Latest / Soul Salon with Ayandastood / 2: the ugliness of beauty — part 1

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2: the ugliness of beauty — part 1 · Soul Salon with Ayandastood

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  The Sun shines out of you and into me.
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  Hello, Sun shines and welcome to reimagining with I understood a podcast where we reframe,
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  rethink and reimagine everything, standing in the way of love and liberation.
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  I'm your host, Ayyanda, and I am delighted, enchanted, ecstatic, overjoyed to have a slice
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  of your precious time today.
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  We are reimagining beauty.
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  And if you follow me on TikTok, you know I haven't spoken about this for a year, and I'm obsessed
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  with this topic.
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  I'm obsessed with beauty politics.
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  And today's episode is called The Ugliness of Beauty.
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  I love a paradox.
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  I love tension.
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  I love contradictions.
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  I just think it invites curiosity and invites just this tantalizing feeling of who?
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  What is the ugliness of beauty?
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  So these first few episodes are going to be me kind of laying a foundation, not the foundation,
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  a foundation, because when we have our guests come on and we have conversations with them,
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  we'll be kind of on the same page, as they say.
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  What I actually want you to imagine is reimagining beauty is this tour of this new city that we're venturing
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  in in our fictional land where we can reimagine and reframe, we can bring our imagination to life,
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  but do we have the tools to really create the imagination that would liberate us?
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  I want you to imagine this as a tour and what do we need?
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  We need a meeting spot.
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  We need the spot where the tour guide is wearing the bright red shirt and saying hello.
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  This is where I am texting you because you're late.
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  You're always late.
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  What's wrong with you?
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  Nothing, you're the best.
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  I want this to be the meeting point.
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  This first, this episode of me speaking about the ugliness of beauty from my mind
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  and sharing the opinions of people who I admire.
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  There are many more that I could not include in the episode, but that's the meeting point.
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  That allows us to really start from the same place with this journey of this podcast.
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  With that, everyone has gathered.
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  We've all arrived now.
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  We had a little bit of logistics to get through.
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  We had a little bit of foundation to lay, but now the meeting has begun.
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  Everyone is at the spot we've arrived.
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  First, I want us to begin with an invitation.
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  I invite you to really question something that we tend to take for granted in our daily lives.
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  Something that exists beneath the surface of so many of our thoughts, feelings,
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  judgments, fears and understandings of ourselves and of each other.
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  Beauty.
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  And also, necessarily ugliness.
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  For they are twin concepts constantly giving each other weight and meaning at all times.
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  They work together, but one of them loves the spotlight, the attention.
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  Okay, and the other is doing the behind the scenes work.
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  And you know who's who.
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  We take so much for granted when it comes to beauty and when it comes to ugliness.
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  We take for granted that it is normal for each of us to want to be more beautiful than we are.
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  It is normal that society equates beauty with worth.
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  It is normal for ugliness specifically.
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  We must name her is one of the most undesirable things people can be.
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  Can we just stop and think about how profound that is?
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  That in a society of violence, of abuse, of manipulation, of exploitation,
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  of war, of greed, of cruelty.
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  We teach each other.
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  We teach our children and we teach ourselves that the worst thing that we could be is ugly.
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  And I want you to really think about that.
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  Like as we move through society, what is celebrated and what is denigrated?
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  Who is attacked and who is adorned?
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  And what you will find is that our society is constantly fleeing from ugliness.
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  Constantly packaging ugly as just one of the worst things that a human can be.
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  And we know that this manifests in people having deep trigger warning, body image issues, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, suicides.
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  Because people feel ugly.
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  Let's reframe that.
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  Let's reimagine that.
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  What could beauty be?
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  Beauty could be the energy that you bring into a space.
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  Beauty could be the way that you treat other people.
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  Beauty could be the kindness that you live your life with.
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  Beauty could be your commitment to fighting for liberation of marginalized people.
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  Beauty could be serving others like beauty could have been defined in so many different ways.
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  And that's also why I'm so fascinated by beauty because beauty is imaginative.
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  Beauty exists within our collective imagination.
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  That is the engine that it uses to propel itself forward and we allow it to exist in its least inspiring form.
