Crucifixion Tapes

Rider Waite Smith

I can’t tell anyone, especially people with bodies maligned in ways that mine will never be, to reject sexiness and embrace ugliness. But for me, I love this ever-growing space. I needed Arabelle’s monsters and the King Kong girls and Courtney Love screaming “Is she ugly?” over and over on “Pretty On the Inside,” like a war cry. It’s not a place of self-love and it’s not a place of self-hate—it’s between the two. It’s basking in the feeling of being perceived as a monster. It’s a celebration of all of your unruly parts, the parts you keep untamed, the parts you don’t have figured out. If anything, it’s an attempt to escape the scale of fuckability that you’re automatically placed on as a young woman. “Beauty is, in some way, boring,” the art historian Umberto Eco wrote in his book On Ugliness. “Ugliness is unpredictable and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.”

“God is still breathing. The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready the sails and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the Biblical character Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a blessing. If you’re curious, you will never leave the text without learning something new. If you’re persistent, you just might leave inspired.”