Ugly as Sin

On failed femininities and the weaponisation of ugliness

Among the many horrible consequences of the new Trump presidency is a new brazenness of hatred. In the days that followed the election, right wing young men took to the internet to proclaim ‘your body, my choice’, a chilling indicator of the patriarchal violence to come with this new regime. For the last couple decades being a young republican was considered at the very least uncool, if not downright repulsive, but those tides are now turning. In their incredible New York Magazine piece The Cruel Kids Table, Brock Colyar spoke to these young conservatives celebrating Donald Trump’s victory at the inauguration ball. One attendee said they had been attracted to the movement because they ‘wanted the freedom to say “faggot” and “retarded’, and another complained about their university being ‘75 percent women and 23 percent trannies.’ A conservative influencer called Colyar a ‘man in lipstick’ and ‘a queer’. The article laid bare the insane vitriol these young people have for any and all minorities, the rampant free usage of slurs and hate speech. The Trump presidency is giving these people full permission to be loudly and proudly hateful.

It is a frustrating state of affairs. This young and very online segment of the right revel in their hatred, and it has seeped through to mainstream youth culture. Many of my own left wing friends have started calling things ‘retarded’ again or using the ‘alpha male’ parlance of the manosphere. Nobody wants to be ‘that one friend who’s too woke’ because it’s not cool anymore. Phrases like ‘low T soy beta cuck loser’ were once the sole lexicon of basement dwelling racists on 4chan message boards, but now they are said by beautiful and popular young women like Arynne Wexler, aka @nonlibtake. Pretty women make a useful mouthpiece for hate. This may go some way to explaining Trump’s appointment of 27 year old Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary (though Leavitt is about as qualified as a 27 year old could be for the job).

The populist right has become increasingly obsessed with the notion of beauty; with a white supremacist, cis hetero patriarchal notion of beauty. One only needs to look at the American right’s obsession with actress Sydney Sweeney to see this. After her appearance on Saturday Night Live last year online conservatives declared cultural victory over ‘wokeness’, because to them, being a hot skinny blonde woman with big boobs is the antithesis of wokeness. As Tayo Bero points out for the Guardian,

‘The “hot blonde” is still very much the queen bee of the western cultural zeitgeist, except today, she may not laugh politely at your crass jokes or let you objectify her. And therein lies the real problem. What conservatives actually want is the version of white womanhood that they saw on Sunday’s SNL episode – sexy, problematic yet unashamed, and seemingly happy to play the role society has assigned her when necessary.’

This right wing obsession with feminine beauty is evident in their obsession with Sydney Sweeney, with the archetypal tradwife, and with other young right wing female influencers like the women of the Cruel Kids Table. It is in the interest of conservatism to maintain this hegemonic conception of beauty. It is a more palatable construction of a fascist body politics with roots going back generations. In Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Francoist Spain, great emphasis was placed on women’s role as mothers and their confinement to the domestic sphere. In their own ways, all of these regimes placed an emphasis on women’s fertility and subservience, perpetuating the idea that a good and beautiful woman is one whose body bears many children that she raises in service of the fascist state.

By defining the ideal woman as a fertile, strong, healthy, and beautiful, and by associating this with fascist ideology, there is another type of woman defined in opposition: the feminist. The fascist conception of a woman’s role as mother confines her to the domestic sphere. By this logic, a woman appearing in the public sphere is masculinised and perverse. This rhetoric echoes throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries, whether it is the armed Communist insurgent women in Franco’s Spain, or the man hating, bra burning, unshaven feminist of the 1970s, or the blue haired and septum ringed feminist of the 2010s. The feminist is constructed as masculinised and sexless, in parallel to the way the male liberal/leftist, especially if he is an environmentalist, is constructed as feminised and lacking in all-important virility. The feminist or dissenting woman is constructed as masculine, and therefore undesirable, and therefore ugly, which is a sin. In the introduction to On the Politics of Ugliness, Ela Przybylo and Sara Rodrigues write:

‘[...] ugliness, like beauty, is harnessed against women in misogynist ways and is attached to the intrinsic worth and value a woman holds in the world, her currency under patriarchy. As is well known, feminists have routinely been accused of being both inherently ugly and have been attacked for our supposed refusal to engage in beauty practices. The resulting “caricature of the ugly feminist” demonstrates that ugliness is as much about appearance as it is about behaviors that depart from the social norms acceptable in and to capitalist patriarchy.’

This social construction of ugliness serves to punish violation of gender binaries, and of women’s aberration from their role as mother and social reproducer. This punishment extends not only to feminists, but to Black women, disabled women, fat women, and many other people who are perceived to veer away from the cis hetero white patriarchal archetype of the fertile white woman. Even a woman who is considered physically beautiful within that framework can be reclassified as ugly if she refuses to ‘play by the rules’ by not marrying, not bearing children, not capitulating to patriarchal sexualisation.