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  Physical beauty but also physical beauty defined in a very narrow Eurocentric way.
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  And we're going to talk about why and whose work that accomplishes whose work do we allow to be done in the name of beauty.
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  So with all of that being said, I told you that I love paradoxes.
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  It is deeply ironic that this normalized social hierarchy of how we look.
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  It's a normalized social hierarchy.
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  We accept implicitly, explicitly that beautiful people are at the top.
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  Beautiful people deserve more love. Beautiful people deserve more attention.
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  Beautiful people deserve more money. Beautiful people deserve more job. Beautiful people.
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  Yeah, we're vibing. We are.
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  So it's a normalized social hierarchy.
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  It separates the haves from the have nots.
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  It separates the light skinned from the dark, the abled, from the disabled, the rich from the poor.
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  That all of this, all of this separation, all of the stratification, hierarchy, this division, that all of this exists under the guise, like a masquerade party.
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  I want you to imagine of something called beautiful.
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  So we're at this ball and beauty is dressed up.
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  But underneath, oh, toxicity, ugliness, cruelty, bullying, violence, hate comments,
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  horribleness, this is the ugliness of beauty.
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  And it exists in our collective imagination.
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  But let us take a step. Let's call it back.
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  Let that two really knows, okay, who really knows?
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  What do we even mean by beauty?
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  And you just simply must forgive me.
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  I do not know how to pronounce the bees and peas in a way that doesn't sound like I'm shouting at you.
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  So it's just going to happen and we're going to grow and we're going to learn.
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  And over time, I will understand how to use this microphone, okay?
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  So let us move deeper into the paradox of beauty.
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  This is a central theme today. I want you to have it.
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  It's very eerie beauty is so fascinating.
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  And its impacts are so complex in part because it is a paradox.
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  Because it is a prism.
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  And I'm not saying prison, like jail, I'm abolished.
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  I'm saying prism as in that, like, we'll talk about this more.
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  It is a prism of many meanings.
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  A prism is a transparent obstacle component with flat surfaces that refract light.
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  This will object. It's a very confusing little thing.
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  What is it doing? A lot, okay?
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  So it's literally a glass or transparent object with refracting surfaces that separates white light into a spectrum of colors.
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  But that's the literal meaning. Let's talk about figuratively.
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  We are poets in this house figuratively.
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  A prism is a medium that distorts who slants or colors whatever is viewed through it.
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  I'm going to say that again. A prism is a medium that distorts slants or colors whatever is viewed through it.
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  And so the prism of beauty keeps us always already unprepared to assess the reality of beauty truthfully.
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  What do I mean by that?
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  The name itself is confusing, disorienting.
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  When we view the violence of beauty, the anti-blackness, the racism, the ableism, the colorism, the transphobia, the classism, the elitism,
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  and also the body dysmorphia, the eating disorders, the bullying, the exclusion, the shame, the suicide.
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  When we view all of these things through the very lens of the word beauty, does our language not distort our understanding of the concept?
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  When you perceive a condition through the lens of a word that names the condition, almost the opposite of what it actually is.
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  In the sense that in truth, nothing that causes someone to hate themselves could truthfully be called beautiful.
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  Nothing that causes someone to kill themselves could truthfully be called beautiful.
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  Does the word itself not distort, slant or color the nature of our understanding of the concept?
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  Does the word itself not afford beauty as a concept, the ability to do harm under the guise of virtue?
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  Again, I want you to picture this masquerade ball and the mask that ugliness wears, I argue, is beauty.
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  The prism of beauty means that we have to be careful with our language.
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  And I'm going to have episodes on this. We have to be so careful with language.
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  We have to rethink language, but we have to do that in the language that we are rethinking it in.
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  And so that's fascinating. Language is a very multifaceted tool, or it always already betrays us.
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  That is what language does. And of course it does.
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  Why were colonizers and slavers all of it so hell-bent on us conceiving the world through their language,
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  on indigenous people, on black people conceiving the world through English, through Spanish, through French, why?
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  So that they could control the distorted lens through which we view the world.
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  This is a very critical point. We use paradigms to understand, to evaluate the world around us.
