The Terrible, Toxic Power of Pretty
The lie of being lovely
If only I were pretty. Beautiful. Thin. Life would be so much better.
We as humans have a toxic love affair with “pretty.” And “handsome” for that matter. Yet at the same time we ache for the advantages we ascribe to those gifted with beauty, we often despise them for the physical gifts they were bestowed.
If I may.
I have been considered pretty for much of my life, but I had no clue, not until I was in my fifties. Perhaps even later. When I was an adolescent my brother started his sexual assaults, which continued for years. For any child of incest, one of the first prices we pay is confidence. We feel damaged, ugly. My dear friend Melissa, my Thai masseuse, was similarly attacked by an older brother.
We both grew up believing we were fat, stupid and ugly. Three words which defined my bearing and my behavior for all my teenage years and well into adulthood. I read a piece by Shaunta Grimes recently which spoke to much the same thing. We are scarred by the messages we get as adolescents, and spend a great deal of time unpacking those prison bars. For some they last for life.
I’ve got a genius IQ. Couldn’t have convinced me of that. My classmates thought me pretty AND smart, something I didn’t know until my 40th high school reunion. I was genuinely shocked to find that out.
What I saw in the mirror was stupid, ugly. My father, about the time genetic predisposition began to express itself, labelled me fat.
Pretty? You have to be kidding.
What does pretty get you? In my life, it got me raped. Pretty attracts abusers like wasps to a trap. People want to own, control and contain “pretty,” and what they feel that pretty conveys for them.
Part of that is to teach pretty a lesson for the crime of being pretty.
Today, as if on cue, here’s another piece on the privilege of pretty:
If you Google why attractive people have advantages, you’ll find lots of articles that discuss how those considered beautiful or handsome are more fluent, have advantages in business, make better leaders. The list is endless.
There is also plenty of research- in part because society is so enamored of pretty- that says that the way we treat attractive kids develops those skills. You could argue damned persuasively that if we treated less attractive or ugly kids with that kind of love and respect, they would demonstrate genius in precisely the same way. They are no less gifted. We simply automatically bestow gifts onto those with physical advantages and assume far less of those who don’t have them.
We are far worse when it comes to ugly, which is deeply underscored by a piece I read this morning by Gillian Sisley:
So yeah. If you and I believe we’re ugly, dear god. Dear god. Being ugly or less than gorgeous is, in today’s society, the same thing as being fat, or being old, or having dark skin, or anything that isn’t White, young, perfect, thin, muscled and rich.
Toxic messaging. And yet, even those who are pretty not only doubt it, but now they dabble with it in a never-ending quest for air-brushed perfection that doesn’t exist.
Ever the search for external perfection as opposed to the deep work to develop character, which the remarkable Lizzie Velasquez has in spades, and vastly too many otherwise pretty people most certainly do not.
I would also argue that our extreme emphasis on the external is in itself deeply toxic, for the fundamental qualities that we so often ascribe to attractive people don’t necessarily exist. They certainly aren’t automatically born with them just because they are pretty or handsome. If anything, I’ve noticed that gorgeous people, in all too many cases, assume rights and privileges they didn’t earn by action but only by appearance.
In other words, they’re assholes. Pretty assholes, but assholes just the same.
As I have written elsewhere, some of the worst trollers on Medium are very pretty women who have all the character of a pissed-off cobra.
In this thoughtful article, Ray Williams explores the notion of beauty.
However I would note that throughout his article, Mr. Williams, in discussing beautiful people, does not show a single person of color. Every model, every famous face is White.
Such exclusions are quite normal in media, which decides for us what gorgeous is, and what gorgeous deserves as a result of a more advantageous skin suit.
To that, my fellow Medium writer Dr. Furaha Asani:
You see my meaning. What we experience as beautiful, as pretty, is determined for us by others, by media. While facial symmetry and other factors do indeed play a part, media often dictates what is pretty or handsome.
For example:
People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, since 1985, has listed two Black men: Denzel Washington 1996 and Idris Elba, 2018.
Halle Berry was listed in 2003, then Beyonce in 2012, Lupita Nyong’o in 2012. All lovely Black women, and all with less-pronounced Black features. How society gauges the Most Beautiful People has everything to do with how White the editors are. That’s just my opinion. But it’s borne out.
