Who Is Ugly?

New York Times

14-02-2025

How do we decide that someone is 'ugly?' And what if you believe that the ugly someone is you?
The Afghan German writer and artist Moshtari Hilal, 31, takes up these questions in her new book, 'Ugliness,' (translated by Elisabeth Lauffer),' a sweeping meditation on a subject rarely addressed, combining personal memoir with history, sociology, philosophy and the author's original drawings, poems and photographs.
Ugliness has been a defining concept in Ms. Hilal's life. Growing up an Afghan immigrant in Germany, she spent years contemplating what she calls 'the cartography of my ugliness,' by which she means a top-to-toe map of all she once hated and thought 'wrong' with her looks. This included her head (too big), her face (too long) and the two worst features of all, in her estimation: her dark and abundant facial and body hair, and her un-button-like nose, whose size and shape tormented her.
For the young Ms. Hilal, trying to live up to Northern European beauty standards meant engaging in near-constant combat with herself.
She was consumed with plans to fix, hide or undo her perceived shortcomings, drawing up a 'battle plan,' as she put it, to fight her facial hair. This involved painful bouts of bleaching, shaving, waxing and chemicals, which left her burned and bruised.
'I declared war on my skin, over and over again,' she writes.
A photo in the book depicts the terrain of her personal war: a 'map,' drawn over her own leg, with areas outlined like countries, labeled 'shave,' 'bleach,' 'laser,' 'wax.'
Ms. Hilal's family only confirmed and reinforced her misery.
'This looks terrible. Why don't you get rid of your mustache?' asked one of her aunts, before forcibly smearing ten-year-old Moshtari's face with a strong depilatory cream.
Even Ms. Hilal's father denounced her looks: 'He routinely pointed out what a beak I had sprouted. I was certain my father thought his daughters ugly. He loved his ugly daughters, but he never failed to remind them how hard it was for him to look past their long faces and long noses.'
Ms. Hilal's sister underwent rhinoplasty to 'correct' this perceived deformity, but Moshtari took another route, 'committing to her nose,' as she puts it, but also to a vast reconsideration of 'ugliness' writ large.
Ms. Hilal argues that personal aesthetic judgments are neither personal nor 'aesthetic.' Instead, our perceptions of human beauty (or its lack) derive from politics, and are determined by wide-ranging, international factors such as war, imperialism, colonial conquest, power hierarchies and economics.
In other words, that 'war' she declared on her own body is but a microcosm — and a descendant — of the actual wars that, historically, have determined who gets to be considered beautiful. (Hint: It's always the victors, the powerful and the rich.)
Such global-level thinking is not surprising from Ms. Hilal, who pursued political science and Islamic studies at universities in Hamburg, Berlin and London. She draws, for example, on the theories of the anti-colonialist philosopher Frantz Fanon, who wrote of the internalized racism of colonized or oppressed peoples.
On the subject of noses (to which she devotes many pages), Ms. Hilal cites, among others, the historian Sander Gilman, who has studied plastic surgery and its role in Jewish assimilation. She sees, in fact, a close link between her own experience, feeling 'othered' and 'ugly' as an Afghan immigrant in the majority-white society of Germany, and the persecution endured by Jews in that country.
'Antisemitic stereotypes and caricatures built and created this creepy image I had of myself,' Ms. Hilal said. 'I thought I looked like a witch or like someone evil or greedy. These are all very obvious antisemitic images.' (Multiple illustrations in the book depict the author's face distorted, as if in a fun-house mirror.)
But, Ms. Hilal added, when she moved to Italy for a time, she found that her features blended in easily with the locals', which further confirmed the contextual nature of beauty: 'Italian women, they mostly look like me,' she said. The same holds true in her native country: 'In Afghanistan. I look like the majority. I actually look like a group that historically was in power.'
Ms. Hilal focuses mainly on women. 'The way I was raised, at some point you have to become a woman,' she told me, echoing Simone de Beauvoir's famous dictum, 'One is not born, but becomes a woman.' 'Being a woman is a bodily practice,' Ms. Hilal continued, 'and if I don't practice appropriately, and in secrecy, I will not be woman enough.'
Ms. Hilal takes on our beauty-worshipping celebrity culture and the beauty industry for their roles in encouraging all this effort, shame and secrecy, keeping women in an expensive prison of self doubt and fueling the consumption of products. 'Exclusive beauty is effective because it generates the Not Beautiful,' she writes. 'Dehumanization is the real point of modern concepts of beauty. Those who set, regulate and sell these standards profit the most.'
So does she abstain from beauty culture?
'I fully participate in beauty standards,' she said. 'But I can also opt out. I do not think my self-worth is linked to these things. But I also do not think I am fully outside of it. On a bad day, I will feel all the insecurities, and watch all the videos and consider all the face massages and the retinol. … but it's not interesting to make it into an individual responsibility. It is a structural issue and we should find structural responses.'
Ms. Hilal's book is all about seeing just how structural the issue of ugliness really is, how little it has to do with individual features, or individuals at all. Ugliness makes a 'big picture' argument, panning outward from one young woman's life to some of the largest issues we confront globally — hence to all of our lives. This is not about redefining beauty, or even about denying the existence of ugliness.
Instead, Ms. Hilal asks us to become 'reconciled to ugliness,' to 'dismantle the dichotomy between beauty and ugliness,' and to step away from our fear of it. It's a tall order, with liberating possibilities.