Nobody wants wrinkles. I don’t want wrinkles. I’m stressed out by the smile lines dragging my face down. Sometimes I try to make my eyes look rounder with makeup, sprinkle freckles across my nose, add a childlike pout to my mouth. It’s a game of seeing how young I can make myself look. A lot of people tell women who are afraid of aging that wrinkles and sunspots are good because they show that you have lived. This is very true. It also misses the point. Women are not supposed to look like they have lived. To live is to amass experience, and therefore to amass entropy, complexity, problems — wrinkles metaphorical as well as literal. Women are not usually rewarded for that.
When Taylor Swift’s last album came out, I remember a lot of people making fun of the line, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby / And I'm a monster on the hill.” I am not going to tell you that this line is some sort of heart-shattering poetry. Like most Taylor Swift lyrics, it’s so relatable as to be obvious. Or so I thought! You’re telling me you never feel like everybody is a sexy baby and you’re a monster on the hill? Be real!
The beauty standard for women revolves around the preservation of a youthful — and thus inexperienced — look. Women, as many have observed, are meant to look like smooth little sexy babies, hairless and wrinkle-free. This beauty standard is widely understood to be patriarchal and oppressive.
What really intrigues me is the widespread insistence, among women who use the language of feminist criticism, that it is good and right and just to be a sexy baby. It is good, politically, morally, personally, cosmically, to have the smoothest skin, and also the smoothest thoughts, the smoothest life.
I’m not trying to be facetious here. I’m not remotely trying to make an argument that women who care about their appearance are dumb — intelligence doesn’t factor into it, actually. I care a lot about my appearance. Actually, I care more about it with each passing year. I’m getting vainer as it slowly dawns on me that I will never emerge from some unremarkable childhood as a breathtaking beauty. I think (maybe because it’s a universal tendency, maybe because the media I imbibed growing up convinced me) that awkward-looking or regular-looking girls with interesting interior lives would get their revenge by being the most beautiful women. It’s the ugly duckling myth: interior worthiness rightfully and inevitably externalized. This is the arc of The Princess Diaries, and also kind of the Harry Potter movies, and also even more adult literary fare like Normal People. Like most adolescent girls, I felt that I had an extremely interesting interior life, which had been paired with an incongruously unremarkable exterior. I suspect most people feel this way, or (more rarely) feel that their remarkably beautiful/ugly exterior is instead a distraction from their interesting interiority. Either way, I think most people feel a mismatch. I was soothed by the notion that I’d one day be very beautiful in a way that perfectly reflected my broader personhood. Instead I got older, and it dawned on me that I would continue to look pretty much the same. What changed was just that I got older. My acne cleared, I lost some fat in my cheeks, I learned to dress better, and also, of course, I began aging, amassing experience, amassing wrinkles.
I’ve wanted to write something with the title “In Defense of Ugliness” for a while, but really, the ugly is only one facet of the category I’m defending. A more accurate (if impractical) title might be In Defense of That Which We Do Not Want To Look At For Too Long.
What do we not want to look at for too long?
Well. The ugly, and things that are deemed ugly.
But also, the unfamiliar. There are studies demonstrating that we quite literally do not like to let our gaze linger on unfamiliar faces, and prefer to shift it toward ones we know.
And, furthermore, the complicated. The wrinkled, if you will. The entropic. Complicated things require a long look, or a long life, if we want to understand or at least apprehend them. We aren’t always willing to give them the look they deserve. We all know that our attention spans are fucked, after all.
We often place these all under the banner of the ugly: lots of people feel ugly when they start to look older, for instance. They are related but distinct.
If we dislike looking at these things, we like looking at their opposite: smooth, young, easy, and frictionless things. In my dumbest moments I like to watch TikToks of people who sell personalized, colorful slimes. Sometimes they rate how easily and pleasingly they can scoop up different slimes, using a big spoon. It is very stupid and very pleasant to watch these disembodied hands scoop up endless globs of smooth, frictionless slime.
When I talk about the pairing of the smooth-brained and the smooth-skinned, what I mean is that I keep seeing frictionlessness, à la slime-scooping, being crowned a feminist virtue. Frictionless skin and hair, frictionless narrative, frictionless art.
The thing is, to a degree, frictionless youthful skin, and adherence to norms of feminine behavior and appearance, are kind of empowering. They are empowering in an extremely literal and limited way, because they make your life easier when you have them. When people act like it is a feminist, girl-power choice to get cosmetic surgery, they are obviously being a little bit ridiculous. But they are right that it gives them power, because being smooth-skinned, in a world that wants women to be smooth-skinned, removes friction from your life. You can slide on through, streamlined and polished, like a dolphin in a waterslide, like a swimmer shaving their entire body to move through the water quicker. Being “feminine,” in a world that very much (indeed, by definition) wants women to be feminine helps you get the things you want.
Sometimes, we talk not merely as if being personally smooth and youthful and pretty is feminist, but as if art must have all these virtues in order to deserve the mantle of feminist art. Leave now if you don’t want Barbie movie discourse.
Before I begin, I want to give Barbie its due — not just by saying that it was entertaining, visually delicious and the most fun, unifying pop-culture moment in years, but also by acknowledging that it’s more thematically complex than its branding and reception gave it credit for. Yes, the overwhelming impressionistic takeaway from the film was of frothy, unwrinkled, youthful girliness. But Gerwig, et al. do absolutely critique their own subject matter. One of the movie’s lessons is that you are going to get old, get wrinkled, look ugly, and die, and that this is not only good but at the core of what it means to be a woman and a person.