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  When the colonizer, when the enslave is the one who gets to name the paradigm, well they name that paradigm in the image of their own self-interest.
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  So suddenly we have a concept called beauty, but that beauty is named in the image of the colonizer,
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  but its name specifically to fulfill the colonizer's ends.
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  But that colors then how we perceive the ugliness of beauty,
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  because we're less likely to see it as such when it is called beauty.
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  So it becomes this paradox that's always already protecting itself from critique,
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  because of the name that it's allowed to navigate the room, masqueraded within.
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  Beauty has many paradoxes embedded within it, because we use the same word to mean so many different things.
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  Beauty is an industry, a culture, a philosophy.
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  Beauty is something that has given life to so many people who have found expression through makeup and through fashion and through art.
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  Beauty has uplifted many people from struggle, from poverty, in terms of becoming beauty influences, whatever it is.
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  And this makes beauty feel like it's always slipping through our fingers,
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  because it has so many faces within this prism.
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  So as we think about this prism of meaning, I want to be clear what I am talking about in this conversation.
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  I am talking about beauty as a social construct, as a form of capital, as a social hierarchy.
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  That is the beauty I'm critiquing.
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  If you're listening to this and you're a beauty makeup artist and you're like,
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  oh, she's coming for everything that I am, I'm kind of, I'm not.
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  I'm coming for beauty as a social construct, beauty as a form of capital and beauty as a social hierarchy.
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  I'm talking about what Deshorn L. Harrison, a black fat trans author and abolitionist, calls capital B beauty.
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  I am talking about a kind of beauty shaped by anti-blackness, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy,
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  among so many other things that we will unpack.
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  And in part two of this series, we're going to be unpacking each of these in much more detail.
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  I just want to say that I know that many cultures have their own definition of beauty.
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  So I just want to be clear that I'm trying to tackle the Western hegemonic hold on global beauty standards and beauty politics.
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  That exists in our world today.
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  I know that this is not inclusive of many cultures or many frameworks when we think about beauty,
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  but I also know that very few are left untouched by these forces,
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  which has fueled everything from skin lightening in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, India, South Africa, Ghana, Brazil,
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  to the rise of cosmetic surgery globally and to a rise of anti-fatness even in the very same cultures that used to celebrate it.
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  Hmm, the paradox of beauty.
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  Now you may be asking yourself many questions I can imagine, but one of them might be, okay, why is beauty ugly?
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  And I've touched on this, but because of the way it makes so many people feel so deeply unworthy, unloved, undesirable,
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  because of the way that beauty functions to help legitimize and further entrench the privilege of the privileged, the power of the powerful.
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  Because of the way beauty is so deeply rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy that even when anyone black, brown, or Asian is included in beauty,
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  it is a false inclusion in that it only benefits those closest to Eurocentric beauty standards as thin, light-skinned, cisgendered, able-bodied people are used to reproduce a more clandestine version of the same problem.
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  And as beauty continues to be used by patriarchy to ensure the subordinate status of women, femmes, and girls in society, we are always already distracted in ways that are male, cisgendered, able-bodied counterparts are simply not.
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  They do not have to carry the burden of beauty, and we have been all too ready to allow the myth of inclusion to prosper.
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  The idea that all we need to do is include more people in beauty and then we'll have nothing left.
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  I don't want us to think in a binary way, so I'm not saying that we shouldn't focus on diversity and inclusion, but what I am saying is that we cannot all be included.
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  A much more expansive project is to get rid of, to abolish, to annihilate, the need, the expectation, the demand that people be beautiful, because this will always already exclude the very same people who we should be fighting to center in our movements.
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  On that point, what does beauty do, but dehumanize?
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  It strips human beings of our inherent value as human beings, and it makes that value contingent on something beyond our control, and something that only further reinforces the power and status of the most powerful in other words.
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  If it is within the interests of white supremacy, and patriarchy, and global capitalism, that wealthy white men profit the most from society at large, and profits specifically off of the labor of poor, black, brown, and Asian women, especially,
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  beauty is the perfect device to do that, because who's the CEO of the company? Who's doing the mining?
