Ugliness by Solace Chukwu

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I have a rather large head.
Not ridiculously outsized, but big nonetheless. Now, I do not know much about physiognomy. However I expect that a bigger head should house a larger brain, and that should in turn procure for the bearer greater mental latitude. Is this erroneous? Probably. How do you explain some of the things I think about, though?
For example, I recently had a thought. More of a question really: why are people offended when you say they are ugly?
Now, let us examine this critically. I looked up the word ‘ugly’. Essentially, it means ‘displeasing to the physical senses; not aesthetically pleasing.’ It is clear from this definition that the word is not derogatory. Why are people offended by it then? Pause for a minute from reading this and play out in your head the scenario that would ensue were you to say to someone, “You’re quite ugly, but you’re very intelligent and articulate. You have a fabulous dress sense too.” Chances are the hearer would be quite miffed. Chances are that he will hear nothing but the first four words of that sentence. However, for all intents and purposes, it is a description.
Say someone had no distinguishing features whatsoever, but was not a looker, and you needed to refer to him without the luxury of recourse to his name, what would you say? Perhaps it’s not so much the word as the intent of it, yes? After all, it is hard to fathom someone not using the word in a mean-spirited form. Hard, but not impossible. Like was established earlier, it is a fairly innocuous, descriptive word. So why is it so hard for us to take the word ‘ugly’ at face value? Somewhere along our growth curve, we were taught that the word has negative connotations. The same way we were taught to smile and say “thank you” when someone offered a ‘compliment’. So, who decided that “You are beautiful” qualified as a compliment? It is simply stating a description based on the speaker’s perception of the stimulus before him. Essentially, what is being said is, “You are pleasing to my senses,” in which case, the question becomes why the hearer is so pleased and considers it an affirmation to be told that he/she is pleasant to another.
Should it really matter? After all, we all agree that beauty is only skin deep and what matters is the attractiveness of the personality (evidenced by the wave of people in a hurry to declare themselves ‘sapiosexual’, please do not get me started on that lot). So, going back to my earlier example, what is the likelihood the hearer is more pleased by “…you’re very intelligent and articulate. You have a fabulous dress sense too” than offended by “You’re quite ugly…”?
This is really just hypocrisy, no? We are pleased by what we perceive to be compliments (they are really just descriptions of our external stimulus) and offended by being told “You’re ugly” (also just a description).
Really though, why would this be such an issue? If, for example, I walked up to a lady and said to her, “You’re a man,” would she take umbrage at that? Definitely not. Why? Because it isn’t true. Or more accurately, she does not believe it to be true. I make this distinction because she ‘knows’ she is a woman only because she has been told that her characteristics are peculiar to the female gender. But I digress.
To stretch the example, let’s say a child is born and told every day that it’s beautiful and comely in every way. It was raised to believe this implicitly, and grew up with no doubt regarding this information. Would the child be offended at being called ‘ugly’?
You see now where I am going with this. If someone considers being called ‘ugly’ insulting, that is because the description reaches deep into his soul and touches his deepest insecurity. It’s a programming that has been coded into us all from a young age; we fear that others will find us repulsive, we work so hard to be pleasing to them.
So when that aim is accomplished, we consider it a compliment to our efforts to hear someone else say “You look beautiful” and a damnation when they refer to us as ‘ugly’. Well, if you did not believe yourself unsightly, you would not be put out at being referred to by that description.
Should it really make you hot under the collar that someone finds you displeasing to his/her physical senses? Pretty sure there’s more to life than wanting someone to approve of your appearance. Perhaps if we stopped looking for affirmation from external sources, we would delight in our own uniqueness, ugly or otherwise.