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alt title(s): Hollywood Ugly; TV Ugly Producer: What were you thinking? Casting: Well, you said you wanted gritty. In other words, ugly. Producer: I wanted Mary Ann on Gilligan's Island ugly, not Cornelius on Planet Of The Apes ugly. TV-ugly, not ... ugly-ugly.
June is hideous. By which I mean Movie Hideous, in that she's actually an adorable little girl who's had all kinds of makeup applied to make her look hideous.
Dramatic situations sometimes require a character (always female) who is unappealing, unattractive, and has a hard time finding dates. However, unattractive or even average-looking women are often dissuaded from even trying to get acting jobs in Hollywood unless they are older or unusual-looking in some way, so the person cast in the role is more gorgeous than anybody you'll ever meet in real life. They make her "plain" by giving her some or all of: thick glasses, braces, unfashionable clothes, an unflattering hairstyle, and an even-better-looking sibling or friend. A more subtle method involves giving the actress clothes that clash with her natural skin color, making her look pale or blotchy — a method also often used in " before-and-after" shots for diet-pill commercials.
Works better if the inability to get dates is also attributable to being socially inept.
Inversions of this trope are just backlashes because plain-looking or utterly ugly males can pursue a successful career in Hollywood without problem and fit in the Ugly Guy Hot Wife trope. The likes of Danny De Vito, Jack Black, Mike Myers, Joe Pesci or Woody Allen hardly have any female counterpart. In short, this trope is Double Standard at work.
Generic Cuteness is the animated equivalent of this trope, and the result is a very Informed Attribute.
Compared Beautiful All Along, Loser Guy, Cool Loser, Hollywood Nerd, Hollywood Pudgy. Contrast Informed Attractiveness. Adaptational Attractiveness is when this trope is applied to characters who were plain, unattractive, old, etc. in the source material a show is based on.
Examples
Film
- Janeane Garofalo in every role she ever gets. Making nonsense of The Truth About Cats And Dogs, which is The Cyrano with Garofalo as the fat homely girl that skinny model girl Uma Thurman pretends to be, except that Garofalo is actually cute and Thurman looks grey-skinned, anorexic and dead.
- She seems to have escaped this in her more recent television roles, however; this trope was not applied in her roles on The West Wing or 24.
- Sam Witwicky in the live-action Transformers movie. At least his girlfriend Mikaela Banes was supposed to be gorgeous. Mind you, Sam acts like a grasping dork, so that might have something to do with it all.
- Renée Zellweger at her Bridget Jones weight was considered too fat for the cover of Harper's Magazine, showing that Hollywood beauty standards apply even beyond the film studio. It's probably even worse in magazines. Zellweger was supposed to be a size 14 in Bridget Jones - a UK size 14, which is a US size 10. She only gained enough weight to reach a size 6, but even then she endured dozens of newspaper and magazine articles on her weight gain and even her "temporary obesity". In comparison, Michelle Obama is a size 10, as was Angelina Jolie before her first child.
- Andi in The Devil Wears Prada. Even in her supposedly frumpy stage, she's still played by Anne Hathaway and while clad in a college sweatshirt and pajama pants with unstyled hair looks better than most women could ever hope to. Also constantly referred to by the other characters as fat. Admittedly, this is meant to be a takeoff on the fashion industry's ludicrous standards, but several other non-fashion characters (including her boyfriend!) comment on her lack of attractiveness.
- This is arguably worse in Hathaway's previous film The Princess Diaries, where Mia has frizzy hair, Nerd Glasses, and Doc Martens. And then she gets transformed into a sleek-haired contact-wearing princess. The stylist actually breaks her glasses. Because you want to wear contacts from the moment you get up until you go to sleep. The movie even tries to make a stab at turning this into a really Warped Aesop. On top of Mia's friends rejecting her for becoming prettier right off the bat, the movie attempts to show how she's beautiful inside when she shows up to give a speech completely drenched. Then at the end of the movie, she's back to sleek and styled and never returns to old Mia at all. Kevin Murphy had some choice things to say about this in his book A Year at the Movies.
