A message from an ‘ugly’ woman

[Over40Overdating]

I am, by all conventional standards, an ‘ugly’ woman.

I am not, and never have been, beautiful. Never pretty or attractive. On a good day with some good light, I could possibly pass for striking.

This awareness has crippled my self esteem for years, to the point of developing a phobia of mirrors and pictures. I have no pictures of me from 14 until recently.

Tonight, on my way home from work, 2 young women got on the trains opposite me and started discussing and laughing loudly about how deformed and ugly my face I was.

I didn’t challenge them because I am middle aged and knackered and didn’t fancy my chances with two very loud, much younger women, but I realised I don’t actually care.

For so long, someone calling me ugly or unattractive to my face would have been my worst nightmare but it happened and instead of the world ending, I’ve realised I no longer care about my face or how it’s viewed.

I don’t know if it’s age, peri menopause, life experience or being too tired to care, but for the first time in my life I feel like I am more than the sum of my facial features and very much like who I am regardless of what I look like.

I feel free. Like a giant weight I have been dragging around my whole life has suddenly dropped off. I wish I’d had this realisation decades ago! I wish I could tell younger me my wonky face doesn’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. I have a life I am proud to have created and many things to celebrate and not a single one of them relied on me having a conventional looking face.

So fellow ‘ugly’ women, please come join me on a ‘DGAF’ thread.

Reassurance about your face ‘not being that bad really’ is banned.

Celebration of all the many other things you are than your physical appearance encouraged!

So ... you'd like to be perfect and admired, but only if it's a gift of God, without your having to participate? You think you'd be luckier without options? You think that other aspects of your life are free from pressure?

Obviously, we think differently. If you think you'd be luckier to have no options, I suppose you could just pretend there aren't any - which seems to be what a lot of men do. I run across men complaining that they can't get a second glance from women, and I generally have the impression that it hasn't occurred to them to get a decent haircut, spruce up their wardrobe, or acquire some conversational skills.

I don't think I'm naturally ugly but I am very fat and also ageing and I had a similar epiphany recently. I thought 'what if I go and everyone else is skinny and judges me?' And I couldn't think of a what if answer that actually made me give a shit.

@JANEY205 here’s to freedom!

Like you I can appreciate someone good looking objectively and I no longer envy it the way I used to, but what attracts me to people now is all based on who they are as people. The physical rarely comes into it now and the quality of my relationships is better for it.

I'm not sure I understood what your epiphany was, though. Was it the realization that you might be judged? Or was it the realization that you didn't care?
That's something else I never understand. I can't figure out why modern, urban women imagine that the can avoid situations of being judged.

@Nopeasinapasty I’m sorry to hear about the photo that made you cry and I get it.
For what it’s worth, it’s highly likely all anyone will think looking at the photo is that you are important enough to your sister to be included in her wedding that way and in the pictures she’s chosen to remember the day. No one is ever as harsh on us as we are in ourselves.
Here’s to many more DGAF days!

I find your posts weird

ALL those options you say men don’t have, they do. There’s nothing exclusive there to women, there’s nothing that makes them lucky. There’s nothing stoping a man from getting a nose job. It’s just that society doesn’t expect men to alter their appearance. The typical gender roles were women to be fuckable/raise children and men to be providers. So men aren’t expected to look stunning to prove their worth to the dating pool - they pull without that. Many ugly women are expected to do something about their appearance first to prove their worth, else they’ll be written off. The “options” you think women have are only really for the benefit of men. Men are lucky in that they have options but are simultaneously not expected to change themselves.

@Over40Overdating thank you for your incredibly kind words xx

@Phillipson if you can’t imagine total strangers making derogatory comments about your appearance then I’m glad for you, but I can assure if you are not conventionally attractive or thin or able bodied or otherwise different from the crowd, strangers are very comfortable making comments and thinking they are perfectly right to do so.

I've always been a bit odd looking. At my all girls school, I was once nominated by our PE teacher as our entry to the Mr Ugly contest on a big school camp in France. I came second, despite being the only non-boy in it.

