So, here is... something else. Warning: this is about as tl;dr as you can get. But I've been thinking about ugly versus pretty for a while, and this is basically me giving my own perspective on the idea.My parents never told me I was beautiful. This isn't an accusation - they certainly never made me feel bad in any way about my looks. When I would dress up for a special event, my mom would smile and say, "You look very nice." I do remember a very fraught adolescence where I was lectured to about my weight a lot; but beauty itself never came into it. To my parents I was: smart, interesting, funny, curious, imaginative, dramatic, talented. "Beautiful" didn't exist in my head in any meaningful way. It's not that I had low self-esteem. It's that I didn't understand what I was in relation to "beautiful" - I didn't it as something to want to be, when there were other things,things, to be. I mean, at age thirteen I was basically confronted with the choice of figuring out makeup or joining my junior high Star Trek fan club. I picked door number two.One thing to note before I go on: the girls who picked door number one are just as awesome as those who picked door number two. There is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with picking makeup over Star Trek, or picking both, or picking neither. One thing that I don't want to promote is this idea thatis something to be derided. No one's ever been able to convince me that getting a mani-pedi is less valuable than watching NFL football, or that skirts aren't as professional as pants, or thatis more harmful than. There's a quote from S. E. Smith's excellent Get Your Antifemininity Out of My Feminism article:(Full disclosure: totally found that on Tumblr.)So the rest of this should be read with the understanding that I don't believe that women who strive for beauty are in any way inferior or even different from me. We've all gotten caught without a tampon, as my mom used to say. There's no demarcation I'm making in this post, nothing where I want to say, "this is why people like me are great and people who aren't like me suck."...I mean, people who aren't like mesuck, but by "people who aren't like me" I really mean "people who aren't me." Why deal with misogyny or misandry when you can have the whole, misanthropic package? I am amazing; y'all are okay, I guess.I think you can safely assume that my self-confidence has never been lacking. Moving on.When I was a little girl, I wanted an eyepatch. More than that - I wanted to only have one eye. I used to write stories about how I fought a bear but then managed to somehow strangle the bear or maybe just convince it to be friends with me or something, and I'd come away with an eyepatch and a badass reputation. It was never about doing harm to myself; to this day I freak out if I get so much as a splinter, ask me about the time I had to get stitches and sobbed the whole time (I was 26). But the idea of a scar, or a "disfigurement," or some other obvious and non-sexual facial alteration was endlessly fascinating to me. I remember seeing The Jackal , a pretty terrible movie with one amazing character, a woman who looked like this . Of course, she died halfway through, but I remember watching her and going,. Not because I have, or wanted, a burn mark on my face; in fact, I was never really clear on why I identified with her so much, not until recently when I saw a snatch of the movie on TV.It's because, when I was younger, that burn mark signified "ugly" to me. And "ugly" was whatidentified with, what I recognized in the mirror, what I thought of myself as being. Now that I'm an adult, I understand that people with scars can be and often are beautiful. Moreover, those whose faces do not fit the norm can lead exceptionally difficult lives and have to endure stares and rude questions; I don't mean to detract from their experiences by saying that, as a young person, I wanted to be co-opt their experiences. I've done a lot of growing up since then - thank goodness.But you know what? I still think I'm ugly. And I'm happy about that.For the longest time I wasn't - I thought it was something embarrassing, like incontinence, something I should hide. I wore clothes I didn't really like but that were comfortable and unremarkable, because I thought that wearing things I liked would draw attention to the fact that I wasn't pretty enough to wear them. I went to the gym and tried desperately to lose weight, to tone up, to slim down. But I gradually came to the realization that I don't really want to slim down, or have nicer cheekbones, or a longer neck, or perkier breasts; I'm not willing to discard the advantages that come with being ugly.Advantages, you say? Why yes! Advantages!(Bear in mind, the following list is based on my own personal experience and the experience of close friends and family. My experience doesn't invalidate yours, which may be different,- and this is key -. So if you read this list and feel the compulsion to comment on how ABC is wrong because you neverABC, you should know now that I will not take you seriously.)* People might call me a bitch, but I almost never get called a whore or a slut. Those who want to insult me don't try to demean my sexuality, because they don't believe Ia sexuality. I remember having a male roommate, long ago, who was honestly surprised to hear that I have, at some point in my life, masturbated. When I asked him why, he was like, "I don't know, you just -- don't seem the type." It didn't offend me, but it was very illuminating.* My single-ness, and my intention to remain single, has rarely been questioned by friends or family. I have a friend, a very beautiful woman, whose parents are worried about her single status and think she'll never get a husband - and my friend worries, too. She's not even in her late twenties yet, but there is this implication that although she is becoming, every day, a more interesting and funny and wonderful person, she is also becoming, every day, older and less attractive. Andshe is lovely, and will continue to be lovely for many years, she views her single status as a kind of pathology, a stain upon her character. But I don't have this problem; my friends and family take it for granted that I will be single for the rest of my life because I am ugly and therefore unlikely to attract anyone. So I never have to be on the phone with my father for hours at a time explaining that I just haven't met the right person, or that I'm busy with my career, etc. My father doesn't think I'll ever get married; so I never have to.* I've never had to compete in any of my friendships. I've read countless stories and watched countless movies and TV episodes where two best girlfriends suddenly turn into raving lunatics because a man wanders into their eyesight and suddenly both of them want him. It's happened, occasionally, that both a friend and myself have liked the same man, but the man has never picked me, which creates a kind of freedom that I wonder if beautiful people can feel. Plus, I've been able to keep my friendship intact, which has always been more valuable to me than the chance at a date with Tad Hamilton or something.