Pretty Ugly

Last time, we left off with my whining about the USA’s fascist beauty standards. When I gripe about the pretty people, I do so fully aware that, if I fit their mold, I wouldn’t be griping, and I probably wouldn’t feel the need to harp on things like how peoples’ self-image suffers, how too much emphasis is placed on outward appearances, and how it’s all fruitless because even the pretty people will become tabouleh when everything’s said and done. It’s a very judgmental point-of-view, and the more you read things I write, you’ll see that sometimes I’m a very judgmental chick.

It’s a culturally conditioned assumption here in the USA that beautiful people don’t have to be smart and that they generally aren’t. They don’t have to be intelligent; they don’t have to have any kind of merit other than their appearance because beauty is highly valuable in our society. You’d be hard pressed to find an unattractive person who doesn’t want to be beautiful, or to find a beautiful person who doesn’t want to maintain herself. Why else would our multi-billion-dollar beauty industry exist? It sure as shit isn’t there to help people cure AIDS, conquer world hunger, or research sustainable clean fuel sources. But is there really a positive correlation between beauty and stupidity? My grimy, cobwebby, cold black heart says there is. But my brain’s fairly sure that intelligence and physical appearance aren’t related.

In Tally’s world, the opposite is true: after the operation, a new pretty’s personality is drastically different. Regardless of what she or he was like as an ugly — no matter how cynical toward New Pretty Town life, no matter how mischievous, how crafty with ugly-tricks — the operation leaves the patient a beautiful airhead. Uglies opens with Tally sneaking into New Pretty Town to visit her best friend Peris, a recent post-op and her best friend, whom she’d been without for months. (Although pretties are allowed to visit Uglyville in the off-chance that they’d want to, uglies aren’t allowed to step foot inside New Pretty Town, hence the Mission Impossible-esque sneaking.) She does find Peris in the party tower where he makes his home, and she’s completely dazzled with his beauty, but she can’t help but notice that he’s not too thrilled to see her. His personality is different; he’s not sarcastic, he’s not ironic like he was before his operation when he used to criticize pretties for their irresponsible, shallow, half-drunk lifestyle. In fact, he’s dressed in black velvet, on his way to a bash, and he tells Tally that they’ll be best friends for life again after she has her operation. Tally sneaks back to Uglyville with a foul aftertaste in her mouth, but she chocks it up to the loneliness of waiting for her operation while all of her friends are already pretty. On her way back to Uglyville, she meets Shay, another ugly.

Eager to find a new friend now that she knows Peris is off-limits until she has her operation, Tally jumps at the chance to be Shay’s BFF. And it comes out soon that, not only does Shay not envy the pretties, she doesn’t want to be one at all. She doesn’t want to be pretty; she likes her own face. She even thinks Tally’s face is alright, and she doesn’t feel the need to gag when she sees another of what society would have her call “ugly”. To Shay, the stupidity factor of beauty is the major deterrent. Nothing is as valuable as her mind, her individuality, her creativity. Tally disagrees. She thinks being a professional party girl in a lit-up party tower every single night is a worthy replacement for the “ugly tricks” and mischief that run rampant in Uglyville. She sees having the operation as a rite of passage that one looks forward to, kind of like graduating high school — never mind that it seems to undo all the book-learning. Tally calls it “growing up”, as if moving to New Pretty Town expands horizons and responsibilities. Like the culturally conditioned assumptions that I bitched about earlier, these are Tally’s culturally conditioned assumptions. She can’t make sense of Shay’s point-of-view because she’s been trained her entire life through her peers, her parents, media, and school to believe just the opposite.

Aside from the large theme of the culturally conditioned assumptions surrounding beauty and self-image, there are a few other things that jumped out at me about Uglies.

1. The specifications of the new face and body that are created during the operation are based on a template for a beautiful person. This template’s features — facial structure and symmetry, eye, nose, and lip size, limb length, etc. — are based on the calculated averages that came from years and years of studies conducted to determine what people considered beautiful. Scientists researched which facial features triggered immediate positive reactions from the study participants, who came from all over the world and all walks of life. Tally frequently analyzes the physiognomy of the pretties around her: their wide eyes signify vulnerability and innocence, the pearly white teeth and full lips, when smiling, are inviting and compelling. She feels an odd tug inside her that draws her towards them. And, what’s more important, she notes that their healthy glow signifies that they’d produce healthy babies. Uglies are taught that, because of the extremely low human population, it’s very important that they reproduce; and that’s where the operation comes in. Who’d want to make babies with a total hag? In Uglies, the inexplicable emotion of love is played down and the instinctual, biological drive to rut like beasts in the field is played up. The operation is intended to assist nature in its course. Yet, it has created a society that hates its natural self. To live life with the face you were born with is wrong. If you keep your natural face, you will never reproduce, because people will look at your natural ugliness and their knee-jerk reaction is that you’ll produce ugly little babies. You must have the operation to become human. Beauty doesn’t occur naturally in humans; you must have this operation or you are just an ugly-for-life, which is something not quite human.

2. There’s an Uglyville, a New Pretty Town, and a Crumblyville, which segregate the citizens by their level of prettiness, but the city containing all three of these towns is unnamed. There are starkly defined boundaries dividing pretty and ugly; if you’re not a pretty, you must be an ugly. One or the other. But to name the city itself would place a border around all three towns, which would undermine the hierarchy create and endanger the uglies’ acceptance of the regime.

To place a large border around something emphasizes that the city is indeed finite, and there is something outside of it. The people in Tally’s city are not remotely curious about what lies beyond the city limits, and are actually scared to think that, in other cities, people may or may not come in different colors or speak different languages from them. And there are not just other cities, but other options: the Smoke, for example, which is a small rebel community inhabited by people who ran from their city to avoid the operation (and where Shay goes when she leaves the city). The purveyors of the pretty regime don’t want their citizens to know that there are other options; especially not the uglies.

As it turns out, Shay is right; the operation really does change a person into an airhead. But it’s not because the post-op is suddenly encouraged to spend as much time as possible having fun. The big secret, and the real purpose of the operation, is to damage the person’s brain in strategic places to create the “pretty personality”. The pretties don’t realize that they’ve changed because they all live with other pretties; they’re all the same. An ugly would notice a difference, and Tally certainly does. She mentions at the beginning of the novel that she and Peris used spy on pretties to make fun of the stupid things pretties say (that is, until Peris became one himself). Now, an ugly is forbidden to enter New Pretty Town; but a pretty may enter Uglyville if he or she chooses. Tally doesn’t see pretties face-to-face very often. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Peris, at the very beginning of the novel, is the only new pretty she’s ever spoken to. The regime ostracizes uglies because they are dangerous to it. They haven’t had their brains messed with, so their perceptions aren’t fucked up. They would notice that something is wrong with the pretties and resist having the operation.



And it’s late again. I don’t feel like typing anymore. Read the book.

(Uglies, written by Scott Westerfeld, is the first of a trilogy. The second installment, Pretties, picks up where Uglies leaves off, with Tally and Shay living in New Pretty Town.)