I CAME UP WITH THIS NEW MOVEMENT AND I THINK YOU SHOULD JOIN

on ugly rebels, bent dicks & the zapatistas xoxo

The other day, B and I were watching TV when a commercial to correct bent penises came on. Obviously, we shot to attention. 

Using carrots as a (very subtle) visual metaphor for dicks, the commercial explained how this medicine could reduce bend “by up to ten percent.” 

It was a product to correct something called Peyronie’s Disease—a condition that can be, apparently, quite painful. But that wasn’t the main pitch. 

The commercial didn’t focus on pain; it highlighted the embarrassment of sporting a curved erection. 

There were—as always with any medicine advertised on American TV—certain caveats: penile fracture (casual!), anaphylaxis, and a mandatory month-long celibacy period after each injection (of which there could be four). 

“Who would do that?” B asked, incredulous. “No sex for a month just to straighten a dick by 10 degrees?” 

“I think it’s for insecure people,” I said, suddenly realizing how widely beauty culture has permeated society. Now the market is also encouraging men to mortgage their present realities for future aesthetics. 

***

Being inundated by marketing of physical perfection causes a host of mental health problems. (So much so that the National Institute of Health has named “body image” a global mental health concern.) And although men are newer to having their models photoshopped to oblivion, I think they understand this. 

Because the moment I begin to talk about body image, every dude I’ve ever dated has been quick to assure me I’m beautiful. Too quick, to be honest. (Is this a learned behavior from exes who consistently communicated this anxiety?) 

But these sorts of speeches never do much. I don’t want to be reassured that I’m beautiful—I want women to never have to internalize their reality as some ideological aesthetic failing. The great misstep of contemporary American feminism is to confuse support for liberation. I don’t need to be told what a boss ass bitch I am; I need to be told how to undo the shackles that keep me feeling like shit. (And to learn how to help other women do the same.) 

Because I log online and I see that girl I met at that wedding last year and the face she posts looks nothing like the face I know. I hang out with friends and watch them stare at their warped reflections on screens, tilting their heads to find their angles. And then, suddenly, it’s no longer just the women in my life playing with filters. I turn on the TV and see men feeling bad about their bent dicks. 

I want to stand up and scream: the problem isn’t our realities—it’s how we measure them against some pernicious ideal and find ourselves lacking. 

***

The more I thought about it, the more ignorant it seemed to believe the pursuit of physical perfection was ever solely a feminine game. 

Just think about body builders. Fitness influencers and Hollywood actors. And even back in Ancient Greece, “Aristocrats portrayed themselves as beautiful to assert their supremacy as a ruling class deserving of power, as their moral righteousness was so clearly indicated by superior aesthetics,” Alexandra Kauffman wrote in The Emory Wheel. 

Beauty has always been a form of power—but we see it as gendered because until recently, it was one of the only forms of interpersonal power broadly accessible to women. (That’s not the same thing as women being the only ones who play its game.) However, as women gain access to different sources of power, beauty culture is disseminating. The game is becoming playable for different socioeconomic brackets and genders. Despite (or perhaps because of) my frequent trips to Sephora, I have my doubts this is for the best. 

I once had a friend who believed in cosmetic communism (those of you who grew up with “Uglies” may recognize this philosophy). She acknowledged that beautiful people were given advantages in life. And, in order to counteract pretty privilege, she believed that when people turned 18, they should be provided free cosmetic surgery. If we were all beautful, she reasoned, not only would the world be a lot more fun to look at, people would have more opportunities to succeed. We would have more equality. 

It’s almost a worthwhile philosophy—and it makes sense on some level. (After all, we control and manipulate most parts of our experience now. Why not our physicality?) But the surgical pursuit of beauty has always left me feeling strange. 

Somewhere over the last few years, the beauty industry deftly (almost invisibly) co-opted the language of feminism. Then EmRata and Madonna and many more famous women were arguing that their plastic surgeries were a feminist act: if their operations helped them feel better and succeed in the marketplace, how very UNfeminist it would be to critique this action. 

If feminism is working towards the liberation of women, is it not regressive to hamper a woman’s choice of what to do with her own body? Is criticism of that choice not limiting her liberation? 

If you were to ask me those questions, I’d say that you’re using a libertarian (and rather American) understanding of freedom—the freedom to do as one wishes. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin would have called this “negative liberty.” 

This is the freedom from—when no barriers sit in the way of whatever you want to do. It is the first step of establishing one’s freedom. And a necessary one. 

But, realistically, most women who have the money for aesthetic surgery are generally beyond the first stirrings of freedom. It would be much more interesting for them to establish “positive liberty”— to ask what they are now free to do and to consider the consequences of those actions. 

*****

On her Substack, Catherine Lacey recently wrote about the increasing prevalance of Botox—and what happens as more people opt in to the procedure. With each injection, she wrote, we “forget what a face of any age looks like without drastic intervention.”  And she called this an “absence of reality.” Although I get what she means, I think the more precise term may be an absence of the ordinary. (The unnatural is, after all, still real.)  

