ugliness
Earlier this year I tweeted an off-the-cuff joke about how I believe I could easily marry a boring and rich man if I committed to doing so. It soon reached a cluster of boys with Twitter Blue or X Premium or whatever it’s called now, who quoted it with pictures of me they’d found in my media tab. They were trying to claim that I was in fact too ugly to land a man with money. They didn’t say that outright; if I remember correctly the puerile “sub mid” was tossed around. I was also said to be a New York 2-point-something. It felt good to get some decimals.
The whole experience wasn’t traumatizing or even dramatic, really. I quickly blocked the person whose quote tweet was going viral and then made my account private; I didn’t want to endure any harassment if I didn’t need to, and I didn’t need to. I asked my friend to keep tabs on the tweet’s engagement because I was worried that it would truly blow up and reach people who know me offline—family, employers. But it didn’t, and my friend also shared posts defending me, calling me pretty, calling me funny, to the point where I had to make her stop because I was beginning to feel too good about myself.
I don’t think that the people angry with me were really too concerned about how I look. I don’t think that women who joke about ugly boyfriends are entirely concerned about how those men actually look. I do think all of these critics care a bit, to be sure, but saying someone is attractive or unattractive stands in as a judgment for something more obvious: like or dislike.
However unconsciously, we treat beauty as virtuous, and the lack of it is meant to indicate something rotten in a person’s character. Rather than immediately noticing someone’s looks and making a call, the judgment is often (and especially often when online) applied retroactively and thus falsely. Somebody says or does something annoying, and so you look at them or their account more closely and decide they’re just not very good-looking. Straight men, too, are so annoying, and so your friend’s boyfriend is ugly.
You’ll probably find common cause with other people if you start making these claims. You might even make a new friend—nothing brings people together like a shared enemy, after all.
The ugly boyfriend has ossified into a trope, and as such it gets a quick and easy laugh among people familiar with the idea. Maybe you’re not too impressed with your friend’s boyfriend’s appearance, but you wouldn’t say that to her face. She might be in love with him! It would be crude and even hateful to tell someone you supposedly love that someone they love is repulsive. So instead the comment is made online, or in a group setting, but adults with the capacity to self-regulate don’t say nasty things in a vacuum; they say them to an audience they know will agree.
At a certain point in the lifespan of a joke people start to worry that what they’re saying is actually quite cruel. They become so troublingly woke. Before this happens, though, there is a shared humor. There’s context for what people find funny. In the case of the ugly boyfriend, the origins seem pretty clear: Men are, on average, a bit lazier about their appearance, whereas a woman will have a 7-step skincare routine and a developed sense of fashion and a favorite hairstylist who charges in the low three figures.
So women expend all this effort, and as a reward they end up with a man who is at best dusty, at worst busted. Or the guys have weird features, but because they’re men that just makes them attractive—a hot rodent boyfriend. It's unfair, these standards; women have to be conventionally beautiful, and men can get away with using hand soap as face wash.
This facetiousness is a refrain in some circles. In my circles, admittedly. It's reductive but that's the very nature of jokes about a large group of people. Those people are like that, and we’re like this. Injecting a bit of nuance just makes the whole thing less funny, and it also dissipates any sense of camaraderie you’ve been feeling with others on a given topic. And mocking people does foster a sense of camaraderie, however unfortunate this is; resentment boils up and becomes an in-joke, and suddenly it’s fair game to be cruel. Everyone else is doing it, too.
I don’t think all of the men who jumped at the chance to call me ugly actually believed this to be the case. My joke just touched a nerve; wealthy men are quite afraid women will marry them solely for the money. This is a fear that I’m sympathetic to. It’s terrible to share a bed with someone and realize there isn’t anything close to love there.
Rather than reckon with this discomfort they chose to lay into me over some of my selfies. There were enough of them that they could rub elbows and riff, and I’m sure it felt cathartic in the moment to take out their anxieties on somebody else. Certainly it feels cathartic to launch into right-wingers, war criminals, Elon Musk over their looks. Other people might disagree about your assessment, beauty being subjective, but perhaps you’ll find your people through shared mockery.
Public figures have it coming more than ordinary people, you could argue. I’m not sure what level of notoriety a person can reach where it’s fair game to attack them on every facet of their existence, and I’m not especially interested in that debate. It’s more interesting, to me, how the dynamics of belittling someone because of their attractiveness or lack thereof do not particularly change even as the subject does. In a public setting, you declare someone ugly not just because you find them to be truly, distinctively unattractive. You do so because you want to signal that you dislike something inherent to them, and align yourself against whatever this is. It’s a cheap and base insult, but there are others who will probably be on your side.
Calling somebody ugly might hurt them. It might also make some people laugh. No act of unkindness is ever wasted.