Not Ugly

About me: “Not ugly”

My nine year old nephew has this up on his Facebook page as his ‘About Me’. My fear is that this perfectly funny fellow will one day grow up to be The Everyday Guy.

The Everyday Guy is reasonable for the most part, often sincere and frequently funny. He may or may not like dogs but is conversational. He is also very very everyday looking, but will ever so often unabashedly make atrocious remarks (although only in ‘safe’ company) about the physical appearance of the other ordinary, everyday people around him. Especially the women.

The Rajus and Ravis and Rahuls of our time are bestowed with a keen eye – in seconds they register even the most diminutive details of a woman’s attributes – hips, lips, hair, skin, voice, laugh, height. Men of exceptionally high standards, they only ‘do’ what they call “actress pretty”. (An adage I came across earlier this week. A very highly gentleman I am fortunate to be acquainted with tells me that Monica Dogra is not actress pretty.) Their confidence is undoubtedly admirable.

Some years ago, as part of a project I was doing, I went back to my school in Bangalore and spoke with the 8th grader girls there to get a sense of the typical 14 year old urban girl’s conception of ‘pretty’. Who they described to me was the type of figure my deeply spiritual guy friends would right out ‘do’ (great word). She was olive skinned and glowy, her features were doll like, her hair fine AND she had that banging bod. And who’s to say they were wrong. I agreed (still agree) with them myself.

I’d like to believe that it’s only natural that we all think this way, but my second guess is that we have naturalized it. Women are too early, taught to derive much too significant a part of their sense of selves from their physical appearance. It does not help then, that there has come to be exactly one kind of beautiful. It is expensive, stylized and exclusive. It requires a certain refinement and a certain flair. It requires very many such ‘certains’. And it is far more required of women than of men. Our concept of beauty has created a society where it is hard for women to be completely self assured and unselfconscious. Where un-groomed is ugly and beautiful trumps everything else.

My angst against the lot of men (besides being a hormone thing :s) also comes from the fact that they so unwittingly reinforce these horribly self defeating concepts with their automated mental rating system. Of course I wish that women just didn’t care about what they thought. But until we all get there, it sure would be nice for the men to give a little more thought to the extent to which these ideas negatively impinge upon a woman’s psyche. And not just the women they’re hitting on.

Of the forty odd girls I spoke with that day at school, I remember about two or three uncomfortably half raising their hands when I asked how many of them considered themselves to be attractive. I don’t believe any of them were ugly, but I suppose they felt like that because we have made beautiful difficult to be.