weiszklee:

queeranarchism:

weiszklee:

queeranarchism:

Celebrating ugliness is always going to be more radically queer than widening beauty standards.

Redefining beauty standards to include gender-nonconforming, body hair, fat, disability etc is all nice but ultimately it strives to include more people in the concept of beauty, but never all people. Some people will always be considered ugly in order for the word beautiful to have any meaning at all.

So redefining beauty standards is what we call an assimilationist goal. Just like redefining what we call normal is an assimilationist goal.

Abolishing beauty standards and boldly celebrating ugliness is radical because it challenges the root assumption that anyone should be beautiful and that beauty gives a person more value than the value of glorious ugliness, shameless repulsiveness, the wonderful freakishness of being queer.

This isn’t easy. Beauty standards are everywhere in the queer scene, always slightly different from the mainstream but just as suffocating. It takes work to truly embrace ugliness in ourselves and to see how exciting it can be in the people we desire. But it is worth it. Beauty is always going to be a trap, it is always going to leave us struggling as we go through change and aging and sickness and chance. Falling in love with our own ugliness is freedom.

We are revolting. We are revolted. We revolt.

Hm, I just don’t know … Both “Everyone is beautiful” and “Ugly and proud” ultimately serve the same far future goal of removing beauty as a category by which we order humans, so that’s good. But in the short term, the first just seems … psychologically healthier? Also it’s closer to the truth, I think. Beauty is entirely subjective, no matter how you look, some people will find you ugly, some people will find you beautiful, nothing you can do about it. “We shouldn’t judge people for being ugly, it does not define their worth, we should make our peace with sometimes being seen as ugly”, all true, but also: Nobody is objectively ugly, that’s simply not a thing, we’re just brainwashed. 

Well, I’m gonna copy-paste some of this from a previous answer to this point, with a few changes:

I’d say that the big difference is that 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 the things that we have spend time and work to include.

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 because this new imperfection hasn’t been brought into the concept of beautiful yet.

So no matter how much work we did redefining our
beauty standards, as long as we are invested in the idea that we are beautiful we keep having to do the work again and 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 why on earth would that be
psychologically unhealthy? Do you honestly believe that we all need to feel beautiful so badly that to abandon the pursuit is
psychologically unhealthy? That makes no sense to me. 

If beauty standards are a harmful societal construct, obviously the healthiest thing to do is to try to stop attaching value to that construct. Refusing to meet a standard and trying to reduce your own investment in that standard is far more liberating than trying to meet a standard by expanding it.

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.

(I answered another ask about beauty here)

That … doesn’t really refute my points? I don’t want to change the rules of the competition, I want to make it not a competition anymore. Wanting to be desirable is not a bad impulse, it’s just weaponized against us by capitalism like many natural impulses are. My goal is not to change the standard, because beauty doesn’t have to be about meeting a standard. 

I don’t think it’s possible to completely refuse to play the game, but we can change the nature of the game and make it one without winners or losers where everyone learns to feel comfortable in their own skin. 

(Ascribing less value to beauty is still a good thing, absolutely, Western culture is unhealthily obsessed with it, but I doubt we will ever be able to ascribe zero value to it. That’s why I find it more healthy to be honest and acknowledge our desire to be beautiful and learn to fulfill that desire without torturing ourselves to meet a standard. I guess ultimately it’s a question of what it means to be human that we seem to disagree on.) 

We definitely disagree yeah. To be honest, the idea that ascribing no value to being beautiful is unachievable strikes me as incredibly sad and pessimistic. Beauty is a social construct, it is learned and it can be unlearned. The idea that we’d be trapped in that construct seems really bleak.

If we can unlearn the idea that we need to perform a certain gender, that we need to be normal, that we need to be successful, that we need to be strong, why wouldn’t we be able to unlearn that ascribing value to being beautiful?

Looking around me,
particularly at older cisgender straight men (who have never been brainwashed as far into
needing to feel beautiful,

who have always learned that ugly men could have value, etc) I definitely know people for whom the idea of being beautiful holds no value at all in their lives, who haven’t considered themselves beautiful or worried about looking beautiful in years. They could grow big warts on their face and the only thing that would really matter is whether they’re uncomfortable or not. They were never pushed by society as much and at some point in the process of growing older they completely stopped giving a shit.

I don’t see why that level of not giving a shit couldn’t be all of us. I don’t see why we couldn’t achieve that and raise new generations to not give a shit from day one. I think that would defy weaponization in a way ‘everyone is beautiful’ just doesn’t achieve.