Being ugly will set you free

How to get to this oasis

The pursuit of beauty is a tool of the patriarchy commonly employed to keep women small. We’re encouraged to shrink ourselves but concealed from the truth that no woman has ever felt beautiful. The beauty ideal is designed in a way so that you can never reach it, supermodels continually remind us that they too are insecure. The point is not for you to become beautiful, it’s for you to always be trying, because a woman pursuing beauty is a woman who is always spending money, is always insecure and easily manipulated and most importantly, is always distracted enough to not be able to identify the real problem: patriarchy.

Becoming ugly is about no longer being engaged in the pursuit. It’s realizing you have a better use of your time than neurotically obsessing over your looks. With your time rightfully restored back to you, you can do whatever you’d like, even nothing at all. It’s finally your call.

Often women fear becoming ugly because of the retraction of male approval it’d cause. If you are ugly who will date you? Where will you get the magical validation and adoration that comes with being a beautiful woman? The concern is valid, girls are raised from birth to be invested in their looks because of the promise that it’d score them a man one day, but that dream is fiction. Though it functions as a guarantee, this idea is not an unquestionable tenant of society. The world will still spin if you don’t look like Bella Hadid. Not only will it spin, it won’t be a hellscape. Romance and acceptance and celebration still exist in it.

Becoming ugly is dependent on thorough self examination. Ask yourself: what do I think I get by being pretty? Can it only be acquired from my looks? Is getting this thing still enjoyable if I only earned it with my appearance?

Through this examination I landed on the understanding that beauty promised me nothing I could not acquire through other less painful, and actually enjoyable, means.

As I was becoming ugly and breaking up with the world I thought I’d live in if I achieved beauty, I realized another significant thing: I was single. At all my weights, in all my starving, through all my shaving and perming and running and plucking, no one chose me. So what the hell was I still doing this for?

I would like for these questions to exist beyond a Home Goods throw pillow slogan in your mind. Loving Yourself is a nice idea but useless if not truly committed to. I want you to really see that beauty holds nothing for you. There is nothing that will make you truly happy that requires you to become beautiful first. That is a fact. No person worth your time, no job worth your energy.

Even if there was something really in it for you, why would you want it? Why let the promise of good treatment from beauty be worth harming yourself?

Living in the ugly is horrifying. It’s a land the patriarchy has promised would destroy us. Considering the patriarchy considers a destroyed woman to be one that has built her own life and is unafraid of men not being approving of her, I’d say that being destroyed sounds like an oasis. Ugly is silence. It’s a peace that bodily obsession can never afford you. It’s the greatest gift you can receive and it’s entirely up to you to get it.