The woman above is pretty to my eye. She is utterly herself in this photo. And she has strong Black features, and she isn’t stick thin. If you and I are twisted by standards imposed on us by those positioned to make a profit from our self-revulsion, then we cannot see beauty where it is: in everyone we see. ALL of us.
Yet we love those mags that tell us who is gorgeous. To wit:
Mel Gibson, who was a huge crush of mine for years, turned out to be a raging asshole. A hater, a drinker, utterly vicious. Twisted and angry. Lot of good being gorgeous did him in the long run.
To cop a phrase from Forrest Gump, pretty is as pretty does.
To that, Willams’ article explores aspects of what beauty gets us:
“This is the new reality of the job market,” says one New York recruiter, who asked to have her name withheld because she advises job candidates for a living. “It’s better to be average and good- looking than brilliant and unattractive.” (author bolded)
I find this appalling. And yet, this is our world.
It’s been my experience that people who are gifted physically often deeply doubt their own attractiveness. Melissa and I are cases in point; when she and I revisited photos of ourselves as young girls, we had the sudden shock that we weren’t fat, dumb and ugly at all. However, we didn’t see it. We were wrapped in cocoons of self-revulsion at the same time that others envied and hated us for being pretty. Smart.
Other Medium writers have written the same story. In their thirties or forties they revisit childhood or school photos of themselves and are shocked to realize that what they deemed ugly beyond hope was actually a damned cute kid.
There’s no question whatsoever that being attractive gets you advantages. So much so that people will do just about anything to gain that advantage, from makeovers to plastic surgery. The problem is that if you’re an asshole (like Gibson) then whatever you may look like, you’re still a shit. And besides, as you age, and your pretty or handsome has to eventually fade, and it by god will, if you’re still a shit, now you’re an old shit. And in our society, old is the absolute worst of all things.
Being an angry, bitter old shit, well. Good riddance, Sparky.
Some years ago when I was living in Spokane, an arrogant young man pronounced loudly, as a local beauty queen was passing us, that “there is nothing sadder than an aging beauty.”
Kindly, fuck you.
Not only is that incredibly ageist, but it also perpetuates the notion that the only thing worth being is young and pretty.
Oh I forgot. And White.
Which is why we are seeing such an horrific rise in gerascophobia. Fear of aging.
That also sells a great deal of stupid products, procedures and dreams that don’t come true. Because as anyone who ever lost 200 lbs can tell you, they didn’t hear a symphony just for them when they reached weight. Publisher’s Clearing House didn’t deliver the check. And nobody really gave that much of a damn, but for those who really loved us, at least those we didn’t chase away in our terrible need to be something we aren’t: perfect, thin, rich, lovely. Or White.
This last year, as I have begun to ripen into my later sixties, my face has really begun to show all the wrinkles from my life, adventures and the amazing stories I’ve lived. Part of me, now that I recognize that I am indeed a somewhat attractive female, wonders how I might have comported myself had I honestly believed I was pretty when I was young. You and I, especially as women in Western society, spend so much time picking at our skin, over- treating it, worrying about the shape of our face or nose, whatever, that we waste our youthful and prettiest years agonizing about how pretty we aren’t. Or paying massive amounts of money for procedures to give us the look that can only be achieved by airbrushing or software programs.
Yet as I have released not only youth but the angst and terror I long felt about being stupid, fat and ugly, I have ripened those very things that are not only much more important, but last long after any semblance of pretty has aged away: respect, courtesy, grace, gratitude, humility, a great many more things. They all still need work. But when I focus solely on the skin suit, what’s inside rots.
Which is why there are parents, as Gillian wrote above, who scare the shit out of their kids using a woman whose fundamental courage and character are worth fifty of each of those cretins. Kindly, that’s what’s ugly.
Lizzie Velásquez is beautiful. Who she is, what she does, the immense personal power she has developed in response to conditions over which she had no choice or control, all make her, to me, far more lovely than any catwalk model with shit for brains and a personality to match.
You can chase pretty for its own sake. Or you can become a person folks love, respect, admire for what will outlast the physical.