True. But refusing to meet a standard is far more liberating than trying to meet a standard by expanding it.
Beauty or normalcy can only ever be the things that have been defined as beautiful. We can expand that to include pimples and fat and baldness and gender nonconformity but it will only ever be what we have brought into it.
When we grow fatter than what we have normalized, when our skin has more imperfections that we have normalized, when we grow older, when our bodies become more unusual, or we change in some other ways we didn’t anticipate, we once again run into the fear of being ugly.
No matter how much work we did redefining our beauty standards, we keep having to do the work again because we keep running into their limits.
The ugly and the weird on the other hand, is limitless. It can be anything. Ugly can be things we never even imagined. When we have stopped ascribing value to beauty, our body can become anything and it will not lose any of its value. When we have fallen in love with ugliness, our body can not disappoint us anymore.
And when we have come to love the ugly and the weird we will discover that we can celebrate, fall in love with and fall in lust with people with any sort of body.
Redefining standards of what it means to be ugly or normal means trying to change some of the rules of a competition game.
Celebrating ugliness and weirdness
means refusing to play that game at all.
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QueerAnarchism 