I DO HAVE MY own vanities, of course. In my twenties particularly, I was always struggling with the way I looked and cursing my shortcomings. I refused to diet but often exercised madly, running for hours upon hours, unable to extricate myself from a sticky kind of self-loathing. I now resent all the time I wasted worrying about my flaws, and realise that I should have been off hiking and exploring with my friends, refusing to sink in to that kind of self-scrutiny that can screw with women’s heads. I eventually learnt to move with more ease in my skin after several long trips to India and Nepal, during which I danced for weeks on end at a Hindu/Sikh wedding, hiked through the Himalayas, stayed in old forts and palaces in Rajasthan with my free-spirited Indian friends, and was so fascinated by everything I saw that I forgot myself, and rediscovered joy. It can take a while, sometimes, to be the woman you want to be, and to excavate the misogyny or critical eye we too often internalise.
Vanity, for the most part, can lead to a great deal of unhappiness — and is unnerving to be around. People who are vain are usually more interested in what people around them think of them than who the people around them actually are. In contrast, Queen Victoria — and possibly Hatshepsut — for all their obvious faults, accepted their physical limitations and were keenly curious about those around them. That kind of curiosity allows for absorption and connection, and is one of the best ways to undermine any anxieties about the way we look or where we might fall short.
When Barack Obama was asked if he was worried about his daughters dating, he told radio station WDCJ in Raleigh, North Carolina, that he was ‘pretty relaxed’. One reason for that, he said, was that his wife, Michelle, was ‘such a great example [in] how she carries herself, her self-esteem not depending on boys to validate how you look or, you know, not letting yourself be judged by anything other than your character and intelligence.’
Just like my mum. It is supposed to be one of the greatest horrors a woman can contemplate, becoming like her mother. I can think of few things I would like more.
Chapter 9
Seeing the Whole Person
DESPITE BEST INTENTIONS, ADULTS often tangle themselves in knots when discussing physical appearance with children. We try to iron out differences by insisting they don’t matter, attribute a greater moral fortitude to the plain, or leap in defensively when someone is described as not conventionally attractive, or — worse — ugly or fat. After all, there are better, kinder words to use, or other characteristics to focus on.
The Australian author Robert Hoge, who describes himself as ‘the ugliest person you’ve never met’, thinks we get it all wrong when we tell children that looks don’t matter: ‘They know perfectly well they do.’
The former speechwriter wrote a book for children, based on his own life story, called Ugly. He finds children are relieved when a grown-up talks to them candidly about living with flawed features in a world of facial inequality. It’s important they know that it’s just one thing in life, one characteristic among others, that appearance, in other words, means something but doesn’t mean everything.
Hoge was born with a tumour on his face, and deformed legs. He describes himself by asking us to imagine being in art class after the teacher has presented you with a lump of wet clay and asked you to sculpt a baby’s face. You labour and sweat, tearing off lumps, smoothing lines, shaping a nose, eyes and chin. Beautiful. Then a kid tears across the room and smashes another lump of clay into the middle of the face, pushing the eyes apart. That’s what Hoge looked like when he was born; his parents burst into tears.
Hoge says that his mother left him in the hospital, wishing he would die. It was not until he was almost five weeks old, after a family meeting at which his siblings voted for him to be brought home, that his parents returned for him. He grew up to be a political adviser to the most senior politician in his state, the Queensland premier.
So how is a child to grapple with the savage social hierarchy of ‘lookism’ that usually begins in the playground, if adults are so clumsy about it? The advantage of beauty has been long established in social science; we have been told it’s not just employers, teachers, lovers and voters who favour the aesthetically gifted, but parents, too.
We talk about body shape, size and weight, but rarely about distorted features. And we talk about plainness, but not features that would make a surgeon’s fingers itch.
Even in children’s literature, we imply ugliness is either transient or deserved. Hans Christian Andersen wrestled with rejection from his peers as a child, most probably because of his large nose, effeminate ways, beautiful singing voice and love of theatre — his fairy tale ‘The Ugly Duckling’ is widely assumed to be the story of his own life. The moral of that story was that a swan would emerge from the body of an outcast, and that you could not repress the nobility of a swan in a crowd of common ducks. Yet what if you just stay a duck?
Robert Hoge tells us we don’t need to apply a Vaseline lens. ‘I’m happy to concede the point,’ he says, ‘that some people look more aesthetically pleasing than others. Let’s grant that so we can move to the important point — so what?
‘Some kids are good spellers; some have bad haircuts; some are fast runners; some kids are short; some are awesome at netball. But the kids who are short aren’t only short. And the kids who are great at netball aren’t only just great at netball. No one is only just one thing. It’s the same with appearance.’
It’s important to talk to children, he says, before ‘they get sucked into the tight vortex of peer pressure, where every single difference is a case for disaster. Don’t tell kids they’re all beautiful; tell them it’s okay to look different.’
There can also be upsides to being ugly. As ‘ugly supermodel’ Del Keens told Vice, his appearance has allowed him to escape a lot of other people’s more mundane insecurities because he was forced to draw confidence from other things. ‘Knowing I’m aging physically doesn’t affect me as much as it does other people,’ he said, ‘because I’ve never really looked that great. I think I have far more exciting adventures because I never have to worry about what I’ll look like the next day. Same goes for if someone punches me in the face in a bar.’ Recent research has overturned the myth of the ‘beauty premium’ in salaries and found that ‘very unattractive’ people earn more than ‘physically more attractive workers’, and that traits such as good health, intelligence, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness have more influence on pay than appearance.
Perhaps it’s the long association of physical ugliness with immorality that we need to unpack. The Oxford English Dictionary includes in its definition of ugly ‘morally repugnant’. In Greek, the word kalos means both ‘beauty’ and ‘noble’, while aischros means ‘shameful’ as well as ‘ugly’. Ugly characters in kids’ books are generally horrible and their physical flaws are signs of other shortcomings. Villains have bad teeth, liars have long noses, zombies have thick skulls. The miserly are bony, the greedy fat.
Perhaps we also need to spend more time pointing to some of the people who have walked the earth without the need for pageant ribbons or Instagram likes, but who have contributed in enduring ways — think, maybe, about the likes of Winston Churchill, who was short (about 5 feet 7 inches) and portly; or Socrates, who, with his bulging eyes, wide nostrils and fleshy lips, was generally considered ‘profoundly ugly, resembling a satyr more than a man’. Or another philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, who had a lazy eye and a front tooth he had broken as a child and never repaired; his lover, the young American journalist Sally Swing wrote that he was as ‘ugly as sin but utterly charming’.