One History Of The Modern Ugly
F.R.R. Mallory
February 12, 2007

A woman can never be too rich or too thin.
 ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

There are certain voices that penetrate time and withstand the ravages of a continuously transforming language. Shakespeare is one such voice. He had the unique and powerful ability to intuitively combine ideas, thoughts and feelings into both poetry and prose. The effect of his words has been so profound that many people routinely use one or more Shakespearean quotes without knowing their source. We are all familiar with, "the lady doth protest too much," "et tu, Brute," "tis neither here nor there," "parting is such sweet sorrow," and "all's well that ends well." These are but a few of the hundreds of quotes still informing our lives today.

More than anything else, what lives on beyond the passing of a man indicates his true mastery of craft and in this case, this is the mastery of words. This is all well and good when the messages so crafted land gracefully upon the psyche of the listener, viewer or audience. But what happens when a master craftsmen is still human, struggling against his own inner demons and issues, who then translates his concerns into power-laden prose? What happens when a man is strongly attracted to an androgynous body type, the theatrical mixture of the sensual young man playing woman, yet man still?

Couple a woman's face and a young man's body, mental impairment and the full acceptance of self-value through objectification and usury, and you attain the divine elixir of Shakespeare's concept of beauty. This recipe continues its insidious path of violence and oppression as it imposes itself upon the conditioned psyche of men and women worldwide more than 18 generations later. Shakespeare, in direct opposition to the concepts of female beauty of his generation as expressed through the famous Baroque works of Peter Paul Rubens, Abraham Janssens, Adam Elsheimer and others, defined a catalog of characteristics and traits that continue to inform female image standards.
Shakespeare's sonnets tend to center on specific themes suggesting these issues were close to his heart since he documented them in his most personal way, through his poetry. Shakespeare writes about youth, physical beauty, death, immortality, sex, young men and aging among others. In Sonnet 19 when Shakespeare says, "...live young" (line 14). And in sonnet 20 "Woman's face..." (line 1)., he reveals his pre-occupation of mind on both youth and physical characteristics. Yet he also disparages the female by saying, "...she wrought thee fell a-doting" (line 10). This particular line from the poem can be read to say that the woman who creates this package is of diminished mind or is exhibiting mental decay. He is speaking of Nature in the feminine but this descriptive has come to an askew position of lauding the female who through mental damage seeks to re-craft themselves as close to this ideal as possible.

It's difficult to pick up a magazine, turn on a television show or shop for clothing, as a woman or girl, without encountering the optimum female image ideology. This is conditioned behavior at its absolute worst. Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene describes memes as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. (Dawkins 18). Memetics is the process where thought is infected by a thought virus which replicates the gross portions of itself producing extreme thought distortions. In simple terms memes are infectious thoughts. A good example of a meme can be found in advertising jingles that become 'stuck' in the mind of the recipient playing over and over again as a frontal thought interruption. These memes don't replicate in whole. Instead, they replicate along those areas of the meme which possess the most energy. In this way a person will recall only the highlights of the jingle. This is an example of a gross form reproduction. Over time the meme decays like a bad Xerox copy, with each replication more detail disappears until the end results are powerful idea punches without any of the refined information that may at one point have leavened them.

This is potentially what has become of Shakespeare's favored description. In Sonnet 20 when Shakespeare says, "A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted" (line 1). Through memetic decay this line would become painted women's faces (suggesting the artificial application of beauty.) "Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion" (line 2) becomes, androgynous passion (suggesting an ambiguous body shape is favored.) It is hard to watch a skeletal starlet parade herself in her corpse-like splendor across the blooded red carpet of celebrity success without acknowledging that she is a product of extreme thought distortion. If we look at Shakespeare's line, "Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting" (line 10). This becomes create mental decay (to create the object of passion and love, she who creates this will be mentally weak. In fact the extreme dieting necessary to produce a pre-pubescent body form robs necessary nutrients from the brain and causes "deficiencies in their ability to recall meaningful prose and visuospatial information" among other problems.) (Mathias and Kent). Mental decay and extreme thought distortion are twins. What has been reduced from Ruben's abundant fleshiness, are the bitters of a supreme hatred for the female body and a companion elevation of Shakespeare's androgynous pricked out woman. How else can the undead corpse be considered? After all no matter how thin, how pretty of face, how young of body, how damaged of mind - the girl, the woman, will never be a man. She can never remove enough of herself to become the ideal of Shakespeare's mantra.

Though it remains unfair to blame this violent thought construction solely upon Shakespeare, we cannot overlook the enormous power of his influence tumbling down through the centuries as his description has become the mantra of female self annihilation. The powerful need of a human being to be desired and loved by others exists at the very root of our survival mechanisms. We are born with the instinct that our self-preservation resides in pleasing our caretakers. When pleasing our caretakers, authority figures, culture and society includes a description of the optimum female image, this transforms the psyche and places the body in lifelong conflict against this perceived ideal. When women try to live up to the description that is now being called "The Race to Size Zero" (UK Channel 4). women eventually conclude that they will never attain this desired state and through their own inability they will remain the Ugly.

Societies desire to please the Old Master is only marginally different from a small child wishing to please its parent. Both try to live to the description that will make them adored and safe. Yet Shakespeare resides now across death's transom, the return of his love become inaccessible and his children, all of us, lost. He didn't know that which he wrought and I'm certain that should he know, he would release us from this bondage of words decayed now into destructive weapons.

Works Cited

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 3rd ed. New York; Oxford University Press. 2006

Greenfield, Lauren. The Race to Size Zero.
http://www.channel4.com/documentaries/?hpos=Documentaries

Levine, Barbara Hoberman. Your Body Believes Every Word You Say. California; Aslan Publishing. 1991

Mathias, Jane L., and Patricia S. Kent., "Neuropsychological Consequences of Extreme Weight Loss and Dietary Restriction in Patients with Anorexia Nervosa" Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. Volume 20, Number 4 / August 1998. London: Psychology Press, part of the Taylor & Francis Group. (548-564)

Shakespeare, William., David Bevington, Ed., Sonnets #19, #20. The Necessary Shakespeare. 2nd ed. New York; Pearson Longman. 2005

Peter Paul Rubens
"The Three Graces"
1636-38

Kate Moss - 2006
Modern Super Model
"uses cocaine to maintain super thin appearance - ribs are visible in this skeletal shot"

400 years of agony

The race to make women disappear.

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