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  Here I want to read the words of African American sociologist Dr. Tracy McMillan-Cottom. She says, beauty is not good capital.
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  It compounds the oppression of gender, it constrains those who identify as women against their will, it costs money and demands money, it colonizes, it hurts, it is painful, it can never be fully satisfied, it is not useful for human flourishing.
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  It colonizes, it hurts, that is so powerful, beauty colonizes, who is doing the deep, hard labor of beauty, who is being underpaid, who is being exploited, who is being robbed from, whose livelihood has been stolen, and who gets to sit back and relax and retreat?
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  Who gets to be massaged and who is doing the massaging? Who gets to have their nails painted and who is doing the nail painting?
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  Who creates the cultural trends and then who is on the cover of Vogue? So beauty colonizes, beauty enslaves, beauty does all of this work, but it does so again through the framework or lens of something that sounds extremely noble and pure and desirable.
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  So on this point of what Dr. Tracy McMillan-Cottom is saying about being useful for human flourishing, in other words beauty is not useful for human flourishing.
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  You know, in my bones, I feel deeply invested in humanity, in the precious inherent value of human life, like I'm so about that, I'm so about the value of sentient life, we'll talk about non-human animals on a different episode.
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  But I am certain that anything that alienates us from our humanity, that is to say, anything that we are using to look at ourselves and other human beings as subhuman, as things to be exploited, as things to be berated, as things to be bullied or other or excluded, anything that helps accomplish those things has got to go.
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  It simply has got to go, like beauty has got to go, at least in the way that we've defined it in our society.
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  I am, as I've mentioned, through this prism language, the paradox, very fascinated by the work that various concepts are doing within our collective imagination, as in, okay, why does beauty exist in our minds, our lives, our habits, our hearts, our communities, in the specific way that it does, why in that way, and who does it serve?
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  Meanings are not formed in a singular way. Let's talk about meanings, as in, what meaning do we attach to this thing, and what does that imply? What are the implications of those meanings?
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  So meanings are layered, and they are interacting constantly, they are conspiring, just as people collaborate on certain projects to accomplish a goal, good or bad, ideas work together in our minds to help cement and entrench each other.
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  And some ideas are the servants of other bigger ideas, in other words, they serve those ideas, and beauty serves the idea of white supremacy, it serves the idea of patriarchy, it serves the idea of capitalism, it serves the idea of colonialism, and we're going to unpack over these next few episodes, why, how?
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  So the way that these ideas are conspiring together is a key tool in the toolbox of systems of power and oppression, this is how these constructs breathe easily, never running out of oxygen or ammunition, because so many ideas from beauty, to knowledge, to justice are deployed on the behalf of white supremacy and patriarchy, and specifically cis heteropatriarchy.
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  Why do I say this? When you believe that beauty equals value, like being beautiful makes you worthy of more love, of more respect, of more joy, of more money, of more fame, if you believe that, and you also believe that whiteness equals beauty, that fundamentally there is more beauty in things associated to whiteness.
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  Then these ideas conspire together to produce the conclusion that whiteness and everything associated to it is fundamentally equal to greater worth and greater value, i.e. white supremacy.
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  And similarly, if you believe that women and films have to be beautiful, and you believe that it's okay for beauty to hurt, for beauty to colonize, for beauty to oppress, then that helps you fundamentally subscribe to the notion that women, films, girls should just deal with the oppression, the violence, the colonization, the exploitation of beauty.
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  So in these ways, beauty has helped enable, helped justify three things already, just in these past couple of minutes, white supremacy, patriarchy, neocolonialism, colonial relationships between the West and the global South, are the actual root and foundation of the global beauty industry.
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  And that even though a product says that it's cruelty free, the irony, the gag is that that doesn't include human beings, that doesn't include exploitation of poor black brown and Asian people.
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  It's sickening to me. In in serious ways, our obsession with beauty reinforces our obsession with whiteness, and our obsession with whiteness reinforces our obsession with beauty.
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  This sounds very sexy, so I wish I could just leave it there, but I will explain part eight, our obsession with beauty reinforces our obsession with whiteness.
