
In The New York Times last month, writer Megan Nolan asked the simple question: why do we all have to be beautiful? As a young girl growing up in Ireland, Nolan wanted to be beautiful so badly, she could taste it (“it tasted like blood”). She didn’t want to be cute or pretty. She didn’t want to be more desirable to men. She wanted to be beautiful because it’s harder to make beautiful people look foolish. Their lives are always well-ordered and they never feel embarrassed. And like all teens, Nolan often felt embarrassed.
Nolan’s hard, painful desire to look beautiful has stayed with her most of her life, but she asks at the end of her essay whether today’s inclusive message of beauty — where we’re told everyone is, in fact, beautiful — does more harm than good. “I tried to love myself as I got older, tried to look with clear eyes at my physical flaws and not just accept but admire them. I tried to believe that, actually, I was beautiful, because everyone was, not just the chosen few,” she writes. “I tried forcing myself to concede this, through a fake smile and gritted teeth. I’ve said it aloud, as advised by body-confidence self-help gurus, while looking at myself naked. It’s always felt absurd. […] Wouldn’t it be freeing to admit that most people are not beautiful? What if we stopped prioritizing pleasing aesthetics above so much else? I wonder what it would be like to grow up in a world where being beautiful is not seen as a necessity, but instead a nice thing some people are born with and some people aren’t, like a talent for swimming, or playing the piano. Everyone is beautiful, we’re told. But why should we have to be?”
Men don’t face nearly the same pressures as women to look attractive. We have other ways of climbing up the social ladder — humor, wealth, and even a reputation for violence. This masculine advantage is well-captured in Biggie’s “One More Chance,” where he raps: “Heartthrob never, black and ugly as ever/ However, I stay Coogi down to the socks/ Rings and watch filled with rocks/ And my jam knocks.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Atlantic, the word “however” has never been used to greater effect. “There was no ‘however’ for a girl deemed ‘black and ugly,” he writes. “There were no female analogues to Biggie. ‘However’ was a bright line dividing the limited social rights of women from the relatively expansive social rights of men.”
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