Many of us are familiar with the “dorky girl” stereotype in popular culture: braces, headgear, acne, frizzy hair and glasses.

Taylor Swift portrayed this in her “You Belong With Me” music video before removing her glasses, applying blush and revealing she was gorgeous the whole time — a metaphor for how beauty stems from within.

While a nice message, I counter that this historical piece of media is actually an allegory of how external beauty is fleeting and the prettier you are, the harder you may fall. Growing up an outcast because of one’s appearance is actually a blessing in disguise; if you grew up pretty, you’re less likely to be funny, empathetic and driven compared to your pubescently ugly counterparts.

Being ugly may have forced someone to resort to innovative measures to gain popularity. There are a plethora of niche interests, like terrarium building or close-up magic, that may have captivated conventionally unattractive children. Down the line, hobbies like these may have helped one stand out as unique, rather than a dull imitation of someone else.

Before cringing looking at old photos of yourself, this is your reminder to pause and rejoice: If you grew up ugly, you likely evaded one of contemporary society’s greatest plights: “pretty people humor.”

“Pretty people humor” describes conventionally attractive people regurgitating oversaturated jokes that have lost their appeal to the creators of the bits themselves. Many criticize this form of comedy because it is received as unoriginal and perceived as an attempt to cater toward men through performative quirkiness — but dweeb culture is not pretty people’s costume.

In an interview with W magazine, actress Sydney Sweeney named a spinner toy “Bob” and was lambasted online because her humor apparently fossilized at age seven — the age when “Bob” jokes were considered praiseworthy. At 28 years old, a joke this primitive is inappropriate.

What differentiates “pretty people humor” from comedy is intention. Sometimes, cringiness can be done to a point where the joke is still funny. Unfortunately, those entrenched within the confines of “pretty people humor” aren’t joking when making their poorly articulated quips.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the prevalent misogynistic undertone within this claim, implying that the interests of women, down to their comedic intrigues, surround male approval. It is counterproductive to intersectional feminism to assert that conventionally attractive women innately subscribe to male-centricism.

Regardless, people inflicting painfully unfunny rhetoric onto the rest of the general population should not be given grace just because they sometimes get grossly reduced to their attractiveness and unfairly underestimated. Everyone deserves to be held accountable for the torture they consciously provoke.

Those who grew up at the peak of the conventional attractiveness spectrum could be more prone to apathy than those who were ugly because they were the apex heartthrob in their ecosystem. Their exalted removal from the general population often makes them unable to have empathy for others.

In 2022, former supermodel Janice Dickinson faced backlash regarding past quotes of her time as a judge on “America’s Next Top Model.” She was infamous for lines like “America’s next top model is not a plus-size model,” which she justified with no regret in an interview later that year, saying “it was acting.” Dickinson was unable to reconcile with the fact that her choice of words, regardless of their purported inauthenticity, was cruel and detrimental to the self-perception of many contestants and viewers.

People who’ve benefited from pretty privilege their whole lives may be less socially perceptive than those who recently broke the glass ceiling.

Overcompensating is likely a foreign concept to them because they’re used to getting handed things by doing the bare minimum. There is no reading of the room for them because many of them so easily commanded all of the rooms they entered in their formative years, speaking to their lack of ambition.

It’s unacceptable to gloss over the fact that the standards we base beauty off of are determined by the media representation which unfairly favors white, able-bodied presentations.

Subjecting children to labels of “pretty” vs. “ugly” is cruel, and therefore the latter shouldn’t be viewed aspirationally, but rather maturely accepted as a rite of passage rather than a debilitating grievance.

I mourn for a childhood me who hated her thick Belgian eyebrows and socially unacceptable curly Caribbean hair. Yet, while I reflectively admit that it would’ve been nice to grow up blissfully pretty, I’m simultaneously content with the fact that I grew up to be pretty humble, pretty caring, pretty valiant and pretty friendly instead.

Sophia Ainsworth is a sophomore writing about the underbelly and evolution of the beauty industry in her column “Fairest of Them All,” which runs every other Wednesday.