Make normal people hot again

Gen Z doesn't seem to realize that normal-looking people are attracted to one another all the time

The Gen Zs want to know why everyone used to be so ugly. And also why we were paying to look at these ugly people.

To be fair, when looking back at the media we consumed for most of our lives, pre-, let’s say, 1995, as compared to now, people did look “ugly.” That is to say, they looked like normal human beings.

I grew up watching shows like Roseanne, Degrassi Jr/High (the original, you guys, not the gay reduxx with Drake), The Wonder Years, and Cheers. I loved The Breakfast Club, Meatballs, Pretty in Pink, and Dirty Dancing. These shows and movies were timeless. I still watch them. I show them to my young niece, and she loves them too. They were good. But they were also full of regular-looking people. Degrassi, notably, was a show about ugly Canadian teenagers who we did not view as ugly. We had crushes on the characters in Degrassi, just like we did the ugly/normal kids in our classes at school. They looked like us. Which was fine, because we didn’t expect the people in our TV shows to look like the Kardashians or even to look like the supermodels of the time. Perfection wasn’t the norm, and no one cared. We all enjoyed ourselves just the same.

Today, things are apparently different.

On X, a Gen Zer (on the cusp, to be fair) posted several images of Bill Crystal and Meg Ryan as their characters in one of my all time favourite movies, When Harry Met Sally. She commented, “This could be a great film of either of them were attractive.”

Yes, I may be suffering from a case of the olds, but sob.

I never really stopped to think about whether or not Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal were attractive in this movie. It didn’t really occur to me that they should or should not be. The draw was the story and the characters themselves. Meg Ryan is of course very pretty and Billy Crystal looks perfectly fine, upgraded to cute on account of his personality.

The issue isn’t really that either of them are unattractive, objectively, but rather that what the younger generation are accustomed to seeing on their screens is so far from normal, so far from regular, so far from human that regular-looking, non-altered people register as ugly.

The point of When Harry Met Sally was not that they were two hot people, attracted to one another on account of said hotness. The point was that they were two regular (albeit quirky) people, who fell in love through a close friendship that developed over years.

A point (not the point of the movie, per se) is that regular, normal looking people are attracted to one another and fall in love all the time in real life. The storyline in When Harry Met Sally is meant to appeal to us because it gives us hope that we could be them. It’s a wonderful love story that any regular human would be happy to have as their own. The narrative online insists that only very hot and rich people like and partner with one another and that everyone else is left out. But that is ridiculous. Normal, ugly people have been falling in love and partnering and pro-creating for all eternity. And until very recently, this reality was portrayed on screen.

Nowadays, even beyond the screen our appearances are expected to be altered to suit the Great Filter. Girls in their 20s are getting filler and botox, warping their notion of what lips should look like, but on screen things are even worse. Everything they see on Instagram and TikTok is filtered into oblivion, and we’re quickly being immersed in a world of AI, wherein the young women we see online aren’t even real.

The human actresses we see in movies have more work done on their bodies and faces than ever before, and are then further adjusted via visual effects to conceal flaws, wrinkles, pores, eye bags, etc. Even the musicians we used to love looked normal, plain, and ugly. Today, we get manufactured pop stars with perfected looks. I can’t imagine we will ever idolize or even tolerate watching a regular woman again.

How will this impact the younger generations in real life, as they age and (presumably?) interact with the real world? How can one parse what they see online, even in terms of their own AI filtered faces, with what they see in real life?

The movies and TV shows of yesteryear did us a favour. Yes, there were beauty standards (mostly surrounding dieting, which frankly isn’t the worst thing on the planet), but even the pretty women still looked human, and had human features and human flaws. We saw non-bright-white, crooked teeth, thin lips, stubby eyelashes, bad skin, and bumpy noses. Women like Jamie Lee Curtis, who was supposed to be this super hot babe, was, by today’s standards, not particularly hot…

Look at the leading young lady in Dirty Dancing, Jennifer Grey, for frick’s sake. Did any of us think she was ugly? No. We just loved the movie.

When we were young, we actually looked like many of the people we saw on TV. Now, no one even looks like themselves on screen.

We are forcing ourselves into dysphoria. How can we stand to look at our own real faces and the faces of those around us when, as compared to what we ingest online all day, we look kind of gross?

Maybe it doesn’t matter in real life. Those of us who still go out into the real world tend not to think of our friends and romantic partners or dates in this way. We still find one another attractive and charming despite all the pores and crow’s feet and zits. But me and my friends, for the most part, didn’t grow up online. I wonder if the younger generations, raised in a world of AI bodies and faces, will accept their real selves and the real selves of those around them.

If they can’t accept the idea that regular-looking people might fall in love in a romcom, will they accept that regular-looking people can fall in love in real life? Will they think of themselves as loveable? Deserving of romance and sex and magic?

Lord, bring back the uggos. Put them on TV. Let us see some bad skin and messed up teeth and and thin lips and weird hairlines. Take back Kylie Jenner. We want Caitlin Ryan.