An Ugly(cute) Sign of the Times

October 13th, 2011

We live in an image culture. There’s just no denying it. With each passing day, the old adage grows less and less true: in this modern world it’s nigh impossible to ignore the exterior and obey our thirsts. (Even if we really, really, really like Sprite.) What happened to the good old days? The innocent, carefree times, when nobody cared about looks and nobody pretended that beauty was objective?

I’ll tell you what happened. They never existed, that’s what happened. But it’s easier to feel despairing about it today, because the Internet lets everything be judged instantaneously. If you don’t meet a basic standard of beauty, and you go to the wrong place on the web, well boy howdy, you’ll get told real damn quick. And the people telling you will probably find some way to compare you to Hitler, as well.

Which is all very disheartening, isn’t it? We can’t even pretend to exist beyond image, because there’s no way to escape judgement, even for a second. The Internet has ruined everything.

But it has also fixed everything, as the Internet is wont to do. And it has fixed it in an unexpected way: by creating an entirely new genre of thing: the Uglycute. Observe:

Look at that guy. Really take a good look. He’s hideous, isn’t he? And yet cuddleable. You want to cuddle with him. I know you do. I do, too. We all do. We want to make a big cuddle pile on top, and keep him warm, because his abjectly horrific lack of body hair means that he can’t face the cold, cruel world alone. We want to protect him, but are also repulsed by him. And that’s where the hope comes from. Because we look at that pathetic whatever-it-is, and all of our image-conscious hardwiring shorts out, and before we know it we’re snuggling up to something that has more in common with a wallet than a living animal.

And that’s really inspiring. It means that there’s a chance for us. That we’re not lost forever in surface concerns. Uglycute reminds us that even though we spend hours agonizing over which lighting angle is best for our Facebook profile picture, we can still find love in our hearts for a little four-legged fetus with a truncated elephant snout. We can escape the cold, clinical, looks-obsessed world depicted so chillingly in The Ugly One, and we can find cuteness, even beauty, in things that might technically be ugly. We can fight the oppression of image. Even in the case of something ugly. Really, hideously, grossly disgustingly ugly.

Seriously, take another look at that thing.

It’s repulsive. It’s horrific. I want a million of them. I want to hug them all. And then maybe throw up. Throw up love.