Body Acceptance Resistance
On a Thursday evening in Brooklyn, the tree-lined streets outside my window are highlighted by golden hour’s glow, and I’m standing here, glaring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I’m getting ready for a date with a woman from Hinge, but I might as well cancel. My eyes fixate on the center of my face, where a bright red lump has taken residence on the tip of my nose. I turn from side to side, my stomach sinking — the pimple emphasizes the Jewish nose I’m already self-conscious about.
“It looks fine!” my roommate assures me, as she notices me staring for a ridiculous amount of time. “Honestly. I can barely see it!”. Regardless of whether her words are true, I can’t seem to take them in. I am only able to see the pimple which illuminates the acne on my chin and the wrinkle on my forehead, and all I can think is: ugly.
No — you are beautiful. Every body is beautiful, I reply to my mean mirror-self, regurgitating a phrase I heard constantly in body positive spaces.
When I first encountered the concept of body positivity, I was twenty years old (doing push-ups on my dorm room floor), and in the thick of a disordered relationship with food and an exercise addiction. The concepts of intuitive eating, health at every size, and joyful movement absolutely turned my life around. I became passionate about fat liberation and systemic issues of access, as I simultaneously began to accept and love my own body. As weight loss and diet ads continued to permeate my social media, religiously, I reported each one as harmful or spam. I thought I had hacked diet culture, opted out of our appearance-obsessed culture.
My algorithm must have gotten the hint. Over time, without me even realizing, these became replaced with skin care advertisements: everything from serious prescription medication to trendy “ageless” serums and “must-have” moisturizers. I imagine my capitalistic algorithm muttering to itself: it looks like she has accepted her body as it is, damnit! We must find another thing to make her hate about herself (and quick) so she will buy more products. As I grew to accept my stomach and body fat, I learned there were other parts of me that could be deemed as ugly, that needed to be fixed. It felt like “achieving” beauty was always just out of reach, as the standards continued to mutate. And as I’ve gotten older, it’s become apparent how inextricably linked our societal conception of beauty is to youth, as if beauty is a test we’ll all inevitably fail as we age.
In the mirror tonight, the words “you are beautiful” suddenly feel trite and powerless. This leads me to a chilling question: why must I be beautiful at all — why does a lack of beauty feel existentially threatening to my sense of self?
What even is ugliness? I began to wonder, but I could not think of a sufficient answer to the question. Then, I found that multiple incredible activists (especially disability activists) advocating for marginalized groups have pushed a new framework, an embrace of what society deems as “ugly”: a wholehearted departure from the relentless pursuit of beauty.
I was shocked to learn that this train of thought goes back way further than I could have realized. An embrace of the ugly is present in our own Jewish tradition, put forth radically, by none other than the Rabbis of the Talmud.
In the Talmudic tractate Ta’anit (7a-b), the Roman Emperor’s Daughter rudely asks how Rabbi Yehoshua B. Hanania contains “magnificent wisdom in an ugly vessel”. The Rabbi, seemingly unphased, sends the Emperor’s Daughter on a mission. He makes her pour wine in gold and silver vessels (rather than clay vessels as she normally would). The wine sours in the gold and silver vessels, tasting strange. This, apparently, proves the Rabbi’s point: magnificent Torah can be held in an “ugly” vessel.
In this shocking text, the rabbis rail against the pervasive concept of physiognomy, positing that not only is it possible for one to be learned even if they are ugly, but in fact, being ugly has a positive correlation toward inner wisdom and learnedness.
This is a direct rebellion against Greco-Roman beauty standards, going against the normative ideal of the dominant culture: that external beauty was essentially equal to internal goodness; that there is something morally superior about beauty. As Mira Balberg explains in her article “The Emperor’s Daughter’s New Skin”, this orientation toward beauty is a form of quiet but powerful resistance against Greco-Roman hegemony, a culture in which stereotypes of Jewish features were cast as inferior (the Jewish body was seen as deformed and inferior to the Greco-Roman body). The rabbis in many ways internalized these stereotypes, but instead of trying to portray them as “beautiful”, they uprooted the entire concept of beauty as an inherent good. The rabbis seem to discard beauty entirely, opting for the value of Torah and wisdom, an emphasis on internal holiness… one might call it, forms of “magnificence”.
I can’t stop thinking of this story. It pops into my mind as I continue to stare in the mirror. I want to be like Rabbi Yehoshua B. Hanania, to be proud of ugliness, to value Torah and connecting to Hashem magnificence above all. To throw my middle finger up to the norms and standards and skincare routines. But if I am being honest with myself; I’m not there yet.
My roommate hands me a small case of concealer and I dab it on the offending dot. I take one last look in the mirror: it doesn’t match my skin tone, and the pimple pokes right through. I breathe a sigh of resignation, and walk out into the warm summer night.
An hour later, I’m with my date in the packed audience of a queer fashion show. Bodies of every size, shape, race, gender, and ability strut and roll down the runway in leather and lace, to our raucous applause. By now, I’ve long forgotten about my pimples and am losing my voice from shrieking with joy.
Mia Mingus explains that in a white-supremacist, ableist, heteronormative society, the label of “ugliness” is put upon those who are marginalized by those standards (“physically disabled folks, dark skinned people, trans and gender non-conforming folks, poor and working class folks, HIV positive folks, people living in the global south and so many more”). There is a powerful feeling of resistance in this room, and I feel tears rise while watching the community uplift each other. Each of the models, of course, is stunning in their own way — in a way that could never be captured by a cookie-cutter mold. Like Rabbi Yehoshua, we throw a collective middle finger up to mainstream beauty standards.
Whether we choose to say “every body is beautiful” or we try to devalue beauty altogether, may we move toward a world in which we strive to see the holy, glowing magnificence inside ourselves and others — regardless of the vessel.
This article was published in Yente Zine, Judith Edition 5783.
