Straining For Beauty
UDT: ugly duckling trauma
I’ve heard it said that I look like the following actors:
Hugh Jackman
Tobey Maguire
Tony Stark
and a young Russell Crowe (circa 192 AD)
Wonderful compliments. But when you’re all these guys at once, it’s not so wonderful. Liquify these men and mix them; what do you get?
This:
Definitions from Oxford Languages
Dan
/dan/
noun: a vague reminder of cooler shapes.
“I am Dan, therefore I swim at the sexy end of average.”
Similar: normie, almost forgettable, high-end mediocre
verb: produce a slightly interesting result.
“I want that report now! It doesn’t have to be perfect or even near perfect. Just Dan the damn thing, and have it on my desk in an hour!”
And though I am the dumpy half-brother of Beauty, I love it and always have.
Halfway is better than no way in the land of “Beauty is power.”
If you’re hot, you can get away with murder. I mean rich. If you’re rich, you can get away with it. Hot people aren’t as awesome at homicide, though I’d rather be put down by a smoke show than the homely rich.
Would you rather get run over by a ’67 Corvette or Elon Musk?
Exactly.
Like anyone who’s almost something great, I try the hardest.
Can I be hotter?
YES I CAN!
If you’re attempting to bump your beauty to the next level, you’ve got to get a baseline.
Exactly how attractive am I at bottom, and top, and in between?
Does the beauty have good bones? Let’s strip it and find out.
And so, I used to shave my head.
“Am I good-looking without this adornment of hair? I must know.”
“Behold, Mother,” I said, “how do I look?”
She studied on it for a moment, then said, “I think you like to suffer.”
“But how do I look, though?”
“Threatening.”
“Like sexy threatening?”
“No, like a neo-Nazi.”
“A sexy neo-Nazi?”
She wouldn’t answer. For the life of me, I couldn’t get my mother to call me a sexy neo-Nazi.
Though I did get a baldness compliment from a professor once. In grad school, I shaved, walked into class, and the prof said, “You have a beautiful skull.”
Good bones?
Check.
Don’t worry, this wasn’t inappropriate of her. It was grad school; students and professors are supposed to cross lines. It’s a “tip credit provision” situation, which allows colleges and universities to pay professors a lower direct cash wage.
My professor’s compliment made me feel wonderful. I imagined what she saw when gazing at my skull: not a skull.
No way.
She saw the globular pommel of the sword, my body, perfectly weighted…
She saw the right or left butt cheek of The David.
I wished I could shave harder, removing my skin and meat to reveal all my bones. You have to consider yourself truly good-looking if your skeleton is hot.
I know you’re not wondering, What’s so important about being hot? because I already told you.
Also, you’ve always known:
The power.
This power: People are nicer to attractive folks.
You say this isn’t fair.
So do I.
So does the universe, which is why it sometimes tips the scales toward fairness: More often than you think, hot parents give birth to something called “regression toward the mean.”
Statistically, the children of two people with extreme traits (like exceptional beauty) are likely to be closer to the average, the mean.
It’s mean all right.
So-so babies rising out of hot parents? Yes. And it has always been so.
Consider the proverb:
Let it be known in this world of sin,
The hot butt, like any other, can blow foul wind.
What can hot parents do to help their hard-featured children?
Here’s one thing they have done…
They’ve preached the American Dream:
The Ugly Duckling.
by author
Everyone knows the story, but they probably haven’t read it in a long time.
To write this thing, I just read it. I read the board-book version made for little, little children. Then I read the original by Hans Christian Andersen, which, apparently, was made for psychos.
Here’s a refresher:
So, there’s this duck mother who birthed eggs. No mention of a husband, but judging by the look of her, I don’t think it was immaculate conception.
All the eggs are dirty little duck eggs, all but one, which is roughly the size of my hot-ass skull.
There’s no mention of how the huge egg got there. So, we’re left to assume the duck gave birth to it, and we do assume that, because we are little, little children when we first hear this story.
Back then, we didn’t know duck birth science. For example:
A duck egg is 2.6 ounces.
A swan egg is 14 ounces.
The duck who tried to birth a swan egg would die of “egg binding.”
Which is when an egg gets stuck.
To help, you could force the swan bomb out with an air compressor.
You just stick the hose in the duck’s mouth and let her rip.
With the encouragement of 7,000 PSI, the egg would come out. So would everything else, and the duck would be inside out and backwards, which is exactly how I felt while reading The Ugly Duckling.
I couldn’t believe how many creatures in the duckling’s life called it ugly:
his mother
his siblings
all ducks
people
frogs
finches
moles
geese, cats, chickens, a hermity old woman, a farm family
basically anything
and everything
that had the breath of life
It’s brutal.
The duck’s mom is mean in the board book, but Hans Christian Andersen makes Board-Book Mother look like a saint.
In the Andersen, the mother’s like, “I wish you’d never been born. Better yet, I wish you’d get eaten. By the cat. You know they torture their food? I love cats. They’re fearless when it comes to just being themselves.”
by author
And in the end of the Andersen original, when our ugly duckling finally bumps into swans, his life has been so bad up to this point that he has the following plan:
“I will fly to those royal birds,” he exclaimed, “and they will kill me, because I am so ugly, and dare to approach them; but it does not matter: better be killed by them than pecked by the ducks, beaten by the hens, pushed about by the maiden who feeds the poultry, or starved with hunger in the winter.”
