The Upside of Ugly [View all]

[redqueen]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169208/upside-ugly



Nadia Ilse, a bullied 14-year-old, recently received $40,000 in free cosmetic surgery from the Little Baby Face Foundation, an organization that helps children with facial deformities. It sounds like a quite a nice story until you hear what Ilse’s “deformity” was: Her ears stuck out a bit.

The Georgia teen’s supposedly corrective surgery included having her ears pinned back, a nose job and a chin reshaping. This is our culture now: teen girls thinking that the slightest perceived imperfection—any deviation from what they see in magazines—is tantamount to deformity and in need of surgical correction.

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If our end goal for girls is simply to have them feel “confident”—especially about their looks—then we create a trap where anything that makes a girl feel better about her appearance, no matter how harmful, is a reasonable solution. (How many times has plastic surgery been preceded by a “I’m doing it for me!” explanation?)

There may be a bit of head-shaking over young girls going to drastic measures to feel beautiful, but we never seem to question the idea that feeling beautiful is a worthy goal in the first place. We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we’re second class citizens.

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She is of course using mainstream society's definitions of "beautiful" and "ugly"... I agree with her that as far as those go we would do well to stop catering to them... and to stop only paying lip service to the truth - that true beauty (and ugliness) come from within.