Ugly is as Ugly Does
Don’t Be So Shallow
I like to think of myself as aware, woke if you will, relatively unbiased, fair-minded and even occasionally a deep thinker with a relatively attractive appearance, I think.
But in one major area, I remain a Neanderthal. Getting beyond the bias against people who may not be physically attractive as defined by the culture, is one of the last frontiers of bigotry and discrimination and unfortunately I am right there but I am trying. Frank Zappa sang, the “‘ugliest part’ of your body is not your nose or your toes but ‘your mind’,” a nice thought but it often doesn’t work that way. Look around. Who are the people who seem to be the most content, successful, self-assured, who are the people who others are drawn to because of first impressions, surely not the 35 year-old Walgreen worker with a bad complexion, who weighs 350 pounds, smokes cigarettes. has three chins and looks like Shrek.
Look around the gym, who gets a second glance, it’s not the 65-year-old woman who weighs 80 pounds, is sweating away while pressing onward on the treadmill, has a nose longer than a lying Pinocchio and whose face shows every line of every moment of her long life. Or the guy with buck teeth, who is inappropriately dressed in jeans and a sweat shirt, which looks like he hasn’t changed in months, as he sweats profusely on the stationary bike and is about as attractive as a mole rat. Nope, the women are attracted to the guy with the six pack stomach and the men are drawn like magnets to the streamlined, compact women.
Appearance is subjective and people who don’t meet the arbitrary, pretty standards will be excused only if they excel in some other area, like being really smart, really funny and engaging or having saved people from a burning building. God forbid those who haven’t done anything extraordinary. Whoever said don’t judge a book by its cover was hopelessly naive because the reality is we always judge books by their covers and choose the ones with the covers that make us feel good. And how many ugly jokes are there, there isn’t enough time or space to respond. And everybody laughs at ugly jokes, everybody, that is who doesn’t fit the society’s definition of ugly. I can’t avoid it, here’s an ugly joke:
Kid: “Mom, am I ugly?”
Mom: “I told you not to call me mom in public.”
Ha ha ha.
Fat shaming has become a meme and fat jokes have become definitely declasse but what about ugly shaming, who will step up for those poor unfortunate, unseemly souls, it could be you or me, who, through no fault of their own, don’t get anywhere near the false image of beauty.
Ugly people take solace in that there is a World Association of Ugly People, formed in 1879 in Piobbico, Italy, with the charge of fighting for the recognition of ugly people under the motto, “A person is what he is and not what he looks like.” The group campaigns against discrimination in the workplace based on looks and helps people overcome their phobias like fatphobia, a pathological fear of fatness; teratophobia, fear of monsters and people with deformities; cacophobia, the irrational fear of ugliness; and fighting to eliminate “lookism,” a phrase that started in the 1970s referring to discrimination based on looks.
Lookism came into its own in the 1970s when so-called “ugly laws” in some states and cities still prohibited people from being in public if they had diseases or were considered unsightly. The Chicago ordinance of 1881 bars from public streets “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” The last ugly laws were repealed in 1974, including Omaha, Neb., in 1967; Columbus, Ohio, 1972; and Chicago, 1974.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission bars discrimination of people with extreme obesity under the Americans with Disabilities Act but there is still no federal law protecting against discrimination based on physical appearance.
Beauty is worshiped at the cultural alter, consider Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White while prejudice is rife against people who don’t fit the right, societal mode. I’m not talking of extremes like the Elephant Man and Quasimodo but rather, the boy with the bad complexion, the girl with the big nose. There’s the ugly duckling, the ugly wicked witch of the west, Cruella de Vil, Syndrome from The Incredibles.
I’ll leave with theses aphorisms that are fairly meaningless:
* Beauty is only skin deep.
* Appearances are often misleading.
* Looks are deceiving.
* What really matters is invisible to the eyes.
* Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
* Looks aren’t everything.
* All that is gold does not glitter.
* Don’t be shallow.
* Don’t just look at the surface.
And finally:
“If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife
So for my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you
Say man!
Hey baby!
I saw your wife the other day!
Yeah?
Yeah, an’ she’s ugly!
Yeah, she’s ugly, but she sure can cook, baby!
Yeah, alright!”