- Dogfight, starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, is about a crew of Marines who challenge each other to a 'dogfight' — finding the ugliest girl they can and bringing her to a party. Phoenix's character selects Taylor's character in order to win this 'dogfight'. By Hollywood standards, she's hideous. By any real world standards, she's a reasonably attractive woman.
- Melonie Diaz's Alma in Be Kind Rewind is played up as ugly when the male film-makers are forced to take her over her (apparently) more attractive sister. This is achieved by... having her sniff and rub her nose a couple of times. (Then immediately forgotten about - she's the hot girl for the rest of the movie!)
- Jamie Sullivan in A Walk to Remember. Although the character was never intended to be unattractive (merely unconcerned with her appearance) the audience has a hard time believing the shock of the other characters during her Beautiful All Along moment given actress Mandy Moore's natural beauty.
- Male example: In Can't Buy Me Love, the uber-nerd takes off his glasses, untucks his shirt, and fluffs up his hair, and turns into Patrick Dempsey. (Admittedly, it's Patrick Dempsey back when he was a scrawny 14-year-old kid, but still...)
- The House Bunny looks set to play this straight, if the poster
 is anything to go by. Apparently being ugly just means being a brunette.
- Played straight in the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom Of The Opera. The title character, who is supposedly so hideously deformed that he is rejected by his mother, exhibited in a freak show, mocked by society, and driven to live as a recluse below the earth, turns out to look like...Gerard Butler with a skin rash on one cheek.
- Tracing The Phantom Of The Opera over the years offers great insight to how this trope has grown in popularity over time. In the original silent film version, the title character really is gruesome and deformed and (being played by the great Lon Chaney) essentially is one of the famed movie monsters of the silent era. But with each successive adaptation, the character is made more attractive until we reach the extreme noted above, which applies Adaptational Attractiveness to the stage version.
- It has reached the point where many viewers of the Phantom movie consider the "ugly" character to be more attractive than the "good looking" character, and think movie!Christine is a moron for picking the Viscomte. The fact that the Phantom is an obsessive, murderous psychopath makes no never mind to them. Which provides a (most likely) unintentional example of this trope, since the worst that can be said about Patrick Wilson's appearance in that film is the rather unflattering wig they saddled him with.
- Slightly justified in the fact that originally for the stage version, they planned on giving Michael Crawford a more hideous design; but he couldn't sing right with all the makeup they had to put on, so they toned it down (or risk having the title character in the musical sound incoherent). Still doesn't explain why in the more recent film version all he has wrong with him is a little sunburn.
- The upcoming Jennifer's Body stars Megan Fox as a beautiful cheerleader (certainly plausible) and Amanda Seyfried as her "plain jane" best friend. Amanda Seyfried!◊
- A male example: New clothes and a hot car (courtesy of a Guardian Angel) turns nerdy Jason Gedric into a cool kid in The Heavenly Kid.
- Kate Winslet in Enigma is a good example, too - even anti-dolled to look ordinary, she's still prettier than the "hot chick".
- Miss Congeniality: Even though she returns to her old ways afterwards, she's still played by Sandra Bullock!
- Yes, but that was less a case of looks than personality.
- "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful◊." At least, not in the book version of Gone With The Wind...
- Surprised this hasn't made it on the list yet...In the 1999 film She's All That, a high school boy takes a bet that he can turn any girl in school into a prom queen. Of course, he chooses the gorgeous Rachael Leigh Cook in glasses, unkempt hair, and eccentric clothes. Romance, of course, ensues once she makes the transformation and reveals herself as Beautiful All Along.
- The Hottie And The Nottie. Christine Lakin is supposed to be the Nottie. Don't estimate how many hours in makeup she racked up to become the Nottie. Especially if Paris Hilton is the Hottie. It doesn't work. No amount of makeup could make her company less desirable than that of Paris Hilton.
- Averted in Date Movie, of all things. Though the girl in question is played by Alyson Hannigan, the character does look really ugly before "uplifting."
- This is somewhat subverted in the hit Chinese movie "Shaolin Soccer." The Chinese actress Zhao Wei is seen as beautiful and cute by the Chinese but director and actor Stephen Chow does an awesome job of changing that in the character that she plays in that movie. Her character appears as what she was intended to look like.
