Ugliness is ugly. Beauty is beautiful. The two are opposed as binaries. But the words are not simply descriptors. They are also moral evaluations. Consider the meanings listed in the Concise Oxford for Ugly: " Unpleasing or repulsive to sight...morally repulsive, vile, discreditable, unpleasant... " etc; and for Beauty : " Combination of qualities, as shape, proportion, colour, in human face or form, or in other objects, that delights the sight...; combined qualities delighting the other senses, the moral sense, or the intellect... " The physical and the moral are equated : the one IS the other. Beauty = good : physically and morally delightful. Ugly, on the other hand, = evil, bad. These two equations constitute our usually invisible and unrecognized cultural aesthetics, especially as they apply to people: U = E and B = G. (The second binary is the converse : that evil is ugly and good is beautiful, but that is for another day).
This aesthetics is not only enshrined in our language, but also in our literature, media and daily practice - as exemplified in four recent stories.
Susan Boyle became a phenomenon after winning a variety show contest by singing. Why? Because in plain terms she is 48 and almost ugly; though euphemisms are more prevalent : dowdy, frumpy, plain etc. Both the audience and the judges appeared to be amazed that this middle-aged woman could sing so beautifully and look so bad - sing like an angel but look like a wreck with, as Nancy Gibbs remarked in Time, " eyebrows like live mice " (18 May 09) - which is not very polite. We are more used to the union of beautiful voices and beautiful people, like Shania or Beyonce. Anything less is a discrepancy, a disjunction, a contradiction. Things should match. Boyle illustrates the widespread prejudice against the ugly, but also the invisibility of this prejudice. Time magazine commented : " So SHE can sing. So what? " (4 May 09 :18) (Why Time capitalized " SHE " rather than " sing " is not clear; to replace " it " perhaps? Which would be even more rude). So what? So... this clarifies our aesthetic prejudices. Tanya Gold asked perceptively in The Guardian : " Is Susan ugly? Or are we? " (Collett-White, 2009). The answer I think is " Both ", but we must note again this confusion or elision between the (ugly) physical appearance and the moral judgement on us for our (ugly) prejudices. The physical is the moral : i.e. U=E.
There is another double standard here, though not entirely germane : the aesthetic prejudice applies far more to women than to men. John Lennon, Ringo Starr and
Pavarotti are more well-known for their talents than their appearance. The ugly/beauty binary discriminates by gender as well by aesthetics.
Connie Culp looked beautiful, sparkling and vibrant, until her husband shot her point-blank in the face with a shotgun. A team of surgeons worked 22 hours to transplant 80% of her face, including a nose, cheeks, lower eyelids, upper jaw and palate from an unnamed donor. This first transplant patient in the U.S. has endured some abuse. She heard a child say: " You said there were no monsters, mommy, and there's one right there. " Ms. Culp stopped and said : " I'm not a monster. I'm a person who was shot. " At a press conference following her operation she urged people not to judge others by their looks : " When somebody has a disfigurement and don't look as pretty as you do, don't judge them, because you never know what happened to them. Don't judge people who don't look the same as you do. Because you never know. One day it might all be taken away" (Leonard, 2009).
But people do judge, and probably will continue to do so. Our judging is not only built into our culture but also apparently into our brains, as we shall see later. For that child, ugly equates with monster, which equals bad and evil, so unlike beauty.
TO BE CONTINUED
Collett-White, Mike. Reuters 25.4.09
Leonard, Tom. 2009. " First U.S face transplant revealed " National Post 7 May.
Montagu, Ashley. 1979. The Elephant Man. New York : E.P.Dutton.
Pett, David. 2009. " March Markets One Angry Bear " National Post 3 March.
Synnott, Anthony 1993. The Body Social. London : Routledge.