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  If we are obsessed with acquiring beauty, and yet colonial definitions of beauty equates it to whiteness, then in our pursuit to be beautiful, we will pursue being white implicitly within that we have to understand it's not just purely whiteness, but it's any proximity to whiteness.
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  Any proximity to whiteness as well that is going to be celebrated next after whiteness itself, light skin, a loose air texture, long hair, slim nose, all of these things, skin lightening creams, plastic surgery, these are prime examples of how becoming obsessed with being beautiful.
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  And that definition of beauty being defined within a white supremacist context, and a context of colonialism, a context of people who have been subjected to this constant messaging from the West, is that you're then going to be more inclined to lighten your skin, and you won't say to yourself, I'm trying to be white, you'll just say to yourself, I'm trying to be beautiful.
• 24:04
  And that's the whole problem, you're not trying to be white, you're trying to be beautiful, but whiteness has left an indelible mark on the notion of beauty itself, and so while you wake up and you tell yourself all I want to be is beautiful, you cannot separate the beautiful that you want to be from the whiteness that has been embedded in the concept of beauty itself, which fundamentally cannot be reclaimed when the histories of colonialism, the histories of slavery.
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  These histories are so deeply embedded in the notion of beauty and how it was used to help justify the fact that indigenous people and black people and brown people and Asian people were then written into the definition of ugliness of savages of subhuman that we simply cannot separate these two things, and that is why our obsession with beauty reinforces our obsession with whiteness.
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  So if we are always already obsessed with whiteness, not only white people, white models, white celebrities, but also things that have been constructed to have proximity to whiteness, light skin, slim nose and straight hair, loose hair patterns, we become obsessed with the endless pursuit of beauty.
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  The sake of how victorious secret and abacrombie and revolve have built entire mass market industries based on the coveted status of white, thin, able bodied people and bodies, even while selling to people who are none of those things.
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  Like yes, you can't be those people or those things, but you can become obsessed with the pursuit of buying the products adorned by them, whether or not you can actually afford to consume these products, their cultural dominance will consume you.
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  What we are saying here really is that beauty does white supremacy and patriarchy's evil bidding and there's many more things and we're going to unpack that I know I'm just using two examples, but I think first and foremost beauty does white supremacy's evil bidding by helping white supremacy and patriarchy become normalized in our subconscious through the illusion of meritocracy.
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  Beauty as a social construct born out of colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, so many more is frequently used to help justify the abuse and mistreatment of the very same people that these systems seek to annihilate.
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  The poor, the black, the woman, the femme, the girl, the disabled, the fat, the old, the trance, the queer, the dark skinned across cultures, the brown, the Asian, the members of the global south, beauty helps legitimize the oppression of these people, the annihilation of these people.
• 26:52
  How convenient that all of these people are branded capital you ugly to borrowed a Sean L Harrison's words and that ugly is branded as subhuman a Sean L Harrison is an incredible black trance fat abolitionist and author.
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  The goal of beauty then is in part to further the projects of white supremacy of patriarchy of capitalism of so many more which seek to not only annihilate the oppressed by ensuring their social, physical and spiritual death, but also very importantly to serve as justification for that annihilation.
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  And beauty serves to render these deaths, physical, spiritual, social and actual deaths, less newsworthy and less notable when they do happen.
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  Beauty helps us justify the fact that so many people ignore the mass climate disaster facing Pakistan today.
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  Be clear we can and should do both I'm not arguing at all against that all I'm commenting on is the relative lack of mass media attention and social commentary that was received on the issue of Pakistan's climate disaster vis-a-vis the Ukraine war or the Russian war against Ukraine.
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  But to be clear we can care about both and we should and again I'm just making a commentary on what moves pop culture and what doesn't and whose lives and whose pain matters in the consciousness especially of the West.
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  Both the lives and deaths of people deemed capital U ugly are seen as inconsequential, unimportant, irrelevant unless those people are wealthy that can make them newsworthy.
• 28:41
  I want to read from the book seeing beauty sensing race in transnational Indonesia why beauty I render beauty an important subject of inquiry because it allows me to expose the simultaneous and intersecting ways in which racial gender skin color transnational and emotional discourses work together in producing and maintaining power hierarchies.