- In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Tilda Swinton's character is described as "plain as paper." Uh...right.
- A particularly egregious example is the movie Frankie and Johnny. In the stage original, the plain girl was played, to great acclaim, by Kathy Bates, who fits the casting requirement by being not particularly physically attractive. For the movie version, the part was recast. Michelle "Catwoman" Pfeiffer. Again: uh... right.
- Used blatantly in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Iris is supposed to be unattractive as part of the plot, yet she is played by Azura Skye, who is pretty (albeit in an unconventional way).
- Minnie Driver's character in Circle of Friends is supposed to be dowdy and heavyset. (At one point she refers to herself as a "heifer".) Even playing her against the gorgeous Saffron Burrows doesn't quite make this work.
- In Marty, Ernest Borgnine (no prize himself in the looks department, although that's admittedly acknowledged in the film) goes on a date with a "dog" played by former model Betsy Blair.
- Doubly bad in The Enchanted Cottage. The main woman is so "homely" that no guys will dance with her, young boys comment on her looks, and she generally limits her social life in despair. Later, a man breaks off with his fiancee and considers suicide over a barely visible war scar. As the two fall in love, they become beautiful in each others' eyes — represented on camera by a strange blur on their features.
- Juno. Lampshaded in the lyrics of the ending musical number: "We sure are cute for two ugly people", indeed.
- Averted in Monster by Charlize Theron, who looks dramatically different due to gaining 30 pounds and wearing prosthetic teeth and heavy makeup for the film; she won an Oscar for it. Of course, the fact that it is still Charlize Theron under there keeps it from being a total aversion.
- Watts from Some Kind Of Wonderful. Of course, the ugly girl gets the guy.
- It's made a point in the Watchmen comic that Rorschach is quite homely. Jackie Earle Haley in the film adaptation of Watchmen? Not so much.
- Even Hollywood isn't usually shameless enough to pass off Sandra Bullock as "ugly." But she is that town's go-to actress when they need an approachable, girl-next-door type.
- One feels compelled to point out that 'approachable girl-next-door type' is a far cry from 'homely'.
Literature
- Bella Swan of Twilight fame. She is terribly self-deprecating, describing herself as a skinny, big-eyed, clumsy, Pale Skinned Brunette. Mind-reader Edward even lampshades this when he tells her that she should have heard what the entire male student body was thinking when she first came to school. Depending on your opinion, it's made either worse or better in the movie: Better because you don't hear as many of her thoughts and therefore don't have to hear about how "plain" she is as often, or worse because she's being played by Kristen Stewart.
- Arguably, Honor Harrington. Due to from-birth life-extending treatments, she was still physically in the awkward-as-all-get-out stage of adolescence when she formed her adult self-image.
Live Action TV
- Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
- Although it was finally inverted in the Season 3 episode "Rhoda the Beautiful."
- Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch.
- Male example: Seth Cohen on The OC.
- The title character of Ugly Betty - in Hollywood, ugliness is apparently defined by braces, bad eyesight and a complete lack of fashion sense. The show tries to justify it by having her work at a fashion magazine. She subverted it in "Real Women Have Curves". While she and her mother seem to consider her ugly, no one else has that problem. (One supposes a show called "Cutey Betty" would seem derivative.)
- On Just Shoot Me, Maya conducts an experiment to prove beautiful people get social perks by sending both a male model and "ugly" guy to a job interview. She ends up proving herself as shallow as everyone else by rejecting the charming "ugly" guy and dating the clueless himbo. However, the actor cast as the "ugly" guy wouldn't have been out of place in GQ. Maya herself was treated like this in the first season. By season 2 they stopped trying to make any one believe that Laura San Giacomo was in any way "homely".
- Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) on 30 Rock This is Lampshaded in the episode "Cleveland." Liz goes to Ohio and is offered a modeling contract and is complimented by people on the street.
Jenna: "We're all models west of the Allegheny."
- Since reality shows tend to be cast mainly with astonishingly gorgeous people as well, this sometimes carries over into that genre. MTV's Next sometimes sees daters rejected on sight for falling slightly below supermodel/Abercrombie & Fitch standards. This is probably one of the side effects of Network Decay, as there was a time when MTV used to let average and even ugly looking people (who weren't borrowing their fraternity/sorority's brain cell and didn't need a script to be witty) be on The Real World and Road Rules.
