The Ugly Duckling

You all know the fairy-tale: a hideously ugly baby duck endures ages of torment for its unfortunate looks, only to grow up into a swan. Happy Ending.

Or not. What do you suppose happened next?

"That swan thinks she's better than us because her feathers are so white."

"And her neck! She's always flaunting it."

"I think she had surgery. No one's neck is that long."

"You know I heard she's sleeping with Mary's boyfriend."

"No! She's sleeping with Tom, too!"

"What a slut."

"I hate her."

~~~~~

And yes, I'm willing to claim authority here, because I was an ugly duckling. Hideous in middle school, and just ask the folks I went there with. HBM's story of being called "big nose" resonated with me; though no one ever made fun of my nose, I was teased for having small eyes, no breasts, no fashion sense, wearing makeup, not wearing makeup, having knobby knees. (To be fair, most of those things were true.) "She's so ugly," boys would say when I walked down the hall. Once a group of boys followed me around a shopping mall, saying "Woof woof, sit Booboo, sit." Once I intercepted a caricature drawn by a classmate that had me, straggly flyaway hair, knobby knees, small eyes and all, begging for a date. (When I say kids can be cruel, I know whereof I speak--and yet I love them anyways. Go figure.)

So yes. I've been there.

Then I cut off the godawful perm, bought some miniskirts and started highschool. I know it sounds like exactly the sort of cheesy Hollywood movie that everyone likes to criticize for its unreality, but, well, It Happened To Me. People started to hit on me. They asked me out sometimes. Some people actually started telling me I was cute--even hot(tt). Misery over! Happiness found! I was gonna make it after all.

There's no better training for the belief that beauty=happiness than a brush with ugliness, however imagined; and there's no better cure, in my experience, than the opposite. I expected this to bring me happiness, and it went straight to my head. Wasn't it going to make me popular? Wouldn't boys ask me out? Isn't it exactly what all the teen magazines promised, that once you had the right hair and the right face and got yourself the right makeup and clothes and shoes, that you would be happy?

No longer were gangs of boys chasing me through public places telling me how hideous I was; instead, they were chasing me through public places, grabbing my breasts and my ass and telling me what they wanted to do with me, or worse, single middle-aged men were sidling up to me at bus stops telling me how much they liked my miniskirt. No longer was I being tormented with the idea that no boy would ever come within five feet of me; instead, I was being tormented with the idea that I'd already slept with too many of them, even though I was a devout Baptist at the time and intended to stay a virgin until marriage. No longer was I being teased about not having breasts; instead, I was teased for having them and possibly for stuffing my bra or not wearing underwear. No longer were they drawing caricatures parodying my hideousness; instead, they were writing ditties about me on the bathroom walls, and then relaying them to me in explicit detail.

Not so much a step up as one might guess.

The girls who used to ditch me because I was a social liability (scaring away the boys with my small eyes and flat chest) now ditched me because they'd heard I stole so-and-so's boyfriend, even though I still have no fucking idea how you steal a human being. They're not pots. You don't just pick them up and walk away. Presumably, boys exercise some choice in the matter.

HBM says, "In this dream, she never has to give her looks a second thought. In this dream, she never wonders whether or not she is pretty because she is never plagued by the concern that she is ugly. She will be blessed with the luxury of having no need of concern over her looks," when she writes about what she wants for her daughter.

But it doesn't work that way. Beautiful girls obsess about their appearance more than any other because they have to; and being beautiful does not spare a girl any pain. I can say this. I've been ugly, I've been hot(tt), I've been average. Average is the place to be, when it comes to appearances.

Even though I had consistent affirmation about my looks, I still was terrified that I was ugly. I wore the short shorts that seemed to be required, and worried every step that my thighs were too fat; I wore the snug shirts, but wouldn't tuck them in. There was more to worry about as a pretty girl than an ugly one, becuase other people cared so much. If you look like you could be a cover girl, then not only do people seem to think that you ought to try to look that way most of the time--with the clothes and the makeup and the hair etc.--but there seems to be this unspoken expectation that you will live up to all the headlines always printed around the cover girl's head. Be popular with boys (but not too popular)! Have lots of friends! Be happy all the time! Wear this season's coolest shoes! One is supposed to make every effort to allow other people to project whatever fantasies on to one that they have about pretty girls. You have no one's permission to be yourself. If I could tell you the number of first dates I went on where the evening abruptly terminated when I used a multisyllabic word--well.*

