disfigurement, disgust, and the dark side of pretty privilege

Comments · 508

• HE

  @HeyRowanEllis · 1 year ago · pinned

  As some of you might have seen on my socials already - &nbsp;my adsense was shut off without warning due to an unknown error around three weeks ago. Adsense is how creators get paid, and without it you don&apos;t get a penny from views or ads run on your videos, so I&apos;ve now had three weeks with no income from YouTube. <br>So, if you&apos;ve ever considered supporting me on Patreon or tipping on Ko-fi now is the literal perfect time 😅 <br>💙 <a href="https://patreon.com/rowanellis">https://patreon.com/rowanellis</a><br>💙 <a href="https://ko-fi.com/rowanellis">https://ko-fi.com/rowanellis</a><br><br>Some recent comments on my Patreon by supporters by way of evidence that it&apos;s a great time over there and the perks are rad: <br><br>BTS videos: &quot;I am loving the behind the video insights - I went the business route after graduation and you don’t get into many deep conversations that way. I did not realize how much I missed it until I started watching you. Plus now I get the added bonus of it being queer! Just perfect.&quot;<br><br>Rec Lists: &quot;Your rec lists are always phenomenal. I&apos;m taking notes.&quot;<br><br>Care Packages: &quot;I can only imagine the degree of effort and commitment it must take for you to personally reach out so often to so many people, but please know that each touch is meaningful to me. While I also support other creators on Patreon I honestly believe that you are the only one who actually knows my name. While that may not equate to anything of note in real life, I can assure you that it absolutely does within the Patreon bubble.&quot;

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• GA

  @Gaasuba · 1 year ago (edited)

  I was taking classes for hair and skin care for a bit. The teacher asked for a volunteer to get under the magnifying glass and i volunteered cause I thought my big pores would be a good variation as an example. She and all the class were horrified and demanded I swap out with someone else. My pores aren&apos;t even that bad. I was so baffled cause like, what if I had been a customer?? That&apos;s how you&apos;d behave????

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• DE

  @denisovan_the_menisovan · 1 year ago

  I think one of the best disability representations in a family film is Massimo from Pixar’s Luca. There’s no tragic backstory for his missing arm; he was just born like that. The filmmakers even took into account how this disability would affect Alberto; he spends so much time around Massimo that he unconsciously eats one-handed. There’s something so delightfully matter-of-fact about it all.

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• IS

  @isacami25 · 1 year ago

  the first time i watched the wizard of oz when i was a kid, i remember that when glinda said &quot;only bad witches are ugly&quot; or something to that effect, my mom said to me: this is what&apos;s wrong with the entire culture of the US. they are convinced that statements like these are true.

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• LA

  @larissabrglum3856 · 1 year ago

  Two random thoughts: <br>-&quot;Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,&quot; funnily enough, seems like an example of the idea that visible difference is only acceptable if it&apos;s &quot;useful&quot; in some way.<br>-Shrek can definitely be read as a story about the experiences of a person with a congenital &quot;disfigurement&quot; (being a &quot;big ugly ogre&quot; in this case) falling in love with a person with a person who wasn&apos;t born disfigured but became so later in life and unpacking what it means to be visibly different in this world. I&apos;m honestly glad it was a formative film of my childhood.

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• TH

  @ThePonderer · 1 year ago (edited)

  I think we’re more socially accepting of “cool” didfigurements like scars or even (to a lesser extent) loss of limbs because we haven’t been made to &nbsp;immediately associate them with things like shorter life expectancy.

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• BA

  @Banana_hamock · 1 year ago (edited)

  I was born with facial palsy. I never knew a life where I haven&apos;t felt different, not only physically, but because once you have such a distinctive feature it&apos;s hard to accept anything else you might be. Being queer and neurodivergent is coloured by also having FP.<br>I always loved acting and I&apos;m a musician but it&apos;s something I can&apos;t seem to pursue because of how performative arts are connected with body image.<br><br>The other day I realized I don&apos;t even get to age normally, since only half my face is developing wrinkles.<br><br>So when we see disfigured characters that are always anything but normal, it takes a toll on our self image. We&apos;re not villains, but we aren&apos;t heroes either. We&apos;re not brave or saints for existing, and we are not bad people if we have unhealthy coping mechanisms. <br><br>It&apos;s a fine like between wanting to feel normal but also being ok with the fact that we will never be.

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• AN

  @Antjeplantje · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ba_f_AFTSM&amp;t=3268">54:28</a> Oddly enough, I think Shrek is one of the few examples where that&apos;s not the case, because Fiona gets transformed into her &apos;ugly&apos; ogre self permanently instead of her &apos;beautiful&apos; human self. I guess it&apos;s a bit different because Shrek is an ogre as well, but they did fall for each other&apos;s personality more than for their looks ☺️

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• PO

  @PokhrajRoy. · 1 year ago

  I’m so happy that you decided to cover this topic because I need people to stop demonising people who themselves are the targets of systemic issues.

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• KW

  @kwowka · 1 year ago

  As disabled kids, we grow up not seeing ourselves as anything but villains. Captain Hook. Scar. Darth Vader. Every Bond villain. Somehow, physical disabilities became shorthand for evilness, in the same way as Russian accents. And if you see a good guy with a disability, you can bet it’s a limb difference that then has a perfect prosthetic that makes it impossible to tell the difference. Yes, I’m looking at Luke skywalker and Bucky Barnes.<br><br>When all disabled ‘rep’ was done by abled people for so many years, you end up with stereotypes, disabled people are always childlike and innocent or evil and heartless, and both of those necessitate not having any emotional depth. And then abled people don’t ever interrogate the fact that they view any disabled character as ‘asexual coded’, not because they’re actually ace coded, but because they’ve been taught that any time they see a disabled person in media, they do not have any relationships.

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• SA

  @SashaS-s2z · 1 year ago

  An example of non-moral facial disfigurement in fiction, is Mortal Engines: the love interest/deuteragonist of the series has a large scar across her face, described as &quot;hideous&quot; and in detail. Her entire life is affected by it, including her ability for facial expressions.<br>The adaptation (bad in so many ways) decided to tweak this into a barely noticeable, small scar on the cheek on an otherwise conventionally attractive, clean face.

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• VI

  @vic_king_73 · 1 year ago

  I would like to politely disagree with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ba_f_AFTSM&amp;t=3278">54:38</a>, and say that honestly I don&apos;t think that the disfigured person is even centred in their transformation. I feel, if anything (in romcoms for sure), that it&apos;s portrayed as a reward for the other party, that, having overcome their qualms about disfigurement, they are rewarded with a conventionally attractive relationship. It almost suggests that you can &apos;fix&apos; disfigured people by simply ~loving~ them, which is so contradictory.<br>But I mean to say that it comes across as a moral reward either way. Either the conventional love interest is rewarded for their lack of shallowness by... having an attractive partner. Or the disfigurement is healed as a reward for doing something nice/ becoming a better person, implying that the disfigurement was the result of poor morals in the first place.<br>Odd and cruel either way.

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