I admire ugliness, and I think many Gen Z-ers do too, simply because it is now their turn to do so. Counter culture is almost always driven by the younger generation, as a way to rebel, to be edgy, maybe even going over the edge, to explore ways to be different. This want is not necessarily driven by any sort of conscious philosophy. Most people just do it for the sake of it. While some of this innate rebellion can be just as vain as those chasing after beauty standards, those who chase after ugliness has a better chance at creating something new, something interesting. After all, for every right answer, there are an infinite number of wrong answers.
I am from Hong Kong, and I never thought of my hometown as a beautiful city. It was always ugly to me. The city was cramped and grimy, the go-to backdrop for foreign movies looking for a futuristic city with a dystopian edge. Cantonese, I would argue, is among the most objectively phonetically unpleasant language in existence. I liked it, and I sort of miss it the way it was. I find the Hong Kong today sterilized and different, like many gentrified cities around the world that have been affected by more globalized and homogenized architectural trends, one that I suspect to be American-driven.
I miss the old Hong Kong not because it had more character or had more charm. Because to me, those are just weasel words for giving ugliness a different name.
I wouldn’t even say “it was ugly, but I like it,” no, I’d say “it was ugly, and I like it. I like ugly things.”
Here is where the language we use becomes tricky. Did I mean that even though I believe Hong Kong is objectively ugly, I find them beautiful? Or did I mean I like Hong Kong because it is ugly?
I meant the second part.
But that makes no sense, you say.
I like beautiful things too. They are good for certain things. I just don’t find them very interesting. Beauty standards, like all standards, I think, have their value in establishing uniformity in society. I do not dismiss the value of beauty. There is immense value in the ability to establish uniformity and control for a society. But it is also inevitable for an individual to find it limiting for self-expression.
Sometimes, I just want to record a song without having to go through the trouble of renting out a studio and mixing and mastering the tracks, etc. The first part, the creative part, is fun. The rest is homework. Necessary to succeed in society. Necessary for the industry to filter out the junk. But not very enjoyable for the individual.
So the conflict between beauty and ugliness is between the group and the individual. The group enforces while the individual can choose to rebel.
But this is not a fair fight. The language itself, spoken by both the society and the individual, has picked the side of beauty. There is a deeply ingrained positivity and negativity associated with the words “beauty” and “ugliness.”
It is good to be beautiful and bad to be ugly. And so it does not feel right for one to embrace one’s ugliness. It is like “light” and “dark,” which because of their unfortunate synonym pairs with good and evil, and white and black, affects how its speakers see the world. A good black person? But that’s an oxymoron.
The word “beautiful” not only sets the standard for beauty, but also for acceptance.
The whole fat acceptance movement has always bothered me, because by saying “fat is beautiful,” the movement reinforces the notion that one has to be beautiful to be accepted. If one has to be beautiful to be accepted, what about ugly people? What about people with terrible physical deformities?
Oh, she has a beautiful heart.
So people with deformities have to somehow make up for their outer ugliness by having a beautiful heart?
I think that’s what some Gen Z-ers are trying to rebel against. To wrangle the monopoly on goodness by all things beautiful. To be creatively free, and perhaps to be free from other mainstream schools of thought. To not only normalize those who are ugly and weird, but to embrace them, even when the language itself makes it difficult to express the idea.
Someone from a TikTok that I saw once came pretty close in nailing it.
“Being good-looking is out. Being ugly is in.”
