Ugly: Giving us back our beauty standards

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Either way, the message is the same – you are not enough. By belittling your self-esteem and sense of worth, ‘ugliness’ is presented as a problem that needs to be ‘fixed’, says Anita, and typically the solutions involve spending money. In a society where beauty sometimes seems to be the gateway to everything we celebrate - fame, wealth, success, love - Does being ugly mean you can never achieve true happiness? I wouldn't say I stopped hating the way I look but this book helped me make a significant steps towards just accepting myself the way that I am.

Who profits? Keeping women feeling small, old, unworthy and ugly supports patriarchy and capitalism. People get rich when women buy stuff they don’t need via the creation of beauty anxiety.Do you ever wonder why you slather on skincare, remove body hair, or painstakingly contour? Is it because you want to, or feel like you should? I would scour teen magazines for any information I could use to make myself feel better, feel prettier. It was a very narrow beauty remit – thin and white, basically,’ she says.

As an adult, I’ve tried diligently to “fix” my “ugly” problem. As the saying goes, God loves a trier, and I tried hard – so I’m definitely going to heaven. I’ve embarked on multiple extreme diets, cleanses and detox retreats; I’ve taken appetite suppressants and spent endless hours researching various weight-loss surgeries. I have obsessed over beauty products, techniques and treatments.For so many of us – myself included – damage was done slowly and stealthily, without anyone realising or taking accountability. Uncovering it feels like an injustice and wake-up call all in one. Ugly isn’t intrinsic – it was planted consistently during our childhoods. To say that realising this feels freeing is an understatement. Rethinking our beauty standards She kind of lost me with the yoga bit. I understand her frustration with the cultural appropriation aspect but yoga without the spiritual aspect has a place - especially for us atheists who could benefit from the physical movement aspects of the practice. Perhaps not calling it yoga, as such would be more appropriate. Perhaps the biggest shift was learning why I’d reduced my self-worth to being entirely defined by how I look, and that made me realise how imperative it was to root my self-esteem elsewhere, in the qualities that really define me – my character and positive traits. Because ugly is an ever-changing, politically charged construct – and the biggest lesson I’ve learned is never to trust those binary categories, “pretty” and “ugly”, don’t actually exist. Cosmetic surgery seems to boom during periods of female emancipation, for example during the 1980s when more women were entering male-dominated workplaces than ever before. When the contraceptive pill was introduced in the 1960’s it gave women more reproductive rights but subsequently, body standards shifted to being ultra-slim.