But she is onto something: beauty culture privileges the ideal over the reality. It’s a rearticulation of Grecian neoclassical morals: symmetry and eternal perfection. It is, at its core, an idealistic and perpetually dissatisfied understanding of humanity. (And we wonder why the pursuit of beauty is enough to drive people to suicide?)  

But on the other side of the planet, there’s wabi sabi. 

The Japanese Zen aesthetic philosophy of wabi sabi is an insistence that the brokenness and natural processes of life are what make it beautiful. In order for something to be perfect, it must also embody imperfection. 

This means a glorification of stretch marks and weak jaws and one eyelid that is slightly wider than the other. This isn’t the sort of weak-ass Dove commercial “We’re all beautiful enough to be consumers now!” brand of inclusivity. This is a rejection of idealism in favor of unaltered, imperfect reality. And you don’t need to buy anything in order to partake. 

Wabi sabi as a feminist philosophy has the potential to liberate us from the withering glances of social aesthetic Botox conformity—but perhaps more importantly, it can free us from the shame of our own minds. 

***

You would be well within your rights to begin wondering what wabi sabi feminism has to do with bent dicks. (After all, feminism tends not to talk about dicks unless as enemy.) 

If you’re wondering this, please allow me a bit of a digression that, I hope, will tie this all together. 

In her masterpiece “The Chalice and The Blade,” Riane Eisler writes of two different power structures: androcracy (patriarchy) and gylany (matriarchy). According to Eisler, gylany is not what you might think. In this matriarchal power structure, women do not rule over men. In systems where lineage is traced through the mother, everyone has their own role to play. Society follows a “partnership” model that honors life, birth and flourishing rather than violence, death, and suffering. Power, in this case, is not “dominion over,” rather “responsibility for.” 

It reminds me of a philosophy that underpinned the Mexican Zapatista movement. 

Leader Subcomandante Marcos (now Galeano) proclaimed in 2001 that he wanted to be a rebel, not a revolutionary: 

“The revolutionary says to himself: I’m taking power and from on high I’m transforming the world. The social rebel acts differently. He organises the masses and, starting from below, gradually transforms things without asking himself the question of taking power.” 

Eisler and Marcos both noted the failings of contemporary power structures. To fight power with more power is to stay stuck in the same system. (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”) 

Which is why I’d like to combine wabi sabi aesthetics with the Zapatista view of rebels. I don’t want to frame this as a revolution against beauty culture. We don’t need to take back power from the advertisers and companies and sponsored TikTok plastic surgerons. That method will only ensure that we’ll become warped with power one day, too. 

But we can use wabi sabi to liberate ourselves from the corrosive gaze of beauty culture. If we’re able to tear out its roots from our own lives, that impact could go much, much further than we imagine. 

This is not to say that women are responsible for male body image but to acknowledge the interdependence of human reality. What happens to one of us impacts us all, even across gender lines. 

The bent dick commercial was a wake-up call—a realization that gender issues do not happen in a vaccuum. What happens to one gender, inevitably, impacts the others. Women were the canary in the beauty capital coal mine. And, sure, we don’t owe it to men to adapt this zapatista wabi sabi thinking. But I do believe we owe it to ourselves. (Plus: do you want to spend the rest of your life reassuring your man he doesn’t need dick injections?) 

***

My friend who believed in cosmetic communism also imagined a future wherein men would understand the anxiety of living under the beauty gaze. They would look at their bodies and, like most women, find themselves lacking. She couldn’t imagine a world without neoclassical beauty not also including anxiety. 

In Amia Srinivasan’s “The Right to Sex,” she writes that a feminism worth having must be better than what came before. It requires that women in power be better than the men before them. She writes:

I am not saying that feminism has no business asking better of men—indeed, asking them to be better men. But a feminism worth having must find ways of doing so that avoid rote reenactment of the old form of crime and punishment, with its fleeting satisfactions and predictable costs. I am saying that a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better—not just fairer, but more imaginative—than men have been. 

Yes, it would be wonderful justice to see men riddled with bodily insecurities. (Ugh, wouldn’t it feel great to hear a man fret about the size of his thighs and share salad recipes?) But I remain skeptical on what justice ever solved. 

I want a wabi sabi zapatista feminism—one that doesn’t aim to take power but to imagine a new world. The future that I want to create is not one where we constantly reassure men that they’re handsome—it’s one where we show them how to live without an eye on the models. It’s one where we don’t let advertising and movies and magazines impact our relationship with our own bodies. Sustainable power can never be taken; it can only be built. 

The movement also requires participation from men. (Look around and see the links between Jordan Peterson and marketing of boner pills, please!) It requires us to lay down the shackles of gender and remember that our enemy is not people of a different gender but the system that made us shape and understand ourselves along gender divides. 

In the face of beauty culture’s growing scope, if we have any pressing duty as wabi sabi zapatista feminists, it is to embody and teach what Fabliha wrote in her Substack diary: 

“To be ugly is to be powerless from the systems placed against us, but to be beautiful is to be rooted in colorism, fatphobia, antiblackness, and colonization [...] To be ugly is to be exhilarating.” 

There’s a power in being ugly because there is real power in liberation. Sustainable change comes from forgoing power structures—not railing against them. And so I dream of a future of ugly rebels. 

I hope that makes us proud.

xxC