i am not pretty
May. 16th, 2006 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxI have days when the fact that conventional wisdom considers me ugly and deeply flawed really, really bothers me.
This morning was the beginning of one of those days. Or rather, it could have been. I woke up with crappy-feeling skin, cramps, looking more or less like I always look, and it just hits me the I am Officially Not Pretty. Which made me so sad.
And then I thought about![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cavlec's insistence on being able to say, without judgement or "but no, I think you're beautiful!", that one is ugly. We really do, as a culture, think of not meeting some idea (even your own) of pretty as some sort of immense problem. That, even if you are ugly by all conventional standards, admitting to it is - well, an admission. And actually - that's a rather self-involved problem, isn't it? Maybe the answer to the problem isn't this expanding worldview where Everyone is Beautiful in some grand metaphorical sense, but simply allowing for ugly without value attached to it.
Can you have aesthetics without value judgement? That idea intrigues me.
So I thought about that, and pretty quickly got over the emotional reaction to the whole ugliness thing. But, ya know, the ugly remains. Generally I ignore that, but I'd like to get to know it as neither a sad-making nor a fuck-you-world thing. Hrm.
I do not mean, by all of this, that I am unattractive. Hey, have you people met me? I'm practically irresistible. I'm simply also ugly by most definitions, including sometimes my own (culturally proscribed) aesthetic preference.
This morning was the beginning of one of those days. Or rather, it could have been. I woke up with crappy-feeling skin, cramps, looking more or less like I always look, and it just hits me the I am Officially Not Pretty. Which made me so sad.
And then I thought about
cavlec's insistence on being able to say, without judgement or "but no, I think you're beautiful!", that one is ugly. We really do, as a culture, think of not meeting some idea (even your own) of pretty as some sort of immense problem. That, even if you are ugly by all conventional standards, admitting to it is - well, an admission. And actually - that's a rather self-involved problem, isn't it? Maybe the answer to the problem isn't this expanding worldview where Everyone is Beautiful in some grand metaphorical sense, but simply allowing for ugly without value attached to it. Can you have aesthetics without value judgement? That idea intrigues me.
So I thought about that, and pretty quickly got over the emotional reaction to the whole ugliness thing. But, ya know, the ugly remains. Generally I ignore that, but I'd like to get to know it as neither a sad-making nor a fuck-you-world thing. Hrm.
I do not mean, by all of this, that I am unattractive. Hey, have you people met me? I'm practically irresistible. I'm simply also ugly by most definitions, including sometimes my own (culturally proscribed) aesthetic preference.