As much as I hate the loneliness, fear, and despair caused by my social anxiety, goddamn does it do a fantastic job of showing me there is something horribly wrong with the way I think sometimes, and with certain aspects of the world around me. If there could be said to be anything “wrong” with me, it would be my obsessive worrying about seeming different and being ridiculed. But at the same time, where did that come from? Its roots are in society’s obsessive desire for everyone to be “normal.” From childhood we are told, directly or indirectly, that there are normal ways to look, act, think, and feel.
Take for one example the attack on the self-esteem of women that begins from girlhood. The way girls “ought” to look is dictated by the actresses and models in films and television and magazines; and so, girls whose bodies do not naturally conform to the idolized and idealized norm learn to hate themselves. That’s right, self-hatred is learned. Some girls can’t stop looking in the mirror and wishing they were different, some go on radical diets, some stop eating altogether. Some girls dye their hair because they think their natural color is ugly, some have surgery to fix any number of supposed imperfections from boobs that are too small to cheeks that are too round. There is truly no end to the infinite inadequacies for women to find in themselves, ways that they differ from the “perfect” body, whatever fickle fetish du jour that is.
The result is that as every girl and woman is raised to subject herself to this system of self-reproach, her ability to think for herself is enfeebled. By devoting thoughts, emotions, and energy to self-reproach, her free will is bludgeoned into a cowering submission. Her range of thought is restrained by the limits of how she judges herself, it becomes like a dog bound to its shed by a chain. This crippling of the range of free thought is at the center of the matter. Every hour spent devoted to solving the artificial problem of being “normal” or “beautiful” is an hour not spent truly enjoying life or solving actual problems. When I speak of the desire to be beautiful as society dictates it as an “artificial problem” I am not belittling those women and girls who have the desire. The pain of feeling ugly and rejected by oneself and those around, the joy of feeling beautiful and accepted, these are truly powerful and real. But it is the system of the perfect norm and the self-reproach it inspires that are artificial.
Beauty is not an external ideal to be achieved by imitation and mutilation. Beauty is unique within each person, it is how truly she follows her unique natural qualities and passions. Society’s force-fed vision of beauty only has value if it has people regarded as “ugly” to judge against. If every woman’s body adhered perfectly to the ideal standards of height, breast size, facial features, and so on, the system would fail to work! Without less fortunate or gifted women to judge herself against, how does the “perfect” woman draw attention? This is an idea that has been well-explored before – “when everyone is beautiful, no one is beautiful.” Of course, that idea speaks of society’s traditional and current vision of beauty. When beauty is instead regarded as staying true to one’s personally natural healthy figure, thinking for oneself and pursuing unique passions, then the story changes! Those who are beautiful are so because of their inner convictions, not because of how they are judged against others. Ugliness, then, is betraying one’s own inner beauty in favor of a cheap, artificial ideal. Under these views of beauty and ugliness, there are rather a lot of very ugly people that seem to bask in our society’s limelight, aren’t there?
The value we as a society place on being “normal” is poisonous. As painful as it is for the countless people who do not fit into the established ideals, it is profoundly unhealthy for those who actually do. While so many of their peers strain with all their heart to fit in, those who can easily fit in hardly have to try at all. Relatively speaking, those people born up on the pedestal suffer little, struggle little, and grow little. And it is the basic duality of existence that eventually causes that supposed good fortune to actually be a curse. Muscles do not grow unless strained, feasts mean little without times of scarcity, love is superficial without pain. Have compassion even for those up on the pedestal, their lack of hardship makes them ill-prepared to deal with real pain when they will encounter it.