• 29:07
  So this goes perfectly to the idea of how ideas collaborate to reinforce each other especially systems of power and oppression collaborating to really reinforce the power hierarchy and this occurs through the mechanism of beauty as well where we see all these different forms of oppression racial gender skin color transnational embedded into one theory one way of viewing the world way of assessing human value.
• 29:35
  This book is by Indonesian feminist writer are you Saraswati we know that black trans women's deaths are ignored every day violence against fat people disabled people is ignored every day violence against Asian and Asian American people is ignored every day violence against older people is ignored every day.
• 29:54
  So when we are obsessed with beauty and that beauty is constructed in the image of white supremacy we become obsessed with turning our attention away from what has been constructed as ugliness by that same system that wants us to ignore its heinous anti black anti brown and anti Asian crimes as well as its heinous anti poor anti trans anti disabled crimes.
• 30:22
  And this is a core part of our conversation today that beauty and violence are conspiring together within our collective imagination such that the same forces of oppression that so many of us are so deeply against in theory thrive under the concept of beauty in practice.
• 30:42
  And again I want you to remember what I said beauty and ugliness are twin concepts beauty has sent a stage ugliness is doing the work in the back let's think about the notion of how much compassion the world had for Ukrainians and how little it has for Pakistanis beauty helps that it's not only beauty but beauty is part of that who is ascribed beauty in our society is then ascribed worthiness of attention and compassion.
• 31:07
  And who is denied that same worthiness is then ignored their pain is ignored their suffering is ignored.
• 31:14
  Okay so I want us to move to the next you know landmark in this tour and I kind of lost the metaphor but let's come back let's move now to a side of beauty that I'm sure you cannot deny I cannot deny and that is the allure of beauty.
• 31:31
  What does allure mean allure allure allure allure in case you do not know what allure means I got you I really want us to all really grasp this monument that we are looking at on our tour together okay.
• 31:47
  Sometimes it's really interesting to define a word because it really deepens your like texture understanding of what that word is trying to communicate to us because words are actually little packages of meaning and they have so much in them and sometimes we take for granted that we understand what they mean but do we so allure is the verb of it is to attract or tempt by something flattering or desirable it is to fascinate to charm and the noun form it is fascination charm appeal.
• 32:17
  And so we know that there is no law of beauty it attracts it charms us it brings us into its fault it signals when we should and shouldn't pay attention beauty culture feels irresistible not only because it is marketed to us so strongly but because I do think that on some subhuman level we're drawn to beauty but we need to understand that we are not drawn to a monolithic definition of beauty we should not all over the world agree.
• 32:47
  That anyone who's celebrated as beautiful I do not think that if it weren't for colonialism and slavery and all of these things and come west in hegemony I think there is not even a single chance in hell we would all agree that any given individual was beautiful and that that would just be taken as a fact and I want you to contrast this in your mind to flavors like food flavors.
• 33:09
  There is simply no consensus that garlic is simply delightful and if you disagree you're wrong that is true you are wrong and so there's all these ways that flavors in our mouths and music is another great example of this way I can't just tell you what music to like and you're like agree but suddenly someone says oh then this celebrity is not beautiful and it's like you're wrong you're incorrect you're false and why because you've been conditioned into your beauty standards in ways that you simply haven't been conditioned into your food and music.
• 33:39
  You have individuality you have the driver's seat when it comes to deciding what you genuinely believe is beautiful music and is beautiful food and I would love to imagine a world where this is our approach to beauty because I think so many more people could be included everyone gets love if it's truly based on you as an individual gravitating towards certain sounds gravitating towards certain flavors.
• 34:04
  In a static beauty we seem to think it's okay that you know we have like a global beauty standard that to me is so messed up and we're converging in ways that I think is much more powerful that we diverge anyways I'm going to move on what I was saying to you was that beauty has an allure beauty culture feels irresistible because it is marketed to us so strongly because I'm of our favorite celebrities fall under this banner of beauty culture and because many of our relationships with each other.