What saved me was my history as an ugly girl, ironically; I didn't know I wasn't supposed to be smart, and I had no practice in hiding it, and couldn't manage it at all. I didn't know I was supposed to be a slut (the girl in my middle school class who developed first had a reputation when she was eleven years old, and her friends and classmates placed bets on when she would get pregnant. She was also very pretty. It didn't occur to me at the time that the whole thing was probably invented. What hell that must have been for her). I didn't even try to pretend to be someone else, and while it made things difficult at the time, otherwise I think I would have lost myself.

The thing is, when you are The Pretty Girl, a lot of people expect you to justify their beliefs about what prettiness brings you. If the magazines and advertisements say that being a tall slim blond girl with a nice rack means that you'll be happy and popular and utterly manipulative and conniving (and the magazine articles all claimed to know exactly how to connive and manipulate your way to popularity), then you'd better be a living breathing demonstration of it, or else.

Happiness started for me with invisibility, with the 35 pounds I started gaining towards the ends of my teens, when people stopped looking at me "like that." I'm now 150 lbs, and you could not pay me to lose the weight again. It's wonderful to be able to wear whatever the fuck I want, and be able to watch people without them noticing me, and be myself, and not worry that someone else is beginning to hate me because I'm not living up to their idea of who I should be, or because I am. No one gives me the stink eye these days if I'm talking to their boyfriend or husband; no one comes up to me and asks, "don't you think that skirt is kind of slutty?" No one's throwing bottlecaps down the front of my shirt. No one's helpfully telling me that they heard people wondering if I wore panties that day. No one is telling me that Sue told Joe told Anne told Carol that Mark dumped me because I wouldn't sleep with him on the first date. No one cares. I'm not pretty enough. Thank god.

Average is kind of nice. It's what I want for Frances. I want her to be pretty enough that no one torments her for being plain, but not so pretty that she becomes an object of fascination or fetishization for anyone else. I want her to have the freedom to be herself that only comes from being in the middle.

A friend of mine, who I hope is reading this, has an even more harrowing story of being "too pretty," and I don't know if she'll be brave enough to share it. It makes mine look like a walk in the park, which in many respects it was, though I still never want to go there again.

But don't wish it on your girls. The idea that beauty brings happiness is an advertising gimmick, a way to make us buy makeup and skin firmers and soaps and lotions and other crap. If we didn't think that by buying them we'd be buying beauty, and that by buying beauty we'd make our lives better, why would be bother? (My experiences certainly helped in this, anyway; I can't be bothered to buy makeup or lotions or what have you. Whether they do what they promise or not, they won't improve my quality of life, and I'd rather buy craft supplies.)

I don't want to minimize the pain of believing you are ugly. It was one of the worst times of my life. Every day at school was torment. I didn't know what about me or my body would be unacceptable. I didn't know how to make people leave me alone. I'm sure it contributed to the depression that led to my suicide attempt in grade 8.

But let's remember--that bottle of pills and the scalpel stayed in my closet all through highschool. I believed that being pretty would make me popular and happy, but it didn't. I can't even say that it was that much better than being ugly. How I looked was just fine, but nothing else about me was ok anymore. I had more friends, who sometimes treated me worse than my old enemies did. People would passionately hate me before they'd even talked to me. There was one girl I worked with at McDonald's who wasn't even subtle about it. Whenever she saw me, she'd say (loudly), "I hate her." I'd never even talked to her. I didn't know her name. I didn't know any of her friends. But she hated me. And I understood that it was my job to pretend I couldn't hear her, and go about my business.

I'm aware as I type this that I am breaking a taboo. It is not permissible to talk about pain if you are pretty. Part of the fantasy is that you are happy all the time (and so if someone else manages to buy themselves that prettiness, they too will be happy all the time). So I have to spill ten times as many bytes to convey the same message as I did about ugliness. Being ugly hurts. So does being pretty, in my experiece. You just can't win.

