The Wonder Chronicles: 12

On Ugly Feminists

This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle:: On Sisters.

I am not a bad feminist. I am not a good feminist. I am an ugly feminist.

And I am not fishing for compliments; no need to write to reassure me that I’m not ugly. 

The wonder, here, is not the opposite of beauty. The wonder, here, is “ugly” as the accomplice to ‘feminist’; the Clyde to Bonnie, Majnoun to Layla.

It’s a double package– a buy one, get one free sort of package. You choose feminist, you get ugly as a bonus.

I am the kind of feminist who will tell you to fuck off to your face because ugly times are like a bat signal for ugly feminists and when has patriarchy ever been beautiful? 

It is the job of a feminist to keep lipstick away from patriarchy’s pig. 

Ugly feminists, to borrow and distort from Virginia Woolf, are “looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting patriarchy at twice its natural ugliness.”

(The actual quote is “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size,” but who’s counting?)

The wonderful thing about being 56 (57 in two weeks) is that you’re “ugly” to exactly the right people. And it’s not that I’m relieved to be “invisible,” now that I’m postmenopausal. I don’t believe we postmenopausers (yes, I made up that word!) are invisible. 

The wonder of being an ugly feminist means to delight in telling those wielding “ugly feminist” at you to “Cry harder, fuckers.” 

To be ugly is to disobey. To be ugly is to be independent. To be an ugly feminist is to be the alchemist who bangs the two together and creates fusion.

The revolution, like ugly, is a dance-off between disobedience and independence. The ugly feminist tells the revolution’s emperor he–it’s always a he– has no clothes if he’s leading just another cisgender dick swinging contest against the regime over his–and it’s always his-grievances alone.

Cry harder, fuckers. 

Ugly is not about aesthetics but about power. Seize the power of the eye of the beholder of ugly.

What does an ugly feminist look like? 

If pretty is the root of obedience, then ugly surely equals disobedience and independence squared. And the heart of that equation sits on a three-legged stool of capitalism, racism, and misogyny.

The uglier your feminism, the more you butcher that beating heart of patriarchy. They’ll tell you that violence begets violence, as if centuries of patriarchal violence has begotten, what exactly?

Cry harder, fuckers!

The wonder of being an ugly feminist is that you are not squeamish.

Ugly feminists are like graffiti on a subway train–once it finally reveals itself to you, you never want to go back. Ugly feminists are like that graffiti–ugly to exactly the right kinds of people. 

Ugly is not about aesthetics but about power. Seize the power of the eye of the beholder of ugly.

Join this ugly feminist and yell with me FUCK YOUR EYE AND WHAT IT SEES.

My goal: that you are found by wonder.

My wish: that you intensely live. 

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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