- Ethel on I Love Lucy was the source of constant fat jokes, despite being about the same build as Lucy. To compensate for this, the producers had her wear clothes that were several sizes too small. (The Urban Legend that she was contractually obligated to gain 20 pounds is untrue.)
- Karen Ball in Green Wing.
- Many male fans insist this one was (unintentionally) inverted on WKRP in Cincinnati, wherein Jan Smithers as shy, nerdy Bailey apparently came off as a whole lot hotter than 'blonde bombshell' Loni Anderson.
- Subverted in, of all things, a Planter's Nuts commercial. The commercial features an incredibly ugly, short, fat, lumpy woman. Aside from an unconvincing unibrow, it's difficult to tell how much of this is makeup. She is going about her daily business; the men around her all stare at her, enraptured, causing hilarity to ensue. Cut to the woman at home, preparing for her day, revealing the reason for all this attention to be because she's been rubbing on nuts in the same way some women put on perfume. While Planters succeeds in creating a memorable commercial, they seem to have overlooked the Fridge Logic.
- Marvin McFadden (AKA mouth) on One Tree Hill is constantly tormented about his average looks, which are perfectly normal standing next to normal people, but in the presence of the ultra beautiful cast of OTH, are shunned. Another example from this would be Millie, his girlfriend, who in all rights appears completely and utterly gorgeous, except for a thick pair of glasses.
- Ted the lawyer in Scrubs is a deliberate male example, created with makeup and an ill-fitting suit. The actor has been quoted as saying that after seeing him in the pilot episode, his mother called him up and asked if he was ill.
- Accidentally underlined with an episode of The Office (US version). Andy and Michael flirt with a couple of waitresses at a restaurant and attempt to get them to come to a party. They show up at the party with two different waitresses, the joke being that the first two refused and they had to settle for supposedly less attractive ones. Unfortunately, as Co-creator Greg Daniels admitted, poor casting meant the actresses hired were too good looking and the joke fell flat.
- Is that what that was? Since all four actresses involved were Asian, the joke unintentionally came off like Michael couldn't tell them apart and took the wrong women back.
- Mild case (BBC Homely?) in the televised version of the Inspector Lynley mysteries; in the books, DS Barbara Havers is committedly unattractive — middle-aged, plain, overweight, and badly dressed — while the actress they found to play her is, while the right age and not supermodel-gorgeous, nevertheless quite pleasant to look at. The author of the original books reportedly objected strongly until she actually saw the performance.
- When Audrey Meadows first auditioned for the part of Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason rejected her for being "too pretty." So she had a photographer come to her house early in the morning and photograph her just after waking up, morning hair, no makeup, etc. Jackie took one look at the pictures (without knowing it was Audrey) and hired her on the spot.
- On Sex And The City, the character Miranda (played by Cynthia Nixon) is apparently supposed to be the ugly one of the four lead characters. Arguably, Charlotte's second husband Harry. While played up as Ugly Guy Hot Wife due to him being bald and a bit chubby with bad table manners, his actor Evan Handler does have a rather cute face, and is hardly less attractive than many of the character's guys of the week over the years (of course it also helps that he's one of the nicest characters in the whole series.) In the last season, they pretty much dropped the Ugly Guy Hot Wife angle.
- Arrested Development's Ann Veal. Although Ann's not really played as "ugly," more that she's incredibly boring/unmemorable.
- Another male example: Xander of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Despite actor Nicholas Brendon being an incredibly attractive guy, and the character rather witty, he is supposedly the bottom of the social barrel at Sunnydale High, and numerous cracks are made at his inability to get girls. He dates the cheerleader Cordelia from Season 2 onwards. Doing so sent Cordelia's social status straight from 'most popular girl in school' to 'nonexistent'. Every acquaintance she had considered her completely insane for choosing to give Xander the time of day, and she ended up entirely exiled from her former social circle. Joss actually mentions this trope in the DVD commentaries:
Joss Whedon: Of course, Nicholas Brendon is way too good-looking, but this is Hollywood, so get over it.
