I’m currently on Season one, episode seventeen and I have a lot of thoughts. The main one being: how was this show allowed to be made?
Ugly Betty (2006) follows the life of Betty Suarez (played by America Ferrera) and her family in Queens, New York. She is hired at Mode Magazine, situated within the Meade publishing house conglomerate, by CEO Bradford Meade. His son, Daniel, has recently taken over as Editor-in-Chief of Mode and has historically slept with all his assistants, ruining workplace dynamics for everyone involved. Because she doesn’t meet traditional standards of beauty, Betty is hired as Daniel’s assistant in an attempt to stop him from sleeping with yet another assistant.
Daniel kind of looks like my High School Maths teacher, who showed up to school one morning with a black eye.1 But that’s neither here nor there.
My problem with Ugly Betty is that this show is both incredibly problematic yet wonderfully watchable. It’s comedic, there’s interesting plot twists and America Ferrera is a delight on screen.
But I always wonder how actresses feel when playing roles where their characters are ridiculed for being unattractive according to the standards of the world they inhabit. True, America Ferrera doesn’t actually have giant braces, overgrown eyebrows and a less-than-ideal haircut. But it’s still America Ferrera. It’s still her face, it’s still her body.
In the pilot episode, a fashion photographer Philippe Michel and Daniel decide to prank Betty in the hopes that she will quit her job and leave, so that Daniel can replace her with a hot assistant that he can sleep with. They tell Betty that she’ll need to stand in for a model who has called in sick, but the model is a size 0. Betty is forced to squeeze into clothes that don’t fit her and get photographed by Philippe, while everyone in the studio is staring and laughing.2
Workplace bullying aside, this scene actively contributes to the cultural myth that women cannot be intelligent and beautiful. You’re either dumb and hot or ugly and smart.3 Betty is geeky but competent with a US size 8 body, therefore she’s seen as an outsider within the fashion world.
On one hand, I’m horrified that the only reason Betty was hired is because she could never be seen as a sexual object. It’s actually fucked up that the only way Daniel is able to treat her like a human being (and avoid workplace sexual harassment) is because she’s considered the most undesirable person in the building.4 Onscreen and offscreen, I want women to be treated with basic human decency whether we’re beautiful or not.
On the other, I think the writers do want us to hate the Mode Magazine staff. We are encouraged to root for Betty, to love her and look up to her. It’s actually admirable, how little all the bullying impacts her self-esteem, as well as her confidence in her own intelligence and capacity to be good at her job.
I don’t think the harmful messages present in this TV show are anyone’s fault, necessarily, as these sentiments reflect the cultural zeitgeist at the time. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) similarly features Andy (played by Anne Hathaway) being tormented by her colleagues because she’s larger than them and has no sense of style. She ends up losing weight to fit into both a ruthless office environment and all the free clothes that only exist in a US size 4.
The movie also sends a subtle, sinister message that being beautiful, and in proximity to beauty, means that Andy’s life is now more exciting. Her colleagues are nicer. Miranda offers her a promotion. Men want to sleep with her in Paris. Her insecure boyfriend breaks up with her because with beauty comes power and she’s now a threat to him. Her life changes when, and only when, she has the body, hair and clothes that every woman would kill for.
I won’t deny it. My friends and I will chat shit about the clothes we wear and the makeup we buy at least once every couple of months. As we sip white wine and talk about our favourite lipsticks at the dinner table, someone inevitably pipes up with some variation of the words, “… it’s an art form, really! It’s self-expression. I feel more confident going out with makeup on. But I do it for myself.”
But I do it for myself.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relations of women to themselves.” In Physics Book IV, Aristotle argues against the existence of voids. He writes, “the theory that the void exists involves the existence of place: for one would define void as place bereft of body… these considerations then would lead us to suppose that place is something distinct from bodies.”
“Place is coincident with the thing, for boundaries are coincident with the bounded.”
It’s virtually impossible that we’re doing all this for ourselves. None of us are altering our bodies or our faces for ourselves because we don’t live our lives within empty space devoid of others or external influence. We are all extricably bounded to each other. We can never exist separately from socially constructed norms under a patriarchal system.
Women especially, move, objectified, within an interconnected web of social pressure, cultural imagery and marketing - constantly telling us how we should present ourselves. Women’s self-expression in any form is always contaminated by the desire to be seen and validated by what men want.
If I was the last person left on Earth, would I still be compelled to coat my eyelashes with mascara and line my lips red to appear cooler, edgier, sexier? Would I still want to look beautiful when there is nobody else left to see me?
In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf asserts that “what men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.” Giving the example of women’s magazines she claims: “[they] have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women’s roles… they consistently glamorised whatever the economy, their advertisers, and, during wartime, the government, needed at that moment from women.”