Ugliness, and by extension failed womanhood, is often used as a shorthand in media and literature to indicate a character is evil. A straightforward example is in Roald Dahl’s Matilda. The villainous Miss Trunchbull is described as incredibly muscular, large, ugly, and dressed in men’s clothes. Quentin Blake, Dahl’s illustrator and longtime collaborator, explicitly says that she ‘looked like a fascist general’. Matilda’s biological mother, Mrs. Wormwood, is described as ‘a large woman’ who ‘had one of those unfortunate bulging figures where the flesh appears to be strapped in all around the body to prevent it from falling out.’ She is also depicted as a bad, self absorbed, and uncaring mother. These two women who have failed at the feminine ideal of motherhood and are bad, uncaring people are both portrayed as having abject and disgusting bodies that violate the bounds of femininity. This is in contrast to the heroic Miss Honey, who, ‘had a lovely pale oval Madonna face with blue eyes and her hair was light-brown. Her body was so slim and fragile one got the feeling that if she fell over she would smash into a thousand pieces, like a porcelain figure.’ The angelic Miss Honey, despite not being a biological mother, adopts Matilda at the end of the book, elevating her to the status of motherhood, at which she excels.

I am, of course, not suggesting that Roald Dahl’s children's books are all fascist*, or that Cinderella is fascist for having ugly stepsisters as its villains, or that any other media is fascist for exercising these tropes. However, it is important to acknowledge that these ideas do not operate strictly within the confines of fascism, but are omnipresent in wider society. My recent essay on political fatphobia explored the different avenues which exist for reinforcing this hegemonic conception of beauty as rooted in thinness, whiteness, and gender conformity. I explored how the rising swell of the far right has gone hand in hand with a renewed focus on these conformist notions of beauty. Alongside that renewed focus comes a renewed hatred for women, or other people, who exist beyond these confines. These ‘deviant’ womanhoods are portrayed not only as undesirable, but as disgusting, as abject. In her essay Imagining Ugliness, Breanne Fahs writes:

‘Connected to discourses of ugliness, research on disgust has shown that disgust as an emotion can increase the severity of moral judgments made about others much more effectively than other kinds of emotions like sadness or despair. Disgust works to distance the self from the morally inferior other, thereby allowing people to create moral judgments rather than rational cognitions.’

Julia Kristeva explores this relationship in her seminal work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Kristeva describes that ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.’ This is the mechanism by which the far right obsesses over minority groups such as transgender or gender non conforming people. It is a mechanism of abjection, of disgust and unease. These people are painted as ugly because of the ways in which they violate hierarchies and structures. Ugliness and abjection is therefore a mechanism for invalidating their arguments. The abject is not worthy of civilised debate, but must be destroyed or ghettoised.

Much of the activism in the identity politics sphere for the last decades has gone towards expanding definitions of beauty, telling us fat is beautiful, queer is beautiful, disability is beautiful. I do not contest that fat, queer, and disabled people can be beautiful, but I take issue with this discourse. On a personal level it feels good to feel beautiful, but when conceptualising ourselves as political subjects, beauty should not play a role. We should not be expanding the category of beauty, but stepping beyond it. Maybe you are beautiful, maybe you are not. Politically, it does not matter. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel beautiful, sexy, desired– I want to feel like that too. But giving beauty too much power also charges the weaponry of ugliness. The more stock we put in beauty as women and as marginalised people, the more power we give it within the cis hetero white patriarchy.

The ascension of the new young online right has welcomed abundant misogynistic shit slinging back to the forefront of the internet. It all reeks of the 2010s feminist ‘cringe compilations’, of the pre #MeToo era, of the days when my young teenage self was embarrassed to profess herself a feminist for fear of bullying. Many commentators have pointed out a return to the regressive body politics of the early 00s, and this is an important factor in that return. Feminists, especially Black, queer, fat, and disabled feminists, have spent the last twenty years fighting for visibility. Seeing disabled women in tampon ads or fat women on high fashion runways may have felt like a shallow victory, like corporate capitulation, but now that these trivial wins are under attack they suddenly feel important again. I sneered at Target’s Pride collection, but now I want it back. The cracking down on DEI, the normalisation of using slurs, the tradwife Tik-Tokers and the celebrations of Sydney Sweeney’s deodorant ads all share a common goal. These are all mechanisms to reinforce a social hierarchy wherein women and minorities must conform or disappear. If women do not exist to make babies and be subservient then they should not exist (at least not in the public eye). A woman who cannot fulfil this role, because she is disabled, lesbian, or just too ‘difficult’ or ugly to make a good wife, has no right to exist under this ideological regime. To this political group beauty means fertility, whiteness, and compliance, and beauty reigns supreme.

*As has been discussed in the British press in recent years, Roald Dahl was self admittedly anti-semitic, so I don’t know if I can say that his books are entirely not fascist

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