Independent Reading: Uglies (Blog 4)

In our current society, it is normal for us to see people of all shapes and sizes, but when we think about what the characters do to become beautiful equally, the idea seems extreme to us. Ironically, imagine if people in the future look back on our methods and think of them as extreme.

“She’d never seen so many wildly different faces before. Mouths and eyes and noses of every imaginable shape, all combined insanely on people of every age. And the bodies. Some were grotesquely fat, or weirdly over muscled, or uncomfortably thin, and almost all of them had wrong, ugly proportions. But instead of being ashamed of their deformities, the people were laughing and kissing and posing, as if all the pictures had been taken at some huge party” (Westerfeld, pg. 198).

In my opinion, I cannot picture what the characters consider beautiful, because when we look through magazines, we usually see the people we want to look like. For us, being shaped like a human being suffices, but the characters in Uglies think that muscles and body proportions are grotesque.  It just makes me realize how dramatic of a change these teenagers go through once they are able to become pretty.

Westerfeld took the option of explaining what the characters saw by way of shifting to their side. He acts as if the magazine models are a foreign concept to make us question our own ideas of normalcy and beauty. This creates the effect of self-evaluation within our society. Just because we think a certain trend is normal, it doesn’t mean that others find it as appealing as we do.

We as humans should be able to take different opinions into consideration when we look at the diverse world we live in. But the truth is, those beliefs about beauty have been drilled into our minds from the day we were born. For example, the practice of foot binding in China has been traditionally normal until the early 1900s, when it was banned. That didn’t stop the women from secretly breaking their own toes and arches so that they would attain the “three inch golden lotuses.” That takes suffering for beauty to a whole new level. It’s not as common or valued by the Chinese as much as it was back then, but foot binding was their perception of beauty. It is strange to us as Americans but we need to think about our own beauty traditions.

My previous ideas about the issue of beauty mentioned the minimal harm we see in trying to look like models. But we fail to understand that our values will be altered.