I remember being in middle school and praying to God to make me pretty.

This was a hard for me. The other kids seemed to like me fine in elementary school, but right around the age of 12 I’d become a social pariah. I just couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to dress or how I was expected to act, and I went from being in the middle of the pack, socially, to being at the very bottom. None of my former friends would talk to me, and everyone else picked on me mercilessly, and when I tried to figure out what might be wrong it seemed to me as though the problem must be that I wasn’t pretty.

Looking back at pictures from the time, I see a perfectly normal looking female kid, albeit one who didn’t know how to style her hair correctly or wear the sorts of clothes the other girls were wearing. But, at the time, I believed that prettiness was something bestowed on some people and withheld from others, and that this alone decided whether people liked you. I wanted to just “be pretty” overnight and fit in with the other kids again, but not to learn how to style my hair (which I resisted angrily whenever anyone suggested it), or to learn which clothes to wear (which I rejected as shallow and beneath me), or to paint my nails or shave my legs or wear makeup or any of the things the other girls were so obsessed with talking about. I wanted to disappear in sci fi books and be just pretty enough to disappear and not be teased by anyone.

I don’t associate this word, pretty, with fun, or lighthearted girliness, or positive attention. I do associate it with a strict, unyielding, unattainable commandment to fit in and be something I’m not. The idea of being found pretty by a guy has always made me feel a little sick. But being pretty to other girls was something I once tried for (after all, I wanted to get laid). More recently it’s been a relief to accept I’d rather not be looked at that way, by anyone.

Our culture forces women and prettiness together in a coercive, demeaning way that reduces women’s humanity and places any and all of their real achievements below the question of their physical attractiveness. As so often happens, this makes it difficult to distinguish a dislike of being seen as female in a sexist environment from not wanting to be seen as female regardless. I’m suspicion of the association I made between prettiness, being a girl, and achieving normality/invisibility (and by my total lack of interest in taking action to make myself look more like normal girls did), because it suggests that for me it was always more than a simple resistance to sexism and heterosexuality, but who can tell? Dislike of sexism and dislike of being female seem discouragingly hard to disentangle.