However I'm fairly clever, I'm funny, I make a difference every day at work and for some unknown reason dogs and small children seem to like me.

I had open heart surgery a few years back and for various reasons was left with an attractive gash of a scar almost up to my neck. It tends to distract ill mannered adults from staring at my face. I also tell those small children that I got it when escaping from a dinosaur.

One thing I realised when I was ill was that life is so short and tomorrow is not guaranteed. Therefore I do not intend to waste any of it worrying about what I look like.

This post has made me very sad. Please stop speaking about yourself like this. I am sure you are beautiful, there's too much pressure for people to look a certain way in order to be classed as beautiful (and more often than not it involves a lot of needles fillers and Botox). Please try to stop the negativity towards yourself, so sad 😢

I am sorry this happened to you though. People are so utterly rotten these days x

I disagree - or rather I agree that men "can" have most of those options, but society condones them more in women. I don't offhand know of men going to a cosmetician for a makeover, and starting wearing daily cosmetics. Men are, of course, expected to "change" themselves in other ways - like by earning more money. Gender expectations may be slowly changing, but they do still exist.

@Spartak firstly, fuck that PE teacher and I hope he steps on Lego for the rest of his life if he’s still around.

You sound fantastic and I love your philosophy on life. I also hope you get revenge on that dinosaur!

@MsAmerica not sure what a modern urban woman is or if I am one tbh

There are ways to avoid being judged - don't go places!!!

But no my epiphany was that I couldn't give a fuck

@Spartak thank you your comment re dogs it just made me remember a GREAT thing about me
Cats love me. I am thee cat whisperer. They approach me on every walk no matter where and since they have such good intuition they must feel I'm a nice person or they wouldn't come to me
Ahhh I love cats 😅

@RenegadeMasterx I hope those girls are not rotten but insecure and shallow with some growing to do.

I can absolutely assure you I am not beautiful . And that’s ok. For the first time in my life I am fine with that. I don’t disagree that many people are under pressure to conform to current beauty standards via surgery and fillers and I sincerely hope that changes but I was ‘ugly’ back in the dark ages when standards were a lot lower and it was deemed a flaw even then.

I’m not actually speaking negatively of myself why I say that or use the word ugly now - I am no longer giving the word or concept any more power over my life, and not being afraid of it. So I’m ugly to those girls? To umpteen other people in my life who’ve told me? So what! I’m still funny, clever, kind, generous, good company, loyal. Being beautiful or ugly has no bearing on any of those things!

It has made me sad too! Sometimes a just beautiful person is hiding behind a non-conventially attractive face! The ugliest ( as determined by a judgemental society!) can be the most beautiful people inside.

I used to think, in my young days, that my friends were more attractive than me, They always seemed to get more men!! They had some indiscernible attraction that I just didn't have!

Fast forward 40 years. I found photos of me and my friends back in the day. And we were so bloody gorgeous! So pretty with dewy skin and bright eyes - I had long forgotten we used to look like this!! I always used to think I wasn't pretty but at least I had a good figure, and then I put on weight and didn't even have that!

I was so, so pretty 40 years ago!! The sad thing is, I had no idea then!

Good for you OP. What a horrible situation - may karma reward those women with chin hair and spots in years to come. I love the optimism of your post - I can almost feel your lightness. What an amazing realisation.

I think you may be giving them too much credit tbh. They probably were a pair of vile chavvy cunts that needed a slap.

What you have to say is beautiful, and the honest truth about what is valuable and what is not. Thank you.

I’ve avoided being in photos for years too, but I’ve got kids and so I’ve had to succumb to it a few times. I look back on photos of myself and realise how ghastly I’ve always been even on the occasions when I’ve thought I looked reasonable. A proper class A munter.

Unfortunately I’m the opposite to you OP and I do care. I think this is because women can only ever be two things to be considered valuable in any way; attractive or very good at what they do. I am neither and have always been told how awful I am at anything I’ve ever done. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I don’t have to work, but it does make me vulnerable. I carry a constant sense of failure and self-loathing and it’s totally exhausting!