• 34:34
  Touch beauty in some way so I do not deny that we are drawn to this world of meaning and that they are positive aspects to beauty but not in the way that I'm talking about it today remember I'm talking about the social construct of beauty I'm not talking about beauty as an art form I'm not talking about makeup as an art form but then we do have to ask ourselves okay.
• 34:54
  We are made to be drawn to a particular definition of beauty and although I do not deny the joys that beauty can bring I also do emphasize that these joys are predicated on someone else's suffering always that's I mean that's just the nature of consumerism in general
• 35:10
  I mean anything that brings you joy brings someone else suffering because someone was probably exploited in the production of that product the unaffordability of certain products and procedures excludes many people from participating in beauty culture and the way that what makes me feel beautiful is necessarily what makes someone else feel ugly.
• 35:29
  I want you to understand that you have been taught to think about things in a really disintegrated way and so part of our work as we reimagine is to reintegrate I am not opposing the individual practice or choices that keep some people alive safe or employed or happy in the real world that we live in but I am opposing the ideology that makes it so I'm questioning the conditions that inform the beauty choices that we can and cannot make I am questioning the social construct of beauty that lets even the most supposedly pro
• 35:59
  black people breathe life into anti blackness without a second thought through the lens of beauty of preference of choice and so we see people's politics really come to life within this concept of beauty because there's nowhere to hide there's no way to hide when people say that they support bad people but they don't date that people there's no way to hide when people say that they support trans people but find trans people ugly beauty gives us nowhere to hide when we're willing to look at it in the face and this is again capital B beauty not me imposing
• 36:29
  the definition of beauty on people but leveraging the notion that some people have access to desire and to beauty in that way but here's the thing about the allure of beauty it allows us to do something incredibly powerful
• 36:43
  beauty's allure it's undeniable draw becomes a subversive way to use beauty against itself so suddenly we are using beauty to talk about colonialism capitalism all of these things the ugliness of beauty is that it promotes the same violent systems that it conditions people to flee from addressing
• 37:03
  it is so much more comfortable to flee to the comforts of beautiful people than it is to interrogate what makes them so and the discomforting ways beauty conditions us to look away from the power hierarchies it reinforces
• 37:15
  something that a lot of people are really called to can be used to discuss and to unpack and to grapple with things that people often flee from
• 37:26
  while friends we have been on such a profound journey together today at least I hope you feel that way because I know that I do
• 37:35
  but before I wrap up with some closing words I wanted to review some powerful words that speak to the ugliness of beauty from three different perspectives
• 37:45
  number one along with feminists lesbian queer gender queer non-binary and transgender people are frequently accused of ugliness as payback for breaking with conventional gender understandings
• 37:59
  ugly is more than a physical description for a woman it's meant to be shorthand for worthless undesirable undeserving and lesbians are by popular definition ugly women
• 38:12
  in these ways ugliness functions to keep the bounds of gender in check and is used to keep bodies in line in their presumed place
• 38:23
  powerful this is the ugliness of beauty and this is from a book called on the politics of ugliness so we see how beauty is used to police gender
• 38:33
  always already excluding gender non-conforming people queer people transgender people and especially as she names here there's been women
• 38:41
  the second quote takes us to Nigeria Nigerian journalist Tammy McKinney says many dark skinned black women all over the world have been made to bear the brunt of society's obsession with a proximity to whiteness
• 38:57
  and it is no different in Nigeria right from the moment we are born the color of our skin becomes the topic of conversation
• 39:06
  and something to take pride or shame in remember the duality the twin concepts of beauty and ugliness the reintegration the idea that what makes one person feel beautiful make someone else feel ugly
• 39:18
  what one person takes pride in is the exact other face of what makes another person feel shame okay
• 39:26
  she goes on to say that was just me interjecting I had to
• 39:29
  you often hear comments like she'll still get dark look at her ears or your baby now blacky all reinforcing that skin color is a metric of perceived social value
• 39:41
  even the formative systems which are meant to protect us she says continue to contribute to this harm and from schools to our homes we are often reminded that our skin color is something to be changed
• 40:03
  wow that is the ugliness of beauty now a final quote from Deshorn El Harrison in their phenomenal book belly of the beast