- Most of the above also applies to Willow Rosenberg (played by the very attractive Alyson Hannigan). But in both cases, their outcast status is attributed to their social awkwardness and choice of friends - aside from one another, their social circle consists of the school librarian (Giles) and the class psycho (Buffy). It wasn't a beauty problem at all. Willow was considered nerdy, not ugly. Buffy, the former cheerleader, was considered unworthy, too, because everyone thought she was a psycho loony.
- Joss Whedon also makes a point of this in Dollhouse: the Girl Next Door, Mellie, played by the actress Miracle Laurie, complains that she's Hollywood Pudgy and can't get dates because she lives in LA and has to compete with all the girls that aren't. Her love interest doesn't care, and neither does the audience, because by any realistic standard, she is beautiful.
- Lampshaded in Bones when Booth describes himself and Brennan as the "sexy FBI agent and the sexy scientist".
- There was one of those commercials stations run to convince themselves they are socially responsible (as opposed to selling stuff), which featured a very attractive young girl complaining about how ugly she was while comparing herself to a made-up rock star in a poster. The poster pops to life and the stunningly attractive female "rock star" explains that it's all make-up and Hollywood, then shows how she ordinarily looks (still better than any girl I've actually met). Now that she's Hollywood ordinary, the formerly depressed "normal" girl cheers up.
- Disney loves this trope - all parts of the Disney Empire. Look around for the Mitchell Musso music video 'The In Crowd' for a textbook version of this. Katelyn Tarver, who plays 'the plain girl' is so obviously beautiful that it isn't even funny - and to 'make her plain', they give her glasses, put her in jeans and a flannel shirt, tie her hair into a messy ponytail and have her act 'goofy'. Jeez, people - maybe you shouldn't have gone with any close-ups that show just how hot this girl really is! (Of course, in real life, she's a model...)
- Zachary Levi as the title character on Chuck. Granted, when he's dressed in his Nerd Herd attire and placed next to uber vixen Yvonne Strahovski as Sarah, he does tend to look a little plain. For that matter Joshua Gomez (Morgan) and Vik Sahay (Lester especially, if the fan girls are anything to go by) are all reasonably attractive men. Also worthy of note, Adam Baldwin also has a certain following. Sarah Lancaster (Ellie), Ryan Mc Partlin (Awesome) and Julia Ling (Anna) are also much more attractive than your average doctors or retail store employees.
- Deliberately used in Firefly with River, played by the adorably beautiful Summer Glau. The character tends to wear dark clothing and minimal makeup, and has long, frazzled hair to deliberately invoke Pale Skinned Brunette and The Ophelia. The overall effect, when compared with other, more glamorously beautiful female characters like Inara, Zoe, and Kaylee, makes River both a little bit more plain and childish, which is the whole point: she's supposed to be cute, but not overtly sexualized. Of course, that last bit isn't helped by the fact that she's one of the most heavily fetishized characters on the show.
- Peggy Olson on Mad Men is supposed to be deliberately keeping herself dowdy in order to be taken seriously at work. Of course, she's played by the gorgeous Elisabeth Moss. The character was also shown gaining weight throughout Season One, presumably for the same reason. As we learn in Season Two, though, she was actually pregnant with Pete Campbell's child.
- Joss Stone as Anne of Cleves in Season 3 of The Tudors. Henry VIII claims she 'looks like a horse' and is unable to consummate his marriage to her, supposedly because she is so ugly. An alternative explanation suggested by other characters is that he's turned off because Anne is a virgin who doesn't know what to do. Most likely, it's all in his head.
- Part of the backlash on Spinelli on General Hospital is that he's a greasy-haired, geeky nerd with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness...on a Soap Opera, where anyone under a 9 is ugly.
- And stretched even more when they brought in a similarly geeky girl...and hid her behind glasses, Girlish Pigtails, and clothing that went out in the mid-90s. This Troper is still banging his head on the wall after that one...