As a child it’s the pretty clever girls who are praised and told how great they are, or are given opportunities for lots of things. I was also a very ugly child. Big and awkward. I felt so pushed out and I because I’m also pretty thick this meant that teachers disliked me because I basically had nothing to give. I became disruptive because there was literally nothing I could succeed at, learning was always such a challenge and it just got worse at secondary school when I became relentlessly bullied by the boys on my year. I failed all of my exams! None of this would have happened if I were pretty or clever.

I think being in good shape helps a lot. A cracking arse goes a long way way in making up for a less than average face.

Been trying to decide whether to respond to this as you wanted fellow uglies to respond. But it is wonderfully freeing to no longer care what others think of your appearance, however you look and over which we have no control. Congratulations on your epiphany. Those girls, fully made-up were insecure and projecting onto you.

I realised about age 14, that other people saw me as "beautiful". I'd never thought about my appearance, worn make up. I was top 1% of year grades-wise all A*s at gcse.

Suddenly, boys I thought had asked me out as a dare, I realised it hadn't been. I felt completely trapped. My teens and 20s were plagued by over-confident men hitting on me. Everywhere. All the time. People commenting on my appearance in professional situations, on if what i was wearing was "Mumsy" because i was trying to cover my appearance. There was a male doctor who basically stalked me telling me I would go out with him. He had a girlfriend! I'd done nothing, but felt guilty. I had a controlling partner who hated the way men responded to me. He didn't let me go out without him. I was raped.

Now, in my 40s and with a husband who is intelligent and happens to be very good-looking, I finally have self-esteem. I know my worth. I don't care what I look like. I don't care what my husband looks like. He doesn't care what I look like. We're just happy and confident in ourselves. We work hard. We are geeks. We travel. We do crosswords. We battle each other at difficult games. We learn new languages together. I like who I am. I love my kids. I'd never want to turn the clock back to the days when it felt like society judged me for my appearance only.

Congratulations again op. Here's to a bright future and freedom from judgement for us all from ourselves and others.

That's quite an aggressive take on it!

Of course you don't have to wear make up. But it's quite disparaging towards others to describe it as a 'mask'. For many women, they feel it enhances their appearance, makes them feel better & is fun. It's fine if it's not for you.

Equally clean & showered in terms of personal care is a fairly basic measure - fine it's your choice but many others would take care over hair, clothes, nails etc & it's not an excessive approach.

I am, by all conventional standards, an ‘ugly’ woman.

I have to disagree with your opening proposition, sorry! I do not believe that anyone is ugly, I've never ever thought of someone in that light.

Like in The Twits, I believe that people can have ugly thoughts & behaviours which influence our view of them.

There are people who don't look as attractive as they might, based on standards we set, sure. There are also stunningly beautiful people.

No-one is objectively 'ugly'.

However, I do appreciate your wider point, which is that after years of lacking self-esteem you reached a point of happiness & being comfortable in your own skin, which is great.

That's really the issue. Not looking in mirrors resonates with me too. I was exactly the same, from about 10 onwards. I hated my appearance, my unfortunate 80s hair cut in particular. It took many years to feel differently, even though others would have described me as good-looking.

It's not about 'ugliness'; it's all about 'self-esteem'.

2 young women got on the trains opposite me and started discussing and laughing loudly about how deformed and ugly my face I was.
I'm really sorry this happened to you. I'm glad you were able to not let it affect you but it's truly horrible & while the idea of women subtly judging others & making comments isn't sadly too rare, the straight-up insulting & mocking seems shocking to me.

You sound great & I hope you're ok. 💐

I'm in the position of having a conventionally pretty face but a highly visible, frankly gross-looking skin condition that has come and gone since my teens (think cystic acne). This has given me a few insights

• pretty people are treated better. 100%. Anyone who says this is false is lying or deluded
• strangers absolutely will laugh about your looks. No, it doesn't stop in high school. Full adults will point, laugh and mock you.
• being pretty is nice and all, but you better not rely on it. Its not an accomplisment and it can change in the blink of an eye. One accident, one health condition, and its gone. Plus, we all age, unless we die young.