I struggle with understanding what beauty is. In kindergarten until some arbitrary elementary grade, I reserved the belief that everyone was beautiful, except me. Perhaps it was the way the other kids got called “so handsome” and I was called “so smart.” My family would say, as I would run home, tears desperately trying to crawl up my cheeks as they slipped down (I was terrible at not crying) my face, that “just because you dark don’t mean you ugly,” and I would wonder: where did THAT come from? Why did they think my skin was the reason? I didn’t get it until much later that maybe they were right. In sixth grade, a teacher argued with my musings that ugliness can possess beauty as well. I still hold true to that, except I have more words for it. In the words of Alexander McQueen, “I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.” The grotesque. This is a descriptor I more readily identify with, as a person who sees my body every day, sees my shame every day, and knows all of my secrets, I don’t shy from this word.
To speak bluntly, my family believes that fatness is ugliness. After gaining nearly fifty pounds at the end of 2014 due to some brain colds (mental illness), I found myself reconnecting with words like “ugly” and “grotesque.” Many queer men are further stuffed into feelings of unworthiness thanks to queer media perpetuating the beauty standard of v-cut, six pack, and biceps, tall, white or, as one not-hookup on Grindr wrote on his profile, “if you can’t be white, at least be light-skinned.”
Hmm. “At least…” When your very skin color is valued below others, (“at least,”) then where do you look from there?
Body image disorders have long been perpetuated as a “white woman’s disease,” especially if she is middle class and up. Munah Yanae eloquently states that the pressures of body image fall on all women:
“…As if the issues and pressures society places on body image is something that could affect only white women. Black women long have been pressured to conform to society’s standards of beauty, and our Western society often pushes for thin as the body type for a woman. (Well, not only thin, thin yet thick, acquiring both a Beyoncé booty and Kate Upton’s breast, while remaining a size 2 at most.)”
I often feel that my microcosm of the world, the queer man, specifically the queer man of color, even more specifically, the gay black man, is constantly forgotten or simply observed as statistically insignificant. The National Eating Disorders Association also adds the qualifier that “women are more commonly affected by eating disorders,” while also stating that “millions of men and boys battle all forms of the illness [eating disorders]”
The issues of manliness often teach us that men’s emotional spectrum is limited. The narrative also dictates that being ill is a sign of weakness of character or weakness of self and weakness makes one less. In all actuality, every human being on the planet experiences weakness in pain, in grief, in mental and physical health, in emotional turmoil, in so many different facets of our many selves, our multiple-intelligences, our many changes throughout the lives we lead. Weaknesses is an integral part of the human experience and the fact that it is seen as something less than to show that weakness defies one’s very personhood.
A person fighting an illness is not necessarily weak (although, there could be a myriad of challenges facing them to make weakness a reality). Many people are susceptible to mental illness, be it from a biological or genetic source, an abusive relationship, a change in life circumstance, or even physical illness. My mother’s own sickness, Grave’s Disease, came pre-packaged with a tsunami of hormone shifts, leaving her mental health in shambles as it crashed upon the shores of her stability. She did not ask for, nor earn her illness, but it was simply a part of her, as much as her skin was, as much as the Yoruba beauty mark in the form of a gap in the front teeth I inherited from her.
We are told that if we are not beautiful both inside and outside that we will be lonely, that we are worth less than someone beautiful or fiiiiiine. The beautiful person earns someone’s body, their admiration, their trust, earn so much more just for the aesthetics they were born with. We are taught that you must first love yourself before you can love anyone else, but does this count the barriers of self-love that people with any of the various forms of depression. That is the complicated game of “worthiness,” or of what we define as beautiful. I once had a Kenyan man completely inundate me in his disbelief because he couldn’t see how others didn’t see my beauty. Ironically, I mirrored that same disbelief in his disbelief (Inception? Meta-Belief-ness?). How can he see my beauty? How can he believe me to be gorgeous when I am barely past feeling “meh, I’m alright”? He gave me this gift; that certainty he had in recognizing that I am beautiful. Some spend their whole life searching for and desperately attempting to attain such standards of looks, inner beauty, personality, anything we have been taught will make us more worthy, make us more lovable.
The truth is that there is no truth. No magic look or pill or body that will make the world love us how we should be loved. I still stand with Alexander McQueen in finding beauty in the grotesque. Perhaps that is my problem; perhaps I don’t believe other people can see the beauty that I see and therefore don’t believe I can be worthy to someone outside of my own head.
Who knows?
How does one define beauty? What is beautiful and what is beautiful in another person? There are entire weeks I hate myself for eating my way out of skinny jeans. There are other times where I love my tiger stripes (stretch marks) as if they are exactly what I was always supposed to have. Mama said there’d be days like this…shit, was she right.