~~~~~

Leora Tanenbaum's book Slut explores the reasons why girls end up with a reputation. She found that there are two factors:

1. Breasts. If you've got them, you're a slut, and especially if you developed early.

2. Boys. If they like you, you're a slut. It doesn't matter whether you like them. It doesn't even matter whether you've ever kissed someone. Sexual history has no correlation with reputation at all. (If there was someone in your highschool who was labelled this way, and there probably was, you may want to consider that they probably were no more active than you were, and possibly less.)

As she says on p. 199: "slut-bashing likewise is a sad attempt to wield power by those who feel they don't have any. It is a way for a girl who does not attain the beauty ideal (and how many do?) to establish her superior femininity. Her target? Girls whom she fears are prettier and shapelier. ... When she sees a girl she thinks is prettier than she is, confesses Paula, a white ninth-grader from Manhattan, she says, "She's so pretty, let's kill her." Paula's best friend Samantha volunteers, 'If she's pretty, I laothe her." Paula cites the example of a new and really cute girl in her class. "When my friends and I first met her, we were like, 'Oh great, there's the end of our social life.'" Paula and her friends also assumed that the new girl was "dumb or shallow or obnoxious.""

I can't summarize her entire argument as the tagline to this post, but I highly recommend the book. But do ask yourself: do you think the world has changed so much that a very pretty girl no longer has others say about her, "She's so pretty, let's kill her"?

In the world we live in, no woman is free from obsessing about her appearance. It doesn't matter how beautiful you are, you can be more beautiful, you have flaws. Manufacturers will still target you with advertisements that appeal to your insecurities, and magnify them. All women are trained to be fearful of being ugly and certain that happiness lies just beyond their grasp (with the potential remedy of a new bottle of lotion), and beauty does not buy you an escape from that. But it locks the door for you, because for so many women still the primary bonding method is by complaining about appearances. Except that if you're perceived as being attractive you're not permitted to be insecure about your looks; expressing insecurity is perceived as fishing for compliments and elicits animosity, not support.

I'm not sure what the answer is for our girls as individuals--that is, how we make sure they keep their sanity. On a fundamental level they're fucked no matter what they do or what they look like. But I think the first step is the basic acknowledgement that beauty is not happiness, that it does not guarantee popularity or an easy life, both for the majority of girls for whom this ideal puts happiness and self-worth permanently out of reach, and the pretty ones, who are policed and penalized for seeming to unfairly have something that everyone else is trained to want.

As for Ashlee Simpson, she works in Hollywood, where plastic surgery is the equivalent of a university degree. It's a career move. It will buy her fans and record sales and endorsement opportunities. I wouldn't read into it anything about her happiness with herself, her feelings about her appearance, or her endorsement of the beauty status quo. It's entirely possible that she hates the new look and was convinced that it was the only way she could advance her career.

It isn't sad to me to think that she disliked her nose and so had it cut off, because I don't know how she felt about her nose, nor do I have any reason to think she cut it off because she wanted to be pretty. What's sad to me is that we still live in a world where success for women is defined by appearances, and where no matter how talented you are, if you are ugly, you're shit; and no matter how successful you are, if you don't strive to look like a cover model, you don't count. The problem is that in the world we live in it is not acceptable for a famous woman to have a big nose. The problem is that in the world we live in we demand that those who have certain advantages (talent, fame, looks) live in a way that allows the rest of us to project onto them our fantasies about their lives, and which in the end makes our fantasies more real than their lived experiences--that insists that a beautiful woman in Hollywood who looks like a temptress must act like one or lose her fans, that a pretty girl with a nice voice can't be successful until she looks the part of a Hollywood starlet. What makes me sad is that the world we live in is still not prepared to treat women as individuals, as human beings. What makes me sad is standing at the news counter and hearing other girls and women trashing the appearances and reputations of the women on the covers of People or Us or In Style--"she's not pretty," "look at her hair! Yick!" "She needs to lose weight." "THAT'S not a six-pack." "Do you think she has implants?" "There's no way she looks that good, she must have had botox." "Yeah, but you know she never eats. God! Have a sandwich!" And lest you be under any illusions, any pretty girl, within whatever circle she is believed to be pretty, will be under the same level of scrutiny and criticism.

What makes me sad is that even though those fantasies are destructive to every woman in Western civilization, causing everything from eating disorders to suicide attempts, that when a pretty girl (whether a celebrity or not) steps outside of the role of that fantasy, we demand that she get back in. Look at Britney: we should be falling over ourselves thanking her for not hiring a thousand people to help her look like a perfect mother, with a perfect postpartum body and no embarassing slip-ups. We should be thrilled that she's allowing herself to look like a human being, to look no better than us. And what do we do? Hire a trainer, Britney! Hire a publicist! Get a nanny! You must get back inside our fantasy at once and stay there, our fantasy that demands a certain type of perfection and a certain personality of anyone who looks a certain way.

If there actually is a girl somewhere who believes that she looks attractive, do us all a favour and lock her in a room somewhere without a phone or television; she's an endangered species, and if the marketers get their hands on her, they will destroy her self-esteem to sell another $20 bottle of Glamour Cream. None of us are allowed to believe in ourselves. In the end, being pretty doesn't even buy you the privilege of believing in your prettiness. In my experience, it gets you nothing but the unwanted attentions of unethical boys and men who see the hair and face and body you were supposed to want and take it as permission. Who can't even hear you when you say no.**

~~~~~

*For the HSLC: this is mostly based on my experiences among the non-ELC, in case you're offended at my characterization--though if you thought about it you could come up with at least one example of a boy who knew very well that I was smart and was not at all interested in my brain, only in the enhancement that being my boyfriend brought to his sexual reputation.

**The link is to a previous post where I outlined some of my creepier encounters with men who interpret a certain body type with promiscuity.

Posted by Andrea at August 13, 2006 4:24 PM under Female Trouble

EMAIL this entry

(comments fields are below this section)