You ugly 2

Carrying on from yesterday's post about Teh Ugly, I found this awesome post from over at Shakesville called The This Is My Flaw Project. It's well worth the read, and Shakesville is more than worth a bookmark. Here's an excerpt:

Being beautiful on the inside doesn't change the fact that it's still a
radical act to look different and be happy in this culture. If you're obviously,
undisguisably Less Than Perfect, you're not only meant to be unhappy, but deeply
ashamed of yourself, projecting at all times an apologetic nature, indicative of
your everlasting remorse for having wrought your monstrous self upon the world.
You are certainly not meant to be bold, or assertive, or confident—and should
you manage to overcome the constant drumbeat of messages that you are ugly and
unsexy and have earned equally society's disdain and your own self-hatred,
should you forget your place and walk into the world one day with your head held
high, you are to be reminded by the unsolicited comments and contemptuous looks
of perfect strangers that you are not supposed to have self-esteem; you don't
deserve it. Being publicly Less Than Perfect and happy is hard; being publicly,
shamelessly, unshakably Less Than Perfect and happy is an act of both will and
bravery. That is the world in which we live. And being beautiful on the inside
doesn't fucking change that. ... Which is why it is imperative to challenge the
criteria by which the world judges beauty, to look at the profoundly
unreasonable, totally crazymaking, and inherently condemnatory Beauty Standard
in its increasingly unachievable face and tell it to fuck off.