“We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” – RuPaul Charles
Returning to Base Model
I used to joke about people who have no body modifications, never a crazy haircut, no tattoos, not even an ear piercing. I’d say that they were running their base model, that they had yet to unlock some new character customization options. They have an almost biblical look in their purity. Nothing wrong with that, but I knew after finally getting my ears pierced as a tween after years of begging that there was no going back for me. It didn’t matter that the stud of the piercing gun got stuck halfway through my ear, and a Piercing Pagoda employee pushed it through by hand. I was telling her to “go ahead and do it” while my friend was fainting a few feet away. I was in love with the idea of decorating myself.
Then followed years of building a collection: 12+ piercings (never done again at the mall), a thorough wash of tattoos, a bleached and sometimes colorful peakaboo in the hair, and an everyday look that consisted of black winged eyeliner. I even dabbled in an eyebrow slit and years later an eyebrow piercing, neither of which lasted very long.
But lately, it feels like I’ve been moving backwards. The ear piercings became annoying to sleep in and remove everyday. I stopped wearing makeup all the time–a combination of feeling more comfortable in my skin, leaving a 5-days-a-week office job, and getting an extreme case of adenovirus in early 2025 which caused double pink eye. I’ve recently rounded out the Change with dying my hair back to its natural brown.
I have become tired of getting in drag all the time. A likely side effect of Getting Older. Not that my previous routine had been such a dramatic transformation; but it was part of my “persona,” my mask in the world. And letting go of it has been surprisingly freeing.
You’ll recall I’ve kept the tattoos (and plan to) as well as a couple nose rings. No one has come to revoke my alternative card yet.
“You’re Becoming More COnservative”
A comment I’ve heard twice from friends, a statistically significant amount, regarding my recent, gradual de-dragging. Said with a tinge of nostalgia or… vindication.
I prefer to describe it as “taking more of a back seat as far as my appearance is concerned.” Which prompted my longtime friend to say “Oh, but you look healthy! You’ve got a California Sober thing going on.”
My sister asked me if I felt more normie after dying my hair back to brown. Yes–but it’s only a piece of the story. It’s not lost on me that many people who tried eyebrow slits and septum piercings in 2020 have since returned to a polished, inoffensive aesthetic with tattoo regret. As much as I’d hate to align myself with them, is it not true I’m going through a similar process? I can place myself above the desire to maintain a specific aesthetic, but I’d be lying if I said I stopped caring completely about the way I look. The Mirror haunts us all.
But I don’t regret my tattoos, truthfully it would be a bit late for that. They’re a part of my story and a part of my skin. Since I first started getting tattooed, I fantasized openly to artists about being covered. It comes with a certain connotation, maybe about the music I listen to or how I feel about authority (you’d be right). But anyone can get tattoos, from culturally significant to silly to hateful. So really it doesn’t mean much except you got tattooed.
While I’ve got you, I’m going to recommend Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. Because while I am a Rupaul fan on my own, including that quote at the top was inspired by its use in the book. The title character has an obscured identity because she is so consumed by the drag, the peformance of a character. Not unlike what I’m referring to.
Are any of us capable of truly letting go of the aesthetic performance? Should we even try? Or is it baked in with some need for self-differentiation, a need for status, and a need to signal to others who we are and what we look like. It certainly got me positive attention being out in the world, because having body mods and colorful hair is objectively cool. And I may always miss that version of me, the one with the eyebrow piercing and blue hair. I loved that! But my pillowcases were turning blue and the eyebrow piercing was rejecting so… What can you do? I can only put up with so much for the sake of beauty. Maybe the most beautiful thing is that it was temporary.
I still care about my image, just not in the same way I used to. But I still feel compelled to subvert the beauty standard, to embody counterculture, move against the grain. Although my strangest is still pretty tame by Seattle standards. I admit that I have always found the most attractive thing about someone is something that makes them different from everyone else. Something a little off-center. As the great Susan Sontag said, “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” Take that, gender essentialists.
But it feels like its own sort of curse, the need to differentiate yourself. Troubling, that I feel a bit more human without the bells and whistles. A little uglier, more mammalian. But it hasn’t made me feel insecure. It’s actually made me feel more powerful, like I am yet again unlocking a character customization feature—the Monkey.
Being ugly is feminist
It’s tough being a woman, as we know. But one of the worst reasons is learning that being beautiful is the most valuable and important thing you can ever be. The thing that will get you love, respect, and attention. It doesn’t need to be an inherent truth for it to be practiced, obeyed, and accepted. The horrors of girlhood is to be scrutinized from the start, have your insecurities pointed out and place on billboards, so you internalize it and act on it by beautifying yourself and making efforts towards thinness and presentability and looking in the mirror just to see the reflection of what everyone else wants you to be. Enough.
Men have always had the privilege of being artists and geniuses in a separate class, away from the frivolities of femininity. You can read Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma if you’d like to explore more the implications of appreciating art made by terrible people. It’s been on my mind more lately, because men just do not need to prove themselves beautiful (or good) to gain admiration. Being the Default Person, they exist as a blank slate, to create and shape their characters more to their own will. Women, of course, have some agency in becoming the artists of their own destinies. But it feels like a much muddier canvas, when it’s been splattered on by the expectations of others to act respectable, gentle, beautiful, and feminine.
Some people, some women, actually are those things. But that doesn’t mean they’re free from the cage of being observed.
And I’m not telling you to stop wearing makeup either. Self-expression is one of the greatest joys of life, it’s the reason I fell in love with body mods in the first place. I still wear makeup, just not all the time. And I love a statement earring. The biggest thing I’m encouraging is a de-intensification of appearance obsession. Beauty will always exist around us, there’s no need to get so preoccupied with your own contributions. My new counterculture take on beauty is just doing less, and caring less.
The line is so thin, so impossibly blurry, between what we do for ourselves and what we do to perform beauty. The choice to go under the knife, to get botox, to remove body hair. Everybody chooses where the line is for them. And as claustrophobic as it feels, it still matters what you look like. Not just to get accepted socially, but to get treated competently at work or avoid leering, dangerous eyes. Sometimes it feels like we’ll never be free. But maybe the best thing we can do is get a little uglier and let people deal with it. Being yourself is, in the end, a beautiful thing.
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