• 40:13
  if you enjoyed today's conversation I think you would absolutely love this book you should also follow them on Twitter they say thinness as a politic demands that one consume less desire less
• 40:25
  rather than make the demand that we end a world where what one desires would leave others without
• 40:35
  on the surface this means something as simple as the black fat doesn't have to eat less
• 40:41
  when interrogated more closely however this means that the black fat doesn't deserve to have less access to housing less access to employment less access to proper medical care and health care
• 40:55
  it means the black fat doesn't deserve to have less access to adequate clothing options it means fat children don't deserve to be sent to fat camps
• 41:06
  it means a project predicated on the idea that literal minors are undesirable and greedy that's so powerful right that is the notion that is the foundation of fat camps abolish they go on to say
• 41:20
  it means that fat women don't deserve to be believed less and assaulted more when sharing their stories of sexual violence
• 41:30
  all of which is also predicated on the idea that fatness is undesirable and they are thus unable to consent because consent is reserved as an option only for those who are desired
• 41:45
  that is the ugliness of beauty they shone goes on to say in this book society there should be an interrogation of why ugly people are asked to apologize for their ugliness
• 42:01
  and so find ways to conform to beauty rather than divesting completely from beauty as a political concept
• 42:10
  I'm going to take up this charge in the beauty of ugliness which is coming not next but probably next next I cannot wait to share my thoughts on the flip side of this paradox with you
• 42:22
  so wow sunshine we have just been on such a journey together we have traversed many landscapes many monuments we have seen it all really and we have yet so much more to see
• 42:35
  so I want to kind of wrap up with what have we learned on today's grand tour of the land of the ugliness of beauty well we've learned a ton we've learned that beauty is a prism in that it distorts colors and slants our view of the world and of each other
• 42:55
  that the name itself distorts our understanding of the sinisterness of the concept in reality that the name in theory distorts our understanding of the concept in practice
• 43:08
  and we've learned to really take up the charge of embracing the many paradoxes of beauty on that point we've learned that beauty is the mask not the thing itself it is the mask at the mask raid ball that underneath this performance of grandeur of nobility of grace of purity lies something much more sinister and punishing not only in terms of how beauty makes people feel about themselves
• 43:37
  when they do not conform to this very narrow ideal and even oftentimes when they do unworthy unlovable but also in terms of how it is rooted in the exploitation of the most vulnerable and specifically of the people who are doing the labor that produces beauty not only the physical labor that then leads to the raw materials the packaging and the services of the beauty industry
• 44:04
  but also of the cultural labor of producing the trends the cultural capital that is then exploited we've learned that beauty is one of the many tools in the toolbox of white supremacy and Cicero patriarchy
• 44:18
  beauty punishes the very same people that these systems of power seek to annihilate and seek to render subhuman next we've learned that beauty dehumanizes it removes us from the recognition that human life has inherent value
• 44:36
  and it does not become more valuable based on whether a person is conventionally attractive that this even notion of conventional attraction within human beings removes us alienates us separates us from our inherent humanity
• 44:52
  and when I speak about humanity I'm speaking about this as a virtue one that symbolizes human love and compassion towards each other in our capacity as human beings and nothing further
• 45:03
  using the power of metaphors and language I hope this cements this knowledge in your mind I hope that you add to it you challenge it as you're thinking through it I hope that you have enjoyed this great tour the splendid day we've had together
• 45:17
  touring around these monumental findings that we've journeyed we've adventureed we really had a time and I cannot wait to join you again in part two of this conversation
• 45:30
  thank you so much sunshine I love you have a wonderful day
• 45:34
  that's it sunshine thank you so much for listening to reimagining with I understood a podcast where we reframe rethink and reimagine all things standing in the way of love and liberation
• 45:50
  please follow my work on substach at i understood dot substach dot com and subscribe if you have the means as well as on tiktok and instagram at i understood I would absolutely love to hear from you if you have good things to say I am a cancer please be nice to me I am sensitive
• 46:05
  okay follow our podcast community the IG handle is reimagining with I understood please leave a rating on the podcast if it is five stars again I'm a cancer okay I love you have a wonderful day nourish yourself and nourish each other