The Uglification Doomsday Scenario

How the "Uglification of Everything" Could Lead to the Downfall of Western Civilization (but Won't)

Of all the forces that may bring down Western civilization, imagine if we were ultimately brought down by ugliness. Not nuclear war. Not disease. Not an asteroid. Ugliness. This may sound absurd, but it is in fact the real fear of some people bemoaning the so-called “uglification of everything.”

Everything, as claimed in a growing body of articles and social media posts, is getting uglier. And to a degree there’s some obvious truth to this. McDonald’s is a prime example. The traditional McDonald’s was vibrant and colorful; it had the general vibe of a happy-go-lucky circus. New McDonald’s buildings are bland, gray boxes that have virtually no vibe at all. They’ve intentionally been made ugly.

Same with cartoons. Years ago, cartoon animations were detailed, textured, and nuanced. Now they’re routinely flat and poorly-drawn to the point of being not just ugly but genuinely a little grotesque (not to mention de-sexyified—“Never forget what they took from you!”). So too, arguably, with clothes, tattoos, houses, churches, cars and trucks, skyscrapers…

The real concern, however, is that the uglification trend has come for female beauty. The uglification of McDonald’s is one thing. It’s a little hard, if not pathetic, to care too much about the aesthetics of McDonald’s. The world surely can carry on with ugly hamburger joints. But when “they” want to uglify beautiful women? Now we have a problem. A very real, impossible to exaggerate, dooms-day scenario kind of problem.

Even if you haven’t followed the discourse around the uglification of everything, no doubt you’ve been exposed to the glorification of non-perfectly-fit-and-gorgeous women. It’s now common to see plus-sized mannequins in clothing stores—even athletic stores like Nike. Magazine covers routinely feature either plus-sized women, androgynous women, armpit-hair-flaunting women, or transwomen. Even gamers have begun to wonder, “Do video game developers intentionally make women uglier than in real life?” 

The normal response to this phenomenon is to shrug and carry on. This is capitalism at work. Trends come and go. Not every season can be hot-girl season. There’s merchandise to sell and it turns out that some customers are, in fact, not perfectly fit or drop-dead-gorgeous. Give the people what they want! Etc.

The alternate response is to see this trend as evidence of the West’s impending downfall. Jordan Peterson most famously catastrophizes the celebration of non-standard beauty. In 2022, Sports Illustrated featured the plus-sized model Yumi Nu on the cover of its swimsuit issue, to which Jordan Peterson responded, “Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”

Peterson’s claim seems to be that Sports Illustrated is participating in an authoritarian campaign to force the masses to see beauty where, in fact, there is only non-beauty. What next? Are we to accept that the sky is red, not blue? That two plus two equals five? That bugs taste good to eat and aren’t gross at all? That the government can spy on us at all times, stuff us away in tiny pods, and inject us continually with anything they want? And we’re supposed to like it? (As some noted in the Twitter replies, Yumi Nu is quite beautiful, even in the most traditional sense; she is simply on the heavy-set side, sort of like the average American these days. But perhaps that’s beside the point.)

But Peterson is not the only social commentator who sees through the authoritarian propaganda. Responding to before/after images of a hot-girl turned tattooed-and-scary-looking-them-them, X user Job The Sufferer wrote, “The whole point of it is to make it so people aren’t attractive and thus they won’t breed. Especially white women.”

There it is! The doomsday scenario. From ugliness to the end of breeding—the end of humanity. White women, in particular, better watch out!

It’s true that some people are making a concerted effort to stop humanity from breeding. Broadly, this is known as the anti-natalist movement. And it’s not particularly fringe or shadowy. Prominent cultural figures, from Jane Goodall to Bill Maher, proudly advocate against having children. Or look at the environmental movement. The fight against climate change is one of the most talked-about and well-funded global movements of our age, and many researchers and experts in this movement advocate for having fewer children. Inspired by this movement, young people today are anti-natalist almost as a default position.

Decades ago, I stumbled upon a website called the Church of Euthanasia. The site still exists and has scarcely changed. It promotes Four Pillars of the church: suicide, abortion, cannibalism, and sodomy. There is only on commandment: “Thou shalt not procreate.” My initial impression of this site was that it was a subversive gag that, being so over-the-top and un-serious, was actually quite funny. Fast forward a few decades, and it’s not a huge exaggeration to say that the message of the Church of Euthanasia has won in the culture, especially among young people. The subversive, anti-human joke has become reality.

If that thought isn’t frightening enough, consider how the Church of Euthanasia is poised to ultimately win in the battle for humanity’s survival into the future. As the New York Times covered in a 2023 article about human population growth: the global population is projected to peak in 2085 with 10 billion people, and then fall off a cliff. According to the article, “in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.” Meaning, our population could fall back to around 110 million people in a shockingly short time span.

How much of this doomsday scenario can be blamed on the uglification of everything, and in particularly the uglification of women? Five percent? Ten percent? It’s impossible to say, but probably a negligible amount.

The population decline started long before “ugly” women began taking over the covers of popular magazines. In 1965, the world fertility rate was around five kids per woman. From that high mark, it consistently declined to the current rate of fewer than three per woman. What changed in 1965? Playboy Magazine was just hitting its stride. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue was a brand-new venture with its hottest models—Kate Upton, Olivia Dunne!—still far off in the future. So what changed?

According to Our World Data:

 There are three major reasons for the rapid decline in the global fertility rate:

• The empowerment of women — increased access to education and increased labor market participation

• Declining rates of child mortality

• Rising costs of bringing up children, with the decline of child labor

Look at South Korea, where the women are absolutely obsessed with looking beautiful. There are so many cosmetic surgeons in the country that it has become known as the “surgical capital of the world.” Despite this, the country also has the lowest fertility rate in the world. South Korean culture is notoriously misogynistic, even in the modern age. By all appearances, the men and women of the country have virtually given up on getting along. According to the New York Times, “Many of the Korean women shunning dating, marriage and childbirth are sick of pervasive sexism and furious about a culture of violent chauvinism.” Meanwhile, many men in the country see themselves as “victims of women’s activism” and have no interested in working with women rather than against them in their struggle for equal rights.

Ironically, by all appearances, if the women of South Korea were to become even more beautiful, it would only serve to drive a further wedge between them and the increasingly embittered men. If there’s a lesson here for the West, it’s that the glorification of traditional female beauty is not as closely connected to the act of breeding as might be assumed, and it may even become a weapon to further thwart the natalists.

Rather than worry about a conspiracy that “they” are making our women ugly so that no one will have children, it would undoubtedly be more rational to focus on directly addressing the concerns brought by the anti-natalists: climate change, environmental degradation, resource scarcity… Additionally, there’s a large segment of the population that wants to have more children but simply can’t because of affordability issues. If Job The Sufferer really wants to increase the birth rate, he’d have better luck dropping his fight with celebrity fashion statements and start advocating for affordable houses and child care.