So, the duckling goes to the swans and says, and I quote,
“Kill me.”
As you know, they don’t kill him. They accept him. Because, at this point in the story, he’s all grown up. He’s huge and beautiful.
If you find swans beautiful.
I don’t.
You see a swan; I see an obese albino sea cucumber with a penisy serpent emerging from the cuke’s turd cutter.
The point is, the story’s a nightmare, and I’m furious at Hans.
Allow me to rewrite it:
Once upon a time, a mother duck stole a swan’s egg.
Rather, she tried.
The swans caught her, beat her, bit her, then they used their nasty dick necks to hold her underwater.
She drowned.
These swans, having developed a keen bloodlust, killed everything else:
people
frogs
finches
moles
geese, cats, chickens
all ducks
ducks in eggs
and out of eggs
fuck ‘em
and for dessert
they murdered a 19th-century Danish author
THE END
What’s the moral of Andersen’s famous story?
It’s not what I thought it was.
What I Thought It Was: “Hang in there, Little Billy; awkward stages end. You’re not where you want to be today, but someday, your dreams just might come true! All you have to do is hope and wait.”
But it’s way trickier:
“Mother,” says Little Billy, “I get the impression you like reading this story to me every night because something uncomfortable has happened to you.”
Mother frowns. “Speak plainly, child.”
“You and Father are beautiful, and everyone treats you better because of it. I, on the other hand, am cosmic balance. So, you read the duck story to give yourself hope that one day you’ll be able to use my face to convince people I’m your biological son.”
“Yes,” says Mother, “it is a very hopeful story.”
“But the ugly duckling wasn’t a duck.”
“At the beginning he was.”
“He never was, Mother. He was a swan the whole time. There’s no magical transformation. The only magic in the story is Hans Christian Andersen’s circumvention of biological law; it’s called egg binding. Also, he’s magically given the animals hate speech.”
“So?”
“So, am I?”
“Are you what?”
“Am I your biological son? Or do you read the story to me nightly to tell me I’m adopted?”
“You’re not adopted.”
“Abducted then? Is The Ugly Duckling really about human trafficking? I guess it makes sense that they’d have that in Denmark.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Wait, were you ugly when you were a kid?”
“No way.”
“What about Dad?”
“Nope. Hot as hell.”
“Isn’t there anyone who knows what this story is all about?!”
by author
Sure, Little Billy, I can tell you what The Ugly Duckling is all about.
This:
Beauty is power.
It witches kindness out of us, and favoritism, and cruelty.
Sadly, you cannot take hope from The Ugly Duckling. Why not? Because what happens to the main character is lottery-rare. It’s 19th-century-novel rare:
“It is my orphanage, and I can knuckle-whip this child in the eyes if I wish to. And I wish to.”
“That child, Matron Whipknuckle, is the lost daughter of the king!”
“And who are you?”
“THE KING!”
“Father?” said the humble, humble child. “Please, do not kill Matron Whipknuckle. Show her mercy, for the Lord is bountiful in mercy… though that might just be my concussion talking.”
“Sorry, daughter, I couldn’t hear you over my soldiers bayonetting your old Matron. What did you say?”
“What, father? I cannot hear you. Bayonetting is loud.”
“What did you say?!”
The King and the princess laughed, and their laughter was even louder than the bayonetting, because they were very, very, very happy.
The End
What happens in The Ugly Duckling is as rare as the existence of Hans Christian Andersen. I say this because The Ugly Duckling is basically his autobiography.
He went through hellish bullying and failure before becoming famous for his stories. He even believed he was the illegitimate son of King Christian VIII of Denmark. Some historians say he found proof of it, too.
You can’t hope for stuff like this.
Happy Hans endings, Swan endings, are one in a trillion.
Waiting around for them is madness.
Here’s all The Ugly Duckling can teach us:
The world is a mean fucking place.
Some people get astonishingly lucky here.
Most don’t.
Oh, and everyone has the potential for producing words and acts of extreme cruelty.
Lastly, you will be tricked by the shape of things here.
But maybe The Ugly Duckling has one more thing to teach:
When you get to the story’s end, you hate people, frogs, finches, moles, geese, cats, chickens, all ducks, and swans, damn it, “Where were you guys?”
You’re so mad at these dicks, you think, I’ll never be like them. I’d rather be dead. I wish they were dead.
You think, The next time I bump into someone who’s having a rough time, I won’t be cruel.
I’ll be kind to them.
I promise.
You might even be so mad after reading The Ugly Duckling that you don’t want to wait to bump into people who are hurting.
You can’t wait.
You want to go looking for them.
Seek them out and bring your kindness there.
And if you come across a man in your travels who looks a little like Hugh, Russell, Tony, and Tobey, a man who is a mashed potato of these famous beauties, be kind to him, too.
He may be hotter than you, but he’s not better off.
He’s Beauty’s half-brother, and even though he knows it, he still believes that one day he will ascend.
by author