Adeline: “I want to go as her, a pretty girl…
I want to be a pretty girl for Halloween. Make me a pretty girl, like you, Violet.”
…
Constance: “Now wash that smut off your face.”
Adeline: “No! I wanna be a pretty girl.”
Constance: “But you’re not a pretty girl, and you know it!”
Adeline: “But I wanna be!”
American Horror Story, season 1, episode 4
No one teaches you how to be a pretty girl.
Either you are a pretty girl and you are raised with an awareness of your own body and how others find it attractive or you are raised with an awareness of how your body fails to meet expectations. Falling into the latter category, one learns to compensate with personality and other inherent and manifestable characteristics that earn them the respect and/or company of others.
Being talented, or smart, or wealthy helps you to gain recognition and build a social circle, for better or worse and with strong or weak bonds. But, if you’re not pretty, and you want to be exceptional, you must develop an exceptional personality as ancillary to whatever else you might have to offer. It is this exceptional personality that draws people in and keeps them coming back. Everyone has a personality. Not everyone who is unpretty has a good personality.
I developed a great personality, but I still just wanted to be pretty. I came to understand that that just wasn’t in the cards. I wasn’t pretty, so I never learned how to be a pretty girl.
When I first hit puberty, I didn’t realize that not being pretty doesn’t mean there aren’t people who will find you attractive or sexually viable. People who accept, ignore, or fetishize the unpretty parts of you. You don’t even have to be pretty to date; unpretty people have boyfriends and girlfriends. Most often unpretty people find each other. But an unpretty person can attract a significantly more pretty mate with personality, especially when it combines with common interests (or money). Part of being not pretty is knowing how to use what you have to attract what you can and to have an understanding of what is within your magnetic field. Being unpretty means that you know with near exactitude where you fall on the spectrum of less-than-pretty so you know who you can attract, so you don’t overshoot. While undershooting can be embarrassing, overshooting is worse. You rather be the prettier unpretty person than a reject or social faux pas.
Socially and professionally, if you are unpretty and you have a good personality, you can become endearing, alluring, or influential. I was fortunate because, though I was somewhat shy as a child and had horrible fear of rejection, I was able to develop friendships based on my humor, creativity, and general willingness to be the side car (and, as pointed out by many in my younger years, I was appropriately built for the role). I had friends, both male and female, because of my personality, but I learned early on that no one wanted me to have a crush on them.
I wanted to be pretty so someone would want me to have a crush on them.
The way you know you’re pretty is fairly obvious: You are simply told you are pretty by an impartial third party– over and over. Different people who don’t know you and gain nothing from simply telling you that you are pretty, except maybe winning your favor, which, as someone who doesn’t know you, is only important if they want to be near you for aesthetic reasons, proving you are, in fact, pretty. You have value based on just existing visually. You don’t have to do anything.
If you are pretty, you are told you are pretty regularly by strangers, some of whom are pretty. The prettier the people telling you you are pretty, the more pretty you are. There is a hierarchy of attention. To welcome the attention of someone less pretty suggests you, yourself, are uncertain of your prettiness (that there may be something ugly about you) or that you simply don’t understand what pretty is or how it works (which just indicates you missed some phase or facet of social indoctrination).
I wanted to be wanted, but also to have the gravitas to reject. That’s what it is to be pretty.
While pretty is hierarchical, it requires that there is a diametric opposition. Pretty requires ugly. It requires distinct identities and contrasts between subjects (or subjects as objects, valued only for objective criteria). But the way pretty exists socially, it reflects a stratification. There is something pretty (ideal) and there is something ugly (deplorable) and everything that falls between (reality) receives its value based upon how close it is to one pole or the other. Not being pretty, I became acutely aware of my deplorable characteristics– the specifications that made me notably unpretty. I carried those unpretty things around with me neurotically using what I had to distract from what I didn’t. It is those deficits that the subject tries to bandage with reference to the ways in which she reflects whatever ideals may apply to her– she has pretty eyes, she has a kind heart, and she can hide her tears with humor.
When you’re not pretty, you see pretty in others. You know you’re not pretty because you see it in others and not yourself. You set pretty people apart from you and set your value in your relative position. Your value is based on your ability to offer intellectual companionship, emotional support, or comical relief. You are, at best, a supporting actor or, at worst, a prop.
You have pretty friends and they have control over those friendships. And you have no choice but to allow it. No choice, aside from choosing not to be their friend. But it is that proximity to them that provides your access to pretty, a feeling you will never know. Pretty is your objet a. It’s the magical thing you can’t have but moves your desire. Pretty is the thing you lack. And you relish in the thing by watching others enjoy it. You listen to your friends’ stories of dates, and making out, and sex, and break ups, and being too good for so-and-so.