* I am comparatively left alone in public. I say "comparatively" because people still strike up conversations with me, male and female, young and old. Often it's because of my dog or my bicycle or my car, all three of which are unusual (I have a giant mixed-breed dog, a Brompton bike, and a Karmann Ghia car). But in most circumstances, if I am in public, I am not forced to interact with another person against my will. Beautiful women do not have this luxury; just last week I saw proof of that. I was sitting on a bench on the Santa Monica 3rd Street Promenade, reading a book. Across and a little ways down, a very pretty woman in her mid-twenties was sitting on the bench reading something off her phone. We were both there for about ninety minutes (it was a nice day). In that time, I spoke to a stranger zero times; she was approached, and forced to speak to, three men. All men, and all friendly, as far as I could tell. She spoke anywhere from ten seconds with them to a few minutes, but each time they spoke to her and she looked up from her phone; there was no eye contact, no visual cues that would have indicated to these men that she wanted to talk to them. I can imagine getting fucking annoyed by the time the third guy comes up wanting to chat, but she was polite to all of them. I can only assume she's used to it.* I wear whatever the hell I want. I've run around town in a petticoat and pearls, I've run around town in sweats and toe-shoes, I've spent a half an hour on my hair and I've forgotten to brush it before I leave the house. I know I won't please anyone, so I can please myself. It's like knowing you're going to fail a chemistry test and spending that 45 minutes writing a really awesome poem on the back of the test paper instead. (Off-topic: I had a friend in high school who actually did this - she copied Poe's "The Raven". It was a very hard test, and the teacher offered anyone who hadn't finished the chance to come in after school and complete it. My friend did - she used the time between to reread the poem, so she could correct the parts she'd gotten wrong.) Now, again, I have plenty of gorgeous friends who also go outside in anything and don't care. The difference here is that people comment on my friends' choice of clothing, or pay them more or less attention based on what they're wearing, whereas I am treated the same no matter what I put on. (Admittedly, if I dress in clothing that's ratty enough, I can and have been mistaken for a homeless person. But that's another thing.)* I'm able to be angry, more often and more vigorously than my beautiful friends. I've yelled at people, slammed doors, kicked up a fuss, and no one's tried to soothe me or calm me down - because I amwhen I'm mad. I don't get slightly flushed and wide-eyed, I get bright red and I spit when I talk and I get up in your face, and I don't have to back down, I'm notto back down. Nobody ever tries to derail my anger. I remember hating Daddy Warbucks in the movie "Annie" for the longest time, because during a fight with his assistant, he tells her she's very pretty when she's angry. That's never happened to me - good thing, too.* I'm able to recognize romantic interest pretty quickly. Occasionally - very occasionally - theremen who find me attractive, and their behavior to me is so drastically different from most men that I am always 100% certain when someone Likes Me In That Way. Speaking as someone who has dissected endless "maybe he does/maybe he doesn't" conversations with my friends, I can tell you that it saves a lot of time when you figure it out in five minutes or less. Sidenote to this: it's worth mentioning that I've never been able to tell when a woman was attracted to me. My gaydar works fine, but my woman-likes-me-dar is totally busted.* I'm able to speak with authority on the times that I've been subjected to street harassment. Hollaback DC , which to my mind started one of the best movements out there, the movement to identify and point out the behaviors that make women feel unsafe, has often been dismissed by apologists who claim that the women detailing their experiences were probably just being hit on by a slightly inept guy. But when a man patson the ass or shouts from his car that he wants to know my rate, sweetie, or rubs his crotch while staring at me on the subway, I know that he's not doing it because he's just awkward and really, he'd ask me out if the circumstances were a little different. I've been able to shut down arguments with people who complain about oversensitive girls by saying, "yeah, I've gotten groped, too."* I know that the people who are friends with me are either interested in me as a person or hope to get a ride in my sweet-ass car. Which, either way I can't fault them. I've watched male/female friendships break down because a man was friends with a beautiful woman and assumed that one day they would get together; when they didn't, he began to resent her, as though her beauty were something that he was owed. But men who are friends with me don't expect sexual access because they don'tsexual access. And that, again, is a huge weight off my shoulders.That isn't to say there aren't some issues - boy howdy, are there some issues. I have a hard time dealing with a certain type of man who doesn't see the point in women if you don't want to fuck them; they worry so much that I might ask them out that they deliberately treat me like crap, so as to save themselves the aggravation of having an ugly person like them in any way. I'm also expected to be nicer than my pretty friends, and any time I lose my temper or don't express interest in something or even just admit to having a bad day, it's as though I've committed some kind of social faux pas. I suspect it's because my ugliness is, in itself, a social misstep. And so I'm more often jolly than not, because it's easier to make people laugh than it is to ask them to be interested in my problems.But these are absolutely worth the it when you consider the fact that I never have to wonder if someone likes me just because I've got a nice pair of tits, or that I can be the one to hold a door open without someone insisting that I walk through first, or that I can go to family events without enduring the "so why haven't you found someone nice yet" questions that plague my younger relatives. More important - much more important - I know who I am, at a younger age than I think most women get to figure it out, and I like who I am more every day. That may not be an advantage of ugliness; but it's an advantage of being me, and I'm grateful to ugliness for giving me that.My parents were right: I am not beautiful. But I still look at myself in the mirror every morning and I can say, "You look very nice."