Growing Up Ugly
I saw a documentary on TechTV, an episode of the series
Nerd Nation called "Kid Nerd." It's an hour-long documentary concerning what it's like to be, well, a kid nerd -- all the ostracism, the alienation, that stuff. (It is, incidentally, excellent.)
One of the people interviewed was a woman, quite attractive, who had been a nerd as a kid but who went on to be a stripper for fourteen years. She clearly perceived her profession as nothing so much as revenge; she spoke as if she was putting one over on the clientele. "Who would be so stupid as to pay to see
me naked?", to paraphrase. But she was not, by any objective standard, ugly. Why did she think otherwise?
I suspect that for a lot of people, it's quite simply because they were told, at some point, probably in junior high since that's the crucible of self-image, that they were ugly, and they believed it.
I watch the morning news on a station that follows it with Dr. Phil, so I get to see lots of Dr. Phil commercials. Today's was about a woman who had all kinds of plastic surgery done and still wasn't happy with her appearance, what I would have called Michael Jackson syndrome until that became synonymous with other ills. And she was -- well, she wasn't stunningly beautiful, but there was nothing wrong with the way she looked at this point.
In analyzing my thoughts on this, I want to stay away from the rather obvious point that yes, beauty matters in our world, attractive people get ahead at the expense of the ugly, and so forth. I'm more interested in how the label of ugliness affects how people see themselves. Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Not necessarily; I can't generalize just from myself (the nicest anyone's been able to muster about me that (a) wasn't from a family member or significant other and (b) didn't sound forced was "striking", and it's true that no one ever forgets me). I alternated between trying really, really hard to be as attractive as I could (which I knew was not very) and just hanging it up and not caring (which probably didn't do much for my social life, in retrospect).
I think what bothers me the most about it is, well, it's related to what I label (b) above. Honestly, I'm not sure that I could have ever believed anything more positive than "striking" after having been called a dog to my face. But after seeing the nerdy stripper talk about how dumb her customers were, I wonder what most people think of themselves, and whether we're all the victims of a collective delusion that everyone who's not Nicole Kidman has a face for radio.
For now, though, I'm -- ugly and proud? No. But I'm not beautiful, and I'm satisfied.
