Post 33: Ugly, Fugly, Mowgli
(familiarity breeds beauty)
Research has shown that the mental picture of beauty in the human brain is a byproduct of familiarity—in fact, according to the averageness theory, it is an actual mathematical average of the faces that we see around us… so by that token, beauty is but average, and also Mowgli, should really not have found Shanti the human to be in the least bit attractive based on the mangled image of beauty he must have carried in his feral head. But then again, maybe he just really liked her personality? Who knows.
What Mowgli’s mental image of beauty should have looked like (generated by ChatGPT) vs. Shanti, his love interest, who looks nothing like it:
Mowgli was introduced to the world in The Jungle Book, which was published way back in 1894. It was written by Rudyard Kipling who may or may not have been a raging racist, but he was definitely a by-product of immigration, or rather colonization, as it operated as then.
Today, immigration continues to be one the “it” (no puns intended) issues, and therefore it is incumbent upon us ask this question: from the POV of beauty, what happens when a person is transposed to a land where the people look quite a bit different from the mathematical average of the place that they came from? As you can imagine, this can be problematic, and as you can also imagine, this can be especially problematic for women—both from the perspective of finding an attractive mate, and from the perspective of being found attractive enough to be mated with. It’s apparently not bad enough that there is a huge double standard for beauty for women in general, and now add to that this: a double-standard with no easy solution, not even a double-edged one. The pain of beauty is mightier than the sword.
It is this very topical issue that Moshtari Hilal raises in her book provocatively titled Ugliness. Hilal is an Afghan woman who grew up in Germany, and in her book she examines what she evocatively calls, ‘the cartography of my ugliness’.
“How do we decide that someone is “ugly”? And what if you believe that the ugly someone is you?,” she asks.
Side note: It is also truly horrifying to think of the amount of waste that is generated in the human pursuit of “beauty”—the sheer variety and quantum of the products that are consumed is staggering, and you can read about their environmental impact here.
Some of the things that bothered Hilal most about her “cartography” were her large nose, and her body hair, especially her facial hair as illustrated here:
(reproduced from the NYT article on the book)
The Ferriman-Gallwey scale is used to assess the degree of hirsutism, or “excessive” body hair on women (ofc there is conversely no scale for the lack of body hair on men). A score of 8 or higher on this 12-point scale is diagnosed as hirsutism, which I suppose would then put the magnificently long-bearded, bikini-clad women in the Trump-Gaza video at a solid 14:
All of us have seen this video that can’t be unseen, and whatever you think of it, you cannot argue with one thing, which is that there is a lot of fugliness in it (pardon my Arabic)… it’s just not coming from the dancing ladies.
In the end, Hilal moved to Italy where she found the facial mathematical averages to be much closer to hers. (Gastronomically speaking, the notions of beauty to Hilal were much more halal there.) And in the end, Hilal also does not ask us to change our concepts of beauty (like that’s even possible), but to get past them.
The book is meant to help people to let go of the duality but also polarization of “beautiful” and “ugly.” — Moshtari Hilal’s in an interview with VA.
Perhaps like the duality of quantum mechanics, we have to also learn to accept the duality of beauty and ugliness as coexisting within the same entity and at the same time… but also not collapsing in the eyes of the beholder (if you get it, you get it).
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea |
An intriguing little ‘seadevil anglerfish’ was spotted recently off the shores of the Spanish Canary Islands, way high from its natural deep sea habitat, and it caused quite the tiktok sensation. The fish, it turns out was a female, and so I was thinking you might as well have called it a she-devil; you can see here why:
(Source: Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
And if this image looks familiar, it’s because you’ve seen her in Disney’s Finding Nemo:
People were so moved by the rare sighting of this ugly, lost, and sick fish (she died just a few hours later), that they cried copiously, composed poetry mediocrely, and some even got bodily tattoos of the little fishy. Personally, I don’t get the fuss, and yet I can see how this might have carried the same appeal that makes dog-lovers around the world go awww… so cute! upon seeing ugly dog contest “winners” like these:
(No tongue-in-cheek here.)
But coming back to the anglerfish, which, side note, probably looks drop-dead-gorgeous now after looking at the “winning” dogs, you should be wondering how we so definitively know that it was female—that’s because only female anglerfish have the crazy jagged teeth, and the bizarre bioluminescent antennas sticking out of their heads, which are used to lure both prey, and male fish. Side tidbit: the females can eat prey larger than their body size.
And as for the males? Just like the Y chromosome is a fraction of the size of the X chromosome in humans, the male seadevil anglerfish are a fraction of the size of the females (females are up to 60x!), and they only exist to serve as un-glorified sperm banks. This singular function even takes on an extreme parasitic form in some subspecies like the humpback anglerfish: After being lured by the bioluminescent antenna, they not only physically attach themselves to the females, which is surprisingly not that uncommon, but they actually fuse—yes, you read that right, FUSE! with the female body. All of their organs melt into the host’s body until only their brains remain, and by that I of course mean that only their testes remain. The sperm sacks remain piggy backed on their special ladies’ backs like piggy banks that can be dipped into whenever the lady feels like reproducing, all of which raises the bar for sexual fidelity to a pretty nutty level.
And with that, I would like to take this opportunity to say to my niece and to her husband who recently got matching pufferfish tattoos, that they chose the wrong fish. I mean forget ring, if you want fidelity, put a bioluminescent antenna on it!
The lack of glowing accents, their diminutive size, the absence of teeth that look like a dental hygienist’s nightmare, and their generally blah appearance probably means that the principles behind The Evolution of Beauty that apply to birds, and which nudge the male birds into becoming progressively and outrageously more “beautiful” over the generations in order to attract females, do not extend to the deep seas… which totally makes sense, because what does beauty even mean in the absence of light? Absolutely nothing!—it’s just the female anglerfish blowing bublés and singing:
🎶When marina rhythms start to play
Fuse with me, make me sway
Like a lazy ocean hugs the shore
Hold me close, meld me more
Like butter melting in the heat
Cling to me, merge with ease
When we fuse you have your way with me
Stay with me, meld with me🎶