Even when you have your own dates, and making out, and sex, and break ups, you have a relatively different experience. You never have the upper hand in the same way. You lack the desirability of the pretty girl. Your relationships and sexual encounters and their failures are rarely if ever a consideration of your physical body. You know you are valued as something other than being pretty, because you can’t be pretty. If the person you are in a relationship leaves you because you aren’t pretty, it’s not really a reason since you were never pretty. You didn’t change; they just changed their mind.
When you’re not pretty, you can’t imagine what it’s like to turn heads, to receive compliments, or to be doted upon for no reason other than being pretty– But you know that’s a thing.
And you want that thing because you see how it impacts others in an unjustly positive way. They did nothing to earn pretty. That’s just how they were born. It’s not fair to privilege someone for something they have no influence over in the same way it’s not fair to disenfranchise someone for something they have no control over– for the signifier they become, for the dialectic they affirm.
But that’s how society works– it functions off of a series of labels. A series of “this not that.” How would we know who we are if we had no one to compare ourselves to? How could we feel good about ourselves or find our worth if we didn’t have differential markers? And in that, we need a variety of ways to find our strengths and weaknesses, of which looks are but one.
I have a lot of fine traits really. But I was never meant to be pretty. It wasn’t planned for. I wasn’t prepared.
But one day, the oddest thing happened. One day, I saw myself and I wasn’t myself. First, I saw myself out of the corner of my eye and I didn’t know I was looking at myself, which is an extremely uncanny feeling– To become startled by your reflection because you think another person is looking back at you, but then you realize that is you.
It’s like a reverse mirror stage. You think the person looking back at you is judging you for your flaws and lack of completeness, only increasing your discomfort when you realize that that’s not a superior being but you. Unlike the infant in the mirror who gains confidence in the autonomous and independent being they see reflected back at them–that they are that, you are struck by the fact that you know that you are not that. You immediately start searching for your flaws–the ways that what is being presented before you does not match your experience or what you know to be true of you.
And so I went on differently in the eyes of others, but still the same in myself, just with smaller clothes. I was someone else, but the same in my head. But then the oddest thing happened, I was someone who someone pretty considered pretty.
What hit me as I grappled with being pretty in the eyes of some pretty was that being adored or desired for being pretty is not the same as being loved. Desire isn’t a partnership. Desire is more akin to admiration than love. Desire is not unconditional. Desire moves when it is proven that the object (or subject that embodies the object) is found to not be the thing in itself–the objet a– but merely a placeholder for it. Pretty is the perfect that cannot exist. What I failed to see, before I felt what it was like to be pretty, is that pretty is not a thing that garners love. Pretty is just a thing that validates desire.
You can never actually be pretty once you know that pretty is outside of you. Once you begin to recognize pretty as the thing that could complete you. My problem is that I feel things too hard. I internalize judgements and become fixated on fixing. I came to see the failure to be pretty or to be pretty enough as my ultimate flaw. If I am smart, and funny, and artistic, and a good friend, and fun to hangout with, and have a unique style, and still people don’t think I am good enough, well, then obviously, being pretty is important. Being pretty is the thing I lack that would make me good enough to be unconditionally appreciated and loved.
At an intellectual level I know that being pretty does not guarantee unconditional anything. Being pretty is conditional– not only is it in the “eye of the beholder,” it is in almost all cases fleeting. Pretty is not timeless culturally or at the individual level. What is pretty changes, and what is pretty (or not pretty) about you changes over the course of your life. There are very few people who are considered pretty by nearly everyone from the moment they enter the world to the moment that they leave it. And still, I just want to be pretty, from now until forever.
Since I was first recognized as pretty, ever since that first time I misrecognized myself in the mirror, every time anything in my life goes wrong, I fall back on trying to fix my body. Every time anything goes wrong, I see something unpretty about my physical self.
Because life is imperfect, I get wrapped up in an endless web of unpretty things that I can address in trying to perfect myself to perfect my life. My body has become my primary, if not only, means to see progress, to manifest hope by forcing myself to change. But it doesn’t last. The body changes. Life goes on. Good things happen. Bad things happen. Sometimes nothing happens. Life isn’t static. Why do I expect my body to be this glorious, pretty, unchanging thing?
What I never learned in never learning how to be pretty, is that pretty is not the answer. Pretty is not something you can create your complete self-worth and unchanging worth to others upon, and in that, if you aren’t pretty, it isn’t the missing piece of identity that you can grasp and hold on to to perfect your life. Pretty has advantages, but pretty has no real value. It is a value judgement. It’s an idea–an ideal–that impacts an individual’s identity, self-worth, and view of others. It’s abstract, intangible. It doesn’t not have a finite, fixed end, and therefore it cannot be a goal.
It should not be a goal.
But when I am lonely–when I am down on myself for who I am based on who I have been–I just wish I learned how to be pretty, because then maybe I could let myself be loved. Maybe I could see how someone else could see me as attractive as a person, not just a body.
If I knew how to be pretty, I would know how to aesthetically attract and emotionally hold.
But I don’t know how to be pretty…
So I am vapid, and self loathing, and alone.
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