Pretty Privilege and Ugly Main Characters

Written By: Magdalena Styś

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Image credits: @kendalljenner and @charlidamelio on Instagram

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I’ve never seen an ugly actress in a teen movie.

I don’t mean “ugly” in the same way Anne Hathaway is considered ugly at the beginning of “Princess Diaries” - I think we are all intelligent enough to realize that glasses and frizzy hair never made those gorgeous actresses unattractive (hell, I sometimes found myself thinking that main characters of teen movies looked better before their big makeovers). By “ugly” I also don’t mean plus-sized because even though being overweight was a subject of ridicule for a very long time in coming-of-age movies and TV shows, we are finally seeing more and more plus-sized protagonists, who are just as beautiful as the thin ones. Here, by “ugly” I mean just… not very good-looking on camera. Why do none of the teen movie protagonists have strangely-shaped noses or bug eyes? Why don’t their mouths ever look weird when they’re speaking?

We have a problem with ugliness. Even with the body positivity and body neutrality movements, we still tend to view people through the lens of how much they fit to our current beauty standards. Very attractive people are often considered to also be funnier, more intelligent and overall interesting compared to the ones that aren’t as conventionally pretty. This better treatment of conventionally attractive people is often referred to as “pretty privilege” or “the beauty bias” and it gets especially visible when we take a look at the most popular influencers. People like Addison Rae, the Kardashian-Jenner clan and the D’Amelio sisters are all very conventionally beautiful; you can easily gain a following on Instagram or TikTok just by being pretty, but similarly to movie stars, I cannot think of an influencer similar to the ones previously mentioned in the amount of followers that isn’t conventionally attractive. Moreover, many teenagers and pre-teens look up to their favorite social media stars, they wish to have their seemingly perfect lives, as well as their amazing looks. I’m not one to follow many influencers, but I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of yearning to look like beautiful girls I’ve seen on Instagram - and that’s coming from the perspective of a white, cis, able-bodied, relatively thin person; I cannot imagine how pretty privilege affects young people who are trans, disabled, POC, etc., which often have traits that don’t fall into the beauty standard that often.

Eliminating pretty privilege is a big task that I’m neither smart nor motivated enough to try tackling. But if there’s one piece of advice to thousands of casting directors who could be potentially reading this: think about making your protagonist have a crooked nose every once in a while. Or cast a trans person or a person with a visible disability, even if the movie isn’t about the character being trans or disabled. I can assure you your movie is going to do just fine, and you might make a teen or two feel better with the way they look.