- In a recent episode of Reaper, "Business Casulty," Sock is set up with a friend of Nina's. His reaction to her is that she is hideous beyond all imagining, to the point that he tries to get away from her as quickly as possible. In fact, the character is simply played by a beautiful woman wearing a minimal amount of make-up wearing average clothes with her hair in a pony-tail. There isn't even any of the usual Hollywood Homley attempts to disguise this: she doesn't wear glasses, have braces, wear hideous clothes, have bad hair, or prosthetic makeup. She just looks like someone going out to run errands.
- A weird case on NCIS, where in a 6th season episode a young, hot woman's attraction to Gibbs is portrayed as odd, apparently thinking the audience doesn't notice that Gibbs is played by Mark Harmon.
- Quinn in Zoey 101
Theater
- This trope can affect audience perceptions even outside Hollywood. When the Stephen Sondheim musical Passion was in previews, the director James Lapine had great trouble settling on a make-up look for the character Fosca. Fosca is supposed to be ugly, or at least exceedingly plain — that's the entire point of her character — but whenever they used prosthetics to make the actress Donna Murphy look genuinely ugly, the audience lost all sympathy for the character. They ended up making Murphy up in pale "no make-up" make-up, giving her a mole, and dressing her in unflattering clothes; that was as much ugliness as the audience could take. Lest tropers unfamiliar with the work think poorly of those audiences, the character of Fosca isn't exactly beautiful on the inside, either—she has deep psychological scars from a disastrous first marriage, and spends most of the show pursuing a man who has clearly and calmly indicated that 1. He's not interested and 2. He's already in a relationship (with a married woman, but still...). When he finally reciprocates at the end, it's not clear if he has actually learned to love her or if she has simply broken him completely.
- The musical version of Legally Blonde: The supposedly plain Vivienne is played by Miss America 1998 Kate Shindle.
Music
- If you think about it, the song Don't Cha is essentially the Pussycat Dolls pointing this trope to the listener. "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?/Don't you wish your girlfriend was raw like me?/Don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?/Don't you?/Don't you?".
- In the video for "You Belong With Me" they put Taylor Swift in glasses and a band uniform and we're supposed to believe she's The Plain Girl. Yeah, right.
Video Games
- Given Japanese media's issues with Generic Cuteness, it's noteworthy that the first Ace Attorney game avoids this. Will Powers, the defendant in the third case, is, while not a Gonk, genuinely rough-looking and unattractive. Maya, who has never seen him out of his Steel Samurai costume, is more than a little stunned. Your Mileage May Vary, as there are many who find Will's cragginess rather appealing, and the constant hullabaloo about how "frightening" he looks a straight invocation of this trope. The sequel has some more good times on this subject: Will, who lacks the skills or training for anything but television, has been reduced to hosting a children's exercise program in a rabbit costume that hides his face, Will's successor, Matt Engarde, usually looks about as attractively sixteen as you can get (until he pushes back his hair and reveals the rather extreme scar across his eye, which also signals his switch into his real personality as an inhuman, manipulative monster), and Matt's supposed rival, Juan Corrida, is frequently mocked for being ugly and looking so much older than Matt (ie he looks to be in his early-to-mid twenties, which he is, and he looks pretty good for it too). Straight as an arrow.
- Ethan Thomas in Condemned: Criminal Origins is somewhat of an aversion as he looks believable as an average police detective. In Condemned 2: Bloodshot, however, he somehow has become built like a football player despite the fact that he's been spending the year between the two games living as an alcoholic vagabond. The only signifier of his degenerate status is his scruffy facial hair.
Western Animation
Anime and manga
- In Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie is considered plain compared to her sister. That said, her sister seems to be a garish parody plastered with makeup, while Sophie's features are more normal. In the book, mind, Sophie's moderately attractive and aware of it, but has different reasons for being a shut-in; as the oldest of three sisters, she's doomed to fail first and hardest at any task.
- In the Scold's Bridle story arc in Godchild, Drew is supposedly so plain that other upper-class girls won't give her the time of day - something which the mangaka illustrates by giving her quite good-looking round glasses, freckles and a braid. The art style may be partly at fault, but the fact remains that she looks no less pretty than any other girl in the manga. In the same story arc, Viola wears a mask because she is disfigured, but when she takes it off it turns out that her face is perfectly fine apart from a finger-sized acid burn on one cheek. Justified in that she is completely insane and is probably exaggerating the extent of her scarring.
