your weird skin sack, curated and hopeful. If being beautiful is about being clean, being worthy, being responsible, being healthy, being lovable--then feeling ugly can be about refusing some of those moral obligations associated with beauty.

All bodies are lumpy, wrinkled and puckered and hairy, calloused and bruised and scarred, and sometimes necrotic, disordered, infected, neurotic, or otherwise dysfunctional. A body can be appealing and weird, malformed and captivating, generally typical but wholly unique. And because a body can be all these things and so much more, it’s too restrictive to consider them all upon a single axis of ugly---beautiful.

I learned from an NPR podcast that antiquarian horologists rely on things called “witness marks” to figure out how old clocks had been constructed and fixed without standardized techniques or user manuals. Discolorations, indentations, and scratches help indicate where screws, gears, or other mechanisms may have originally been placed.

In the baths of the spa, everyone is naked except the staff.

Pendulous breasts, paunchy butts, stubbly vulvas, waxy mastectomy scars, exposed tattoos and nipple piercings: all our witness marks making a topographical map on our bodies, where we’ve been built and rebuilt over time, occupying precarity through constant renovation.

An antique clock can be ugly but still be magnificent, and it can still tell the time.