Pretty Privilege: Cosplaying the Ugly Girl

When you’re a little girl, beauty myths hit pretty hard pretty early. We know that now, we’ve known it for decades, but we can’t shake off the desire to be loved for our looks and most recently, to love ourselves because of the way we look, depending on what’s trending. You’d think all that feminist trumpeting about objectification and self-objectification would have sunk in at some point but no, the situation has just gotten worse. In addition to plastic surgery, aesthetic procedures—tweakments--are at an all-time high.

In The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf talks about one’s ‘estrangement’ from one’s body, “The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”

Liberal feminism can’t seem to shake off the disproportionate value it places on desirability.  When we ought to be telling girls that it’s okay to be conventionally and biologically undesirable, and that one’s worth is inherent, we’ve been bending over backwards to convince all women and girls that all women and girls are beautiful and desirable, and in addition to that, all desirable traits are marketable. It’s like being in a worldwide shopping mall of girls, every variety including age, shape and supporting personality put on display, endorsed by a movement with a complete lack of self-awareness of its own power.

It also doesn’t work, because women and girls have been trying to correct their bodies despite all the ‘love thyself’ messages that they’ve been bombarded with. One of modern feminism’s many pitfalls, for the purpose of appearing compassionate, inclusive and fostering individuality, is that it demands this contrariness—self-love and desirability—to burrow itself into the minds of young girls at an early age, skirting the entire point. It’s the chink in modern feminism’s armour, especially where capitalism collides, and movement itself has learned to negotiate its survival, primarily in the Western world, by modifying itself to suit the needs of patriarchal capitalism.

The ‘raunch culture’ of the 90’s evolved into something far more insidious for young starlets and singers in the 2000’s, the Madonna/whore complex with a twist, of the innocent young teen embracing her burgeoning sexuality while presenting herself as a pubescent child. Barely legal, she, like Miley Cyrus dancing around a pole attached to an ice cream cart, or Britney Spears gyrating in Catholic Schoolgirl attire, were contributing to what Ariel Levy called the new feminism which looks like the old objectification, because all this, like now, was argued to be an expression of empowerment. Both singers were household names whose oeuvre became more sexually explicit over the years. Annie Lennox called it “peddling highly styled pornography with musical accompaniment". It must be said that we don't know how much of this was grooming and that these singers didn't necessarily come from stable backgrounds---but there was, undeniably, an audience to capture, inpire and ensnare, because for girls, success in this arena often carries an early expiry date.

TBH, the world has never been a safe space to publicly explore one’s sexuality, let alone just be, and if you’re young and exposed to popular culture, you’ve probably been had. We’ve been concentrating much too hard on the marketability of our sexuality when our sexuality offers a myriad variations, not just the very narrow, male gazy, repackaged crap we’re subjected to ad nauseum over the decades.

A few celebrities within the business of acting or singing eventually realized that conventional beauty traits have an expiry date because these days, with the push on inclusivity, if one wants to capture an audience, one needs a personality to go with it. The scripted femininity of the old days doesn’t last if your audience loses interest, because variations in bodies and personalities are trending at speedier rates than before. We owe this to social media and the fact that every ten years a new generation springs out of the ground, clamouring for novelty, in a world addicted to audiovisual stimulation. There is money to be made, dopamine to be stolen, addictions to set in motion. Feminism goes hand in hand with the flow.

So, what does one do when interest runs out? When the sexual explicitness stops working, the stage allows the failing actress/singer to experiment. At one point one could glom on to marginalized groups and appropriate their struggles, pandering to an ever-growing fan base, or well, support whatever current thing works. The other is to reject the hyperfemininity that one has benefitted from so far and desex oneself, drawing the admiration and respect of a new generation, or perhaps a retired one.

The third is uglification.

To quote Stephanie Lange, a well-known Youtuber who keeps a keen eye on changing feminine trends, “You don't get as far as you hoped in your career because you're just another pretty girl, because for all that surface privilege, apparently being pretty is not all as cracked up to be. Now we want edgy, unique, borderline ugly. When you realize that with tweakments we are all beginning to look the same-----after a while it gets pretty bloody boring. So what's a girl got to do to stand out in an era of Instagram clones?”

In 2003, when the press made news of Charlize Theron’s uglification for her role as Aileen Wuornos in Monster, I felt the first stirrings of suspicion. What is the big deal, I thought. What could going ugly possibly do if one’s acting skills remained subpar? On Theron’s part, it was a good move—she improved her range, managed to do justice to her role as well as draw attention to the serial killer’s tragic life.

However, it’s not always so cut and clean. A recent example of rapid uglification is Lily-Rose Depp, whose phenomenally bad series The Idol (2023) bombed despite the overt sexualization of its star. That combined with the fact that she is a nepo baby with middling talent as a model and actress, she, or perhaps her team of advisors, made a wise decision to cast her in Robert Egger’s Nosferatu, where she has an odd, prolonged "ugly" fit which is supposed to pass for good acting. Her reputation as an actress since has improved greatly. She has been recast in the new Egger’s film, Werwulf, where on set photos show her with a visible cleft lip.

If you’re in doubt, experiment with goth. If you succeed, you can venture into uglification. Take it a step further orchestrate a disfigurement/disability. Actors do what they’re supposed to do, which is to portray, but going ugly to save oneself from irrelevance is a strategic decision and the audience keeps falling for it.

Why do I know this? Because uglification is not a new social phenomenon. In the 90’s, about half the girls in every class that joined my college were keen on reaping the benefits of social mobility, and the first thing that affected one’s placement on the social ladder was thinness, achieved by starvation combined with exercise (mastery over appetite being a class distinction). Some already had beauty, thinness and class privilege, however, by their third year, the ones who had peaked had to generate interest through quirk, weirdness or uglification. Uglification ruled because it because it gives the upper class air of detachment. Exploring one's identity can be a phase, especially in the petri-dish of class and culture that is college, but it has little to do with self-exploration and more to do with social currency.

The dishonour of having peaked and slumped into irrelevancy despite all of one’s privilege can hit pretty hard for someone used to having the world at their feet. I recall the shaved heads, the normal straight-backed walks that turned into skulking hunches, the runny khol and the piercings---without the belief system drawn from counterculture movements that inspired the aesthetics. Also, feminism was something that these girls absolutely would not touch, because they couldn’t mess with the eco-system that supported them being at the top. For any countercultural movement that was born of rebellion, women and girls tend to lean heavily on the aesthetics part in the name of empowerment, thereby coming full circle and yet again catering to the male gaze. There is nothing particularly nonconformist about that.

The other thing with uglification is that it’s a borrowed trait and can be reversed at any time, but only if it comes with wealth. Those who are working class or lower middle class cannot and will not benefit from uglification even if they fit into beauty standards because they are trapped within their classification. You uglify yourself when everything else stops working-----when you’ve peaked with visibility, wealth and beauty and headed for boring.

Woe to the real ugly girls and weirdos, though, the ones who must bear the brunt of society’s apathy, the ones that mainstream feminism is still yet to save because of its habit of missing the mark over the decades. When the ugly girl can’t return to the comforts of conventional beauty like the pretty privileged can, she will continue to be ridiculed despite all of her achievements and look for other areas to contribute value, usually to her own detriment. To use unattractiveness to one’s benefit as a ploy to generate interest is a betrayal of every girl left on the outside of acceptance.

Uglification is not just aesthetic play; it is glamour pulled over the eyes, and it’s time for us to look at it with a critical eye.

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