- Arguably, L. It takes more to make a character ugly than make them a Pale Skinned Brunette with baggy eyes, hunched over constantly, and who has no fashion sense. Just ask the Estrogen Brigade.
Real Life
- There are an absurd amount of genuinely attractive teenage girls who insist they are ugly and fat. Even when they happen to be under average dress size, have proportioned features and the coolest hair ever. And it's
all mostly because of the media bombarding them with unrealistic expectations and impossible standards, including every one of the examples above. ("If you don't look at least this good, you're ugly.") They don't just hear "you're ugly"; they hear "you're subhuman pond slime", because the media bombardment also tells them that their worth as human beings is based exclusively on their superficial appearance. Don't bother being smart or hard-working or kind or loving or any of that: the only thing that matters is how you look. Which of course makes a lot of sense, coming from the media, since to be successful in Hollywood, what matters the most IS how good-looking you are.
- The same thing often comes up when posting pictures of significant others online. It's often parodied by people saying such things as "Sharp knees, I wouldn't hit it".
- Non-acting example: the Photoshopping of models has become so ridiculous over the last few years in magazines and advertising that in at least one instance a model in Germany visited the office of the publication that she regularly appeared in...a model mind you, so by definition highly attractive to somebody...and not only did none of the staff recognize her, they didn't believe that such an ordinary person could possibly do work for them. This very photoshopping was lampshaded in the Dove Evolution advert. What the Dove Evolution advert didn't tell you is that Dove is part of Unilever, an enormous corporation that sells beauty products using those very same photoshopped models...
- Another notable example◊, with singer Faith Hill. That almost looks like it might be two different photos, or at least a composite. Her right arm shifts position notably between the two. Some of that is certainly Photoshop, but probably not as much as you'd expect. The arm move is actually a relatively easy feat in Photoshop for a skilled enough user, the exact kind an ad company would have on their payroll.
- This lampshading via street art turned an advertising for pop stars into a Photoshop advertising.
- In another political example, Monica Lewinski and Bill Clinton both got a great deal of grief over Lewinski's appearance. If you never saw a picture of Lewinski, based on the commentary you'd think she was a 350 pound, pox-scarred woman who'd been hit in the face with a brick. The reality is that, objectively, she was at worst an average-looking young woman who wasn't fashion-model thin.
- Chelsea Clinton NEVER deserved to be called the "White House Dog." The way she's grown up since just makes Rush Limbaugh look more of a Jerk Ass.
- For a walking tub of lard like him to snipe about anyone's appearance, especially that of a 14 year old girl, reaches a new low in the depths of hypocrisy. God help him if he says anything about the Obama girls...
- It's questionable whether he actually ever said that. There are no transcripts or recordings of the supposed incident, only Al Franken's word that it happened. In his own words, about the actual incident "There was a new in list and new out list that was published in the newspaper. The writer said in, cute kid in the White House; out, cute dog in the White House. Could we show the cute dog in the White House who’s out, and they put up a picture of Chelsea Clinton back in the crew. And many of you people think that we did it on purpose to make a cheap comment on her appearance. And I’m terribly sorry. I don’t–look, that takes no talent whatsoever and I have a lot of talent. I don’t need to get laughs by commenting on people’s looks, especially a young child who’s done nothing wrong. I mean, she can’t control the way she looks. And we really–we do not–we do not do that on this kind of show. So put a picture up of her now and so we can square this." There have been actual comments on her appearance though, from a Saturday Night Live show say, where an androgynous Julia Sweeney playing Chelsea flirted song style with Madonna in 1993. Comedy can be cruel.
- Many criticized Britney Spears for wearing skimpy clothes when too "fat," an assessment on which she herself agreed. But be honest: Few women look that good on their best days.
- Kelly Clarkson has described herself as "a big old fat girl from Texas". Honey, i don't know if you were being ironic but if you weren't know that most men would kill, or at least maim, to have a girlfriend who looked like you.
- Us men would kill, not maim. Kelly Clarkson does not deserve half measures.
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