I'll tell you what's ugly

[wordplay]

longtimegone & I got into a conversation about the aesthetics and politics of ugly today, and I went on a little tirade. After it was done, I thought, "huh, I didn't realize my feelings on this were so strong", and then I thought, what the hell, give the old LJ some content.

I have a few fandom friends who are fond of calling people ugly or, in the parlance of chat, "omg soooo ugly". Not just, "yeah, I don't like his nose" or whatever - it's directly to "so ugly". And I really hate that. I think it's incredibly ugly.

Maybe I'm just a bit of a slut? (Shut up, LJ.) But I find most people at least a little bit attractive. Everybody's got something that's worth looking at, something I could build an attraction on. There are weeks when I'm really bored at work when I could easily develop a silly little crush on pretty much any one of my coworkers, based on hands or eyes or pretty lips. (And those of you who work with me know how incredibly slim the pickings are there.) It doesn't mean anything, it just means that I can see appeal in a whole lot of different places.

I don't really understand the hypercritical aesthetic that seems to dominate around LJ sometimes. I think my life is better because I can look around and ignore Colin Morgan's unfortunate ears and David Tennant's wonky eye and Nick Clegg's truly tragic political alliances and still have moments of "yep, climb it like a tree". Why on earth would I want to find fewer people attractive? How does that make my life better?

And even if I were so unfortunate as to only be attracted to like 12 people on the planet, why would I be so dismissive and rude about it? And so dismissive and rude toward other people's tastes? Who died and made the hypercritical among us the final judges on attractiveness? And why do they do it? What's the payoff for so loudly (and god, it's ALWAYS LOUDLY) screaming about how you find somebody unattractive? How does that do anything but make you look... well, ugly.

Because I really do think that all the ugly talk makes the world a less interesting place. It suggests an almost impossible bar for attractiveness, it separates the world into "pretty" and "ugly" in really stark terms (and incredibly uneven categories), and it makes me unhappy. So stop. Stop doing it.