Hi Reddit, I’m Constance Grady, a senior correspondent at Vox! You may have read my piece about how Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch taught a generation of young people what was desirable, or why Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a million times edgier than Emerald Fennell’s. But my latest reporting looks at how memoirists are pushing back against an alarming moment that we’re in — a moment of cultural fascination with looksmaxxers.
That too-online community, made up mostly of men who claim to do things like hit themselves in the face with hammers for a stronger jawline and snort meth for leaner bodies, has become the object of shocked trend pieces and news coverage.
Looksmaxxers are fascinating in part because their motivations are so understandable. They have observed the simple fact that in our culture, life is easier for people who are beautiful, and they have made their plans accordingly, self-mutilation and hard drugs and all. The calculus feels both horrifying and comprehensible, which is why I found it so startling and exciting to find people moving in the other direction in the form of two new memoirs by authors who both call themselves ugly and have no plans to change their appearances.
“I am an ugly woman,” begins journalist Stephanie Fairyington in Ugly, forthcoming in May. “At fourteen I learned fourteen times over that I’m ugly,” writes the poet and artist Moshtari Hilal in Ugliness, published last year.
To call someone ugly feels so malicious, so aggressive. But these memoirists and the looksmaxxers appear to agree on at least one thing: People really are treated badly by the world if they are not as conventionally attractive as their peers.
To deny someone the language to name their own reality feels perverse. And yet ugly feels like such a cruel word. The provocative and never-quite-answered question of these memoirs is whether turning it on yourself can become an act of self-love.
What do you think? Should we be embracing ugly?
Proof: https://bsky.app/profile/constancegrady.bsky.social/post/3mijxemnqds2r
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