As Ugly As Sin, Finding A Place In A World Of Beauty - Doing Good Where Ugliness Is A Virtue

Hermione Davis was as ugly as sin, unkind but true, recognized by her parents, friends, and relatives.  She had been a squawky, squally baby whose facial configuration never did straighten out, and its rancid look remained.  Passersby could only manage a 'Wow, what a baby'. No one but the mailman, Hendrik Olson, who had three ugly girls of his own fawned over young Hermione with effusive, warm praise.  'You've got a fine one there, Mrs. Davis', he said when he saw her pushing the baby carriage down Lincoln Street. 'A real looker'. 

 

Hermione's parents hoped that she would grow out of what might very well be a temporary developmental phase, an unfortunate period before the ugly duckling turned into a swan, but nothing doing.  It got worse.  The little girl's eyes were far too close together, her nose was long and irregularly shaped, her mouth was pinched and narrow, and her large ears protruded from whatever hairdo her mother fashioned.  As much as she tried to find one attractive feature in her daughter, Mrs. Davis could not.  

The standards of female beauty - symmetrical features, luminescent eyes, full lips, and luxuriant hair all expressing health, wealth, and well-being as well as being pleasing to a natural sense of geometrical order (the golden mean is universally appealing), and suggesting sexual appeal - have not changed in millennia.  The same perfection sculpted by the Greeks is seen everywhere today. 

Women’s magazines all promote the same classical beauty of days and eras past, and the message is clear – this is what you are supposed to look like.  The influence of multiculturalism is evident, but the principle features of feminine beauty remain the same.

Since most women are not beautiful, sayings like ‘Beauty Is As Beauty Does’ or ‘Beauty Is Only Skin Deep’ reflect a cultural compromise.  It is within that one should look for beauty; for the intelligence, compassion, consideration, talent, warmth, humor, and energy that are far more important than superficial looks. 

Mrs. Davis was not buying it and knew that it was just a sop to ugly women who spent a king's ransom on cosmetics. In fact it was an advertising miracle that so many ugly women believed that blushes, shadowing, liners, and lipstick could indeed transform them. 

As Hermione got older, her mother reluctantly agreed to give these additives a try, but no dice. No matter how she tried, the poor girl's ugly features remained as prominent and off-putting as ever. 

'I've done all I can', said Mrs. Davis, 'and she will have to make her own way'. 

Now, if the girl had had any compensating qualities - a mathematical aptitude, a pretty voice, or a commanding way - her mother might have been less worried about the girl's future; but Hermione was unremarkable in every way.  Not dumb by any means, but a tad below the expected average; not clumsy but a miserable athlete; not inept but far from accomplished.  

'God only knows what will become of her', Mrs. Davis said to Mr. Davis. 

Hermione came into her own in college - a small, third tier institution in the Midwest well-suited to her modest abilities.  It was a normal place, featuring nothing in particular, not quite a finishing school but never insistent on excellence.  Its administrators focused on 'the well-rounded student' - a kind of English major of sociability, a fungible, easy, adaptable way to enter the world.  

At the same time, as in most colleges and universities in the first quarter of this century, there was a politically active group of students committed to the  changing climate, the black man, the transgender, and socialism.  This group, although small in number, made its voice heard, and at every objectional move by the current administration, they took to the streets. 

What most attracted and surprised Hermione was that the women in the group looked much like her - a hodge-podge of misshapen women, perhaps not in the way she was, but in any case physically misdirected far from the norm. 

Being a sensitive girl aware of her own physical misfortune and the stunning beauty of others, she hesitated at first to cast her lot with these irremediably ugly women.  It was one thing to be far off the bell curve of beauty, another thing altogether to associate with those of a particular physical unpleasantness; yet perhaps knowing that one of their own was at the door, it was opened wide and she was greeted with open arms. 

Conservative critics have been merciless in their description of liberal women - blue-haired, fat, dykey ugly women in shit-kickers and muscle shirts - but as in all caricatures, there is always at least a grain of truth. Blonde, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired beauties were flocking to the White House while the ranks of progressives were indeed well below par - in fact so far below that the conservative meme, as unfair as it might seem, was taken as canon.  'The Beauty of Reform' was written across the rainbow banners carried at campus demonstrations and protests.  The women at the barricades were proud of their 'otherness', wore this badge of honor with defiance. 

Membership in the group made all the difference in Hermione's college years.  It wasn't so much the belonging that mattered; it was that ugliness disappeared when existential crises were faced.  The makeup, eye shadow, lipstick, blushes, shades, and coiffures insisted by her mother were seen as bourgeois artifacts. Ugly women in all their ill-proportioned, distorted features were the real thing, with  unalloyed reservoirs of good. 

In all of this, neither Hermione nor her sisters had much time for sexual interests, but she had always been as horny as a bluetick bitch in heat, and had bed on her mind most of the time.  The only problem was as much as she had adopted the 'otherness' canon, she still looked at the world as a traditional woman, attracted to football captains, men about town, Hollywood-ready men - all of whom of course never gave her a second glance. 

It soon became clear that her lot had already been cast among the male counterparts of the female 'other' - the desperately ugly, dwarfed, shortsighted, overweight, physically clueless boys who also gravitated to progressive activism.  Yes, it would feel good to be fucked, but not by one of these undesirables.  She would bide her time; but that time never came either at college or beyond.  The die had been cast at birth and she had to live with it. 

Navigating her way in Washington, given her credentials and her 'other' look was not difficult.  It was  financially unrewarding, but giving back to society and working hard to create the peaceful, verdant, compassionate world in which she believed was worth the penury.  She joined Scientists For Global Reason, a small NGO run by a sloppy, old, former Freedom Rider, was paid pennies, but was as happy as could be among colleagues with the same outlook and the same unfortunate ugliness as she.  

She finally gave in to sexual imperative and slept with the least unappealing of her colleagues, a dismal on-and-off affair which did nothing for her at all, dimmed her hopes for some kind of sexual satisfaction, and turned her against the whole kit-and-kaboodle.  She realized she didn't really give a shit about the black man, the queer, or the bloody climate, was looking only for social refuge, and wanted to ditch the whole affair. 

Her new hero was Diana Vreeland, former editor of Vogue, arbiter of high fashion, a self-described pitifully ugly woman whose sense of fashion turned heads towards her ensemble rather than her face.  Vreeland was the perfect example of harmony - ugliness in the right hands can disappear.  

Gone were Hermione's former convictions about the superficiality and dishonorable fealty to beauty.  Ugly is as ugly does, she repeated as she left Washington for New York, began to turn out Rene Gruau-like high-fashion sketches, caught the attention of an editor at Harper's Bazaar with a professional portfolio of sense and sensibility, and was given a contract, small at first and short-term, but in the end lucrative and noteworthy. 

 

These things happen in America, despite the naysayers of her old progressive crowd.  Talent plus ambition plus persistence plus a little bit of luck can get you places; so her trajectory although surprising, was not out of the American context.  She prospered, dressed accordingly and, mirabile dictu, married well and mirabile visu had two beautiful daughters. Incidentally, she was a major contributor to the Republican Party.