Stop being ashamed of your offensive face
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 1, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 Doug Lief Lief is a third-year English
student who looks like Jay Leno and Groucho Marx’s love child. Show
him some love at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Doug Lief
As I sit in my apartment writing this column, I wear a plaid
ribbon on my shirt as a reminder of a terrible disease that affects
people of all races and creeds. I am talking about the affliction
known as Ugly, or Appearance Deficit Disorder for those of you in
the medical community. This debilitating illness has failed to
receive the recognition it deserves. It is time to fight
back.
Many columns have appeared in the Daily Bruin condemning Los
Angeles as a place where appearance is over-valued, saying that we
should accept ourselves for who we are. Those people say that it is
impossible for an advanced, civilized society such as ours to place
such importance on superficial qualities instead of on intellect or
achievement. I say those people are quitters.
The Oscars garnered 800 million viewers the world over. If that
many people tuned in just to hear Melissa Rivers say
“uch” about Russell Crowe’s outfit (he looked
like he borrowed his tux from John Wilkes Booth), then it’s
time to admit to ourselves that looks really do matter. It’s
time we started putting more money into helping the ugly, the
fugly, the butter faces and all other strains of Appearance Deficit
Disorder.
Ugly, like many diseases, is sexually transmitted, not from
partner to partner, but from parent to offspring. It can also be
contracted from being “whoop with a ugly stick” as an
old Bo Diddley song warns.
Did you know that four out of 10 people suffer from ugly? It may
not be as apparent on the UCLA campus, where the proportion is
closer to 23 percent. This means that an ugly baby is born every
22.5 seconds. That’s almost three ugly babies a minute! And
if you’ve ever seen an ugly baby, then you know the disease
always goes unnoticed by its parents. This pervasive form of denial
allows most forms of ugly to go undiagnosed well into the
child’s first three years of schooling.
Unfortunately, this denial is often present in the ugly person
themselves, as was recently addressed in an open forum, Ricki
Lake’s, “You Think You All Dat But You Really
Nasty.” Often, the denial presents itself as an irrational
belief in the ugly person’s resemblance to an attractive
celebrity. One such girl believed that she looked like Cindy
Crawford, when in fact she simply looked like a big mole.
The first step to curing any illness is diagnosis. We routinely
screen people of all ages for various problems. Remember when the
big ear Winnebago pulled up to your elementary school to test your
“beep” comprehension? Every six months you visit a
dentist to scrape the gunk off your teeth, but when was the last
time you saw a specialist to scrape the rest of your face?
 Illustration by ZACH LOPEZ/Daily Bruin Thanks to the
information age, you can now receive confirmation online as to the
quality of your appearance. When asking someone verbally for the
standard rating on the 1-to-10 scale (or Willem Dafoe-Sean Connery
Likert scale), no one will have the heart to give anything lower
than a five, even if the person being rated is a complete stranger.
But with the anonymity offered by the Internet, sites like
www.hotornot.com afford raters the opportunity to be as cruel as
necessary.
In the interests of science, I posted my picture on that site. I
did not use the picture that runs with this column for obvious
reasons. Instead, I used a picture of myself from two years ago,
back when I had a scratchy voice and Latino accent, which, although
not visible in the picture, definitely adds something.
I received a rating of 9.4, and several comments such as
“Dude, you’re gorgeous” “Omigod” and
“You’re just posting a picture of Antonio Banderas!
That’s so weak!” I also received a very nice letter
from Melanie Griffith saying, “I don’t know how you got
that picture of my husband, but you better stay more that 500 yards
away from us at all times or I will have you arrested.” She
even autographed it! Sweet!
Do you know the symptoms of ugly? When I establish Ugly
Awareness Month as a nationally recognized holiday, we will embark
on several programs designed to educate the populace to the ills of
this disease. First will be a campaign of visiting elementary
schools, finding the ugly students, and pointing and laughing at
them. We will also be asking Congress to approve funds so that in
addition to condoms and tampons, schools will have dispensers for
paper bags (eye holes pre-cut for convenience and safety).
We will also be lobbying for research money so that hopefully we
can find a permanent cure. Very few institutions have clinical
trials set up to combat ugly, not even the prestigious UCLA
hospital. Outside of the Ponds Institute, virtually no reputable
organizations have shown the strength of conviction or stomach to
take on the truly grotesque.
Plastic surgery has, until now, been a relatively ineffective
means of correcting the problem. Rather than curing ugly, it only
succeeds in making people look plastic and ugly, as if someone had
constructed a crude photocopy based on the picture next to
“hottie” in the dictionary. Ladies, for your own sake,
there is a point beyond which cheekbones become terrifying (the
Barrymore threshold).
A far cheaper and vastly more effective alternative to plastic
surgery is alcohol. Combined with the darkness in which it is
normally consumed, alcohol makes the symptoms of ugly less visible
to others. But it is still only a short-term cure, and carries with
it a number of risks, including the possible production of new ugly
babies.
It should be noted that the Daily Bruin in no way promotes
drinking as a solution to ugliness. After all, we can just touch
stuff up with Photoshop any time we want. Doug is actually a 300
pound Vietnamese girl.
There is some good news on the horizon, however. There is at
last a definitive cure for male pattern ugliness: playing the
guitar. Other musical instruments can help, but none so
ubiquitously as the guitar. I myself play the piano, an instrument
which won troll-like Billy Joel a wife in supermodel Christie
Brinkley, but also got Jerry Lee Lewis some lovin’ from his
13-year-old cousin.
I have heard rumors that scientists at MIT, through the use of
powerful electron microscopes, are on the brink of discovering what
they refer to as “inner beauty.” I am skeptical of the
study for two reasons: first, how could scientists at MIT possibly
obtain a beautiful person to study, and second, even if such inner
beauty existed, it is invisible to the naked eye and therefore
useless to the layperson.
“The inner beauty waves we detect are the results of
parasitic bacteria living in a person’s brain, similar to the
ones we have in our stomachs. These bacteria align themselves
together magnetically in what we call “˜decency
colonies’ to produce nice behavior in their hosts,”
said Dr. Melvin Schmerzenfloiven. Unfortunately, said bacteria are
present in different amounts in the general population, varying
from five to zero.
Until that far-off day when we can all recognize such inner
beauty, let’s remember to be aware of ugly. Stop wearing
those speedos at the beach or supermarket, use the proper amount of
makeup (be it more or less), or simply don’t go outside
without your paper bag. Consult your nearest Guitar Center.
It’s time to heal.