However: it is also a little bit incoherent, and it is also a movie about a Barbie doll. As a result, it stars smooth-skinned white blonde people who look like Barbie dolls — exactly the kind of people we have all been trained to enjoy looking at for a good long time. Its delicious and impressive visuals, and the branding campaign attached to those delicious and impressive visuals, are all Barbie-smooth, pink and plastic. The actual experience of watching the Barbie movie, and of living through its overwhelming advertising campaign, was of a celebration of the smooth: of that which we do like to look at.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I personally loved these hyperreal hyperfeminine bizarro aesthetics. The thing I’m critiquing is not so much the movie itself as the broader cultural moment surrounding it and responding to it. A great many people seem to be enthusiastically conflating the traditionally feminine — actually, not the feminine precisely, but the girlish — with the feminist. This tweet more or less sums it up:
But I would add that there’s another corollary: to those who believe that Anything considered girly is also intrinsically feminist & cannot be questioned, it tends to follow that anything not “girly,” pr anything (god forbid) ugly, is tainted as ANTI-FEMINIST. Many young women felt that Barbie was snubbed in the Oscar nominations, and believed that this was a feminist issue. But this doesn’t really add up. First of all, because many other women-led/directed movies were nominated but weren’t being lauded as feminist victories (and because others, like Past Lives, were snubbed, but not mourned as feminist defeats). It also doesn’t add up because, although Margot Robbie did not score a nomination, America Ferrera did. So we have to conclude that this uproar wasn’t just about women being overlooked.
Rather, it was about girliness being overlooked. Girliness in all its connotations, as opposed to womanliness or femininity, is not merely a matter of gender presentation but also of age, race, attractiveness, and complexity. To be girly is to be smooth as a baby. Directors like Justine Triet and Celine Song, and actresses like Emma Stone and Danielle Brooks and Lily Gladstone and Sandra Hüller and America Ferrera, don’t count — precisely because, while they are women, they or the movies they were involved in were for various reasons deemed insufficiently girly.
I think that there’s another, related reason why some people felt that Barbie was intrinsically feminist, in a way that movies like Anatomy of a Fall or Poor Things were not. The reason is that Barbie was easy and didactic. It went down smooth. It went down frictionless. “It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong,” says Ferrera, in a monologue that did not make much sense plot-wise but was also kind of a thesis for the film. I didn’t disagree with anything in the monologue, which is kind of the point: it spoon-fed us simple truths that did not provoke very much thought. Which, again, is totally fine — not every movie needs to be intellectually compelling — but this is not the only way for art to be feminist, or for art to be about womanhood. There’s no correlation between easiness and feministness.
Poor Things was thematically extremely similar to Barbie: it’s also about a kind of beautiful doll who slowly gains self-awareness and autonomy. But it’s a weird and uncomfortable and kind of gross movie — about the paradoxes of womanhood in many ways, but not in ways that map straightforwardly onto some easy moral or political takeaway. Anatomy of a Fall is certainly about the bizarreness of being a woman artist and a wife and mother (and it was directed by a woman), but it revels in its own ambiguity: we can cheer for nobody. Nothing in that movie is getting slapped on a t-shirt.
The line of thinking in which Barbie alone can receive accolades for being feminist, or for exploring womanhood, unfortunately reveals an underlying assumption that women are not very smart. The belief that a feminist movie should necessarily have a t-shirt-friendly thesis reveals a belief that women should have things explained to them as if they are children. Girl dinner, girl hobby, girl subtext (which does not exist. Make it all text). A feminist movie should be innocent and uncomplicated and free of pastness. It should be as easy to look at as a beautiful and unwrinkled face, as a spoonful of slime. It should not challenge us to look for longer than we like.
I do think, despite the silliness of all the Barbie-got-snubbed discussions, we’re slowly opening ourselves to more difficult art, and finally moving out of what has been a relatively puritanical and self-infantilizing moment disguised as a progressive one. After all, like I’ve said, one of the silly things about all the Barbie/Oscars fuss is the fact that there were so many other complicated, wrinkly, challenging films about womanhood this year. In the literary sphere, I’m feeling especially encouraged by the rise in popularity of translated fiction, including a lot of translated fiction by women. After all, reading in translation is all about the wrinkles: a literary translator does not merely smooth out and close the distance between two languages and two texts. They also preserve evidence of the gulf between the two, leaving us on textured, challenging verbal terrain, in which youth and newness are not the only virtues. Instead, the entropic weight of history, in the form of diverging and evolving and complexifying languages, bears down on us as we read (as languages age they develop wrinkles of their own: grammatical gender, case, irregular verbs). If we want to understand, we have to keep our attention fixed on the page, even if our phones full of beautiful smooth people hawking beauty products are calling to us—even if our instinct is to turn away toward that-which-is-easy-to-look-at.
Even though our attention spans are indeed fucked, I kept my attention fixed on this entire piece, and I think the "self-infantilizing moment disguised as a progressive one" is an accurate and succinct summation. Also, I'm old enough to remember when the exact opposite was true, when anything "girly" was deemed anti-feminist.
Thank you for this piece I really appreciate you writing and sharing!