Wolf references a 20th century study which confirmed that “women are misinformed and exaggerate the magnitude of thinness men desire.” This can be attributed to the intense marketing of thinness in the media, as companies will pay for advertising slots to sell weight loss products, services or exercise equipment.
Since the 19th century, the modern pornography industry, valued at $97 billion globally, has also been shaping our perceptions of what a sexy, perfect woman looks like. Other forms of media like TV have been forced to replicate these ideals (only hiring actresses with tiny waists, big boobs, voluminous hair) to keep up financially with the profits that the pornography industry generates, because ultimately, we live under a capitalist system and sex sells.5
I feel a little sad for my younger self who used to sit in front of the TV after school and watch Ugly Betty. I think I was sad then, too, but for different reasons. Back then, I had un-waxed eyebrows, frizzy hair I didn’t know what to do with, a mid-size body going through the ebbs and flows of puberty, wired braces that had been there for years, none of my crushes liked me back. Does everyone else think I’m Betty - a hideous, awkward loser?6
I am now twenty-six. I see my social media feeds flooded with videos about how to look “effortless” and “clean”. I stand in the middle of my friend’s apartment in New Jersey and we analyse if my body is hourglass or gamine. I visit eleven thrift stores in Brussels to search for a leather jacket that will maybe, just maybe, finally change my life.
I don’t think all that much has changed since 2006. The reality is we can’t win. My body could always look more toned, my clothes could always be more stylish. I am always too much, too little, never good enough.
Kylie Jenner debuted her lip fillers in 2015, starting a phenomenon of people obsessed with the concept of having juicy, plump lips. Kim Kardashian famously pioneered the emergence of the “slim-thick” body ideal - a marked shift from the “heroine-chic” archetype that was popular during the early 2000s. Following quickly was the era of the Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL), which is considered one of the most dangerous plastic surgery procedures in the world because “stray lumps of fat can break free and enjoy a trip through arteries, resulting in pulmonary embolisms”.
Eyebrow tattooing, lash extensions and botox have also grown in popularity over the past couple of years. Overall, the plastic surgery industry has seen a significant increase in revenue since the emergence of Covid-19, now valued at $57 billion.
I can’t help but notice that these trends reflect the desire for White women to possess features that most Black and Brown women already have without having to pay for it - bigger lips, thick eyebrows, curves.
It’s difficult to reconcile that White girls now want to look like me when I’ve been told my entire my life that I’ll never be as pretty as them. But these beauty trends are far from empowering to people of colour. In actuality, they’re still inherently euro-centric because they’ve been constructed in the West and transmitted globally via platforms like TikTok and Instagram. You have to be slim-thick but you also must have a cute little button nose.
In Disobedient Bodies, Emma Dabiri rightly explores how definitions of what is considered beautiful, and what isn’t, varies across cultures and regions. Dabiri gives the example of the goddess ‘Oshun’ - goddess of beauty, fertility, love and the river. A line from the goddess’ praise songs describe her as “a corpulent woman, who cannot be embraced around the waist.” Similarly, the Navajo consider beauty as fundamentally linked to land and finding balance. It lies “in the process of creation; the finished product has no worth.”
Understanding beauty through the lens of cultural relativism, perhaps, is the key to us detangling what it means to feel okay with what we looks like. Dabiri radically encourages us to view beauty beyond physical appearance and aesthetic: beauty is the way we love each other, it’s the way we show up for ourselves daily, it’s the way we find joy in the simple things.
In episode nine of Ugly Betty, Bradford informs the Mode magazine staff that the company has been selected to reveal the face of 'baby Chutney’, the newborn child of fictional power couple Tim and Chloe, to the world for the first time ever. The production team, however, find the baby “hideous”. In a heated exchange with Betty and the stylist, he remarks that “the child fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down.”
“Well, maybe your concept of what’s beautiful is a little narrow!” Betty screams back at him.
And she’s right. I think it is.
Mr. Will, if you ever see this, I’m so sorry. But please know that everyone had a crush on you and your black eye fed the school rumour mill for at least two weeks.
The average woman in the US is a dress size 16-18. This scene made me so uncomfortable!
In case the showrunners haven’t already made it blatantly obvious: Betty is ugly and smart.
They’re also basically telling their audience that only women who look like models deserve to be “chosen” by rich, White dudes. Daniel is a LOSER.
Companies teach men to want a certain type of women. Men proceed to transmit these taught desires to women through culture, products, art, film, etc. Women absorb it all and then turn themselves into objects of desire and kid themselves into thinking their decisions to modify body and self are immune from any kind of external pressure.
I had no business watching this show in middle school. In my old age I can now confidently say that I would be proud to be even half the person Betty is.