u/vox

Hi Reddit, I’m Constance Grady, a senior correspondent at Vox! You may have read my piece about how Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch taught a generation of young people what was desirable, or why Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a million times edgier than Emerald Fennell’s. But my latest reporting looks at how memoirists are pushing back against an alarming moment that we’re in — a moment of cultural fascination with looksmaxxers. 

That too-online community, made up mostly of men who claim to do things like hit themselves in the face with hammers for a stronger jawline and snort meth for leaner bodies, has become the object of shocked trend pieces and news coverage. 

Looksmaxxers are fascinating in part because their motivations are so understandable. They have observed the simple fact that in our culture, life is easier for people who are beautiful, and they have made their plans accordingly, self-mutilation and hard drugs and all. The calculus feels both horrifying and comprehensible, which is why I found it so startling and exciting to find people moving in the other direction in the form of two new memoirs by authors who both call themselves ugly and have no plans to change their appearances. 

“I am an ugly woman,” begins journalist Stephanie Fairyington in Ugly, forthcoming in May. “At fourteen I learned fourteen times over that I’m ugly,” writes the poet and artist Moshtari Hilal in Ugliness, published last year.

To call someone ugly feels so malicious, so aggressive. But these memoirists and the looksmaxxers appear to agree on at least one thing: People really are treated badly by the world if they are not as conventionally attractive as their peers. 

To deny someone the language to name their own reality feels perverse. And yet ugly feels like such a cruel word. The provocative and never-quite-answered question of these memoirs is whether turning it on yourself can become an act of self-love. 

What do you think? Should we be embracing ugly?

Proof: https://bsky.app/profile/constancegrady.bsky.social/post/3mijxemnqds2r

Gift link: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/482373/ugliness-moshtari-hilal-ugly-stephanie-fairyington?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IkN1RXE2NGdhaEciLCJwIjoiL3RoZS1oaWdobGlnaHQvNDgyMzczL3VnbGluZXNzLW1vc2h0YXJpLWhpbGFsLXVnbHktc3RlcGhhbmllLWZhaXJ5aW5ndG9uIiwiZXhwIjoxNzc2NDQwMjM5LCJpYXQiOjE3NzUyMzA2Mzl9.beuswAg77Rpu8upIMajH-rPqZvfpt73TDBhz4nQaHWY&utm_medium=gift-link

EDIT: This AMA is now closed. Thank you to everyone for your thoughtful questions! You can read more from our talented reporters anytime at Vox.com. 💛

Hi Reddit! I’m Marina Bolotnikova, a senior reporter at Vox. Maybe you’ve read my piece on the debate over whether fish feel pain or this one on the life of a dairy cow. Most recently, I wrote a story about the giant loophole that lets Big Dairy keep baby cows in solitary confinement. 

In my work, I find that lots of people have lots of basic questions about how our food system works, but often don’t know where to begin or just get overwhelmed by the sheer complexity. This is particularly the case for the meat and dairy industries, which use animals in ways that can be very nonintuitive to many people who grew up with a storybook image of animal farming. I think the treatment of the billions of animals raised for food in the United States has enormous moral salience, so I try to make that subject clear and vivid for our readers. 

In this latest story, I wanted to explain a core dimension of dairy farming that is surprisingly little-known, both among the general public and even among the advocates who fight for better treatment of farmed animals: What happens to all the baby cows that are born in the dairy industry?  

The first thing to understand about dairy production is that it revolves around continuous reproduction, since cows, like all mammals, must give birth in order to lactate. So on dairy farms across the country, babies are constantly being born. Perhaps you've already heard of veal, or the meat of male calves born to dairy cows, which animal advocates long ago successfully branded as a symbol of cruelty. In the 2000s and 2010s, a wave of "cage-free" laws in states across the country banned some of the worst forms of extreme confinement of animals on factory farms — including veal crates, tiny crates that allow calves little room for movement. Veal has since cratered in popularity in the US, and now amounts to a rounding error in the nation's overall meat consumption. But the caging of newborn calves has not gone away, because the laws banning veal crates have not extended any protection to calves that are not raised for veal. 

Today, around 9 million calves are born every year in US dairy farms. Many of the females will eventually become dairy cows themselves, while the males — and some females, too — are raised and slaughtered for beef; vanishingly few of them are slaughtered for veal. And increasingly, these calves are being shipped off from the dairy farms on which they’re born, at not more than a few days old, to be raised on “calf ranches.” These specialized facilities are often enormous mega-farms in their own right; my story focuses on an investigation into conditions at Grimmius Cattle Company, located in California’s Central Valley, America’s top milk-producing region. Grimmius is the largest calf raiser in California, confining close to 200,000 calves at any given time, according to state data. 

Each of the newborn calves shipped to Grimmius and similar calf ranches is confined alone in a tiny stall, about one-tenth the size of a typical parking spot, where they are deprived of physical and social stimulation. California’s Proposition 12, one of the strongest and most celebrated animal welfare laws in the world, requires veal calves to each be allotted at least 43 square feet, but virtually none of the calves in the state are raised for veal. Instead, they are legally allowed to be raised in 13-square-foot stalls where they have just enough room to lie down, stand up, and usually to turn around, but do nothing else. 

Confining vulnerable, highly social baby cows in this manner is a practice that, as one of my sources put it, many members of the public believe they’d already voted to ban. But it’s very much still standard practice in the dairy industry and is more pervasive than almost anyone realizes. 

This is a big, complex story that brings together my many years of accumulated knowledge of animal agriculture — so, AMA! 

Proof: https://x.com/mbolotnikova/status/2031026798226469012

Story gift link: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/480529/calf-ranches-grimmius-investigation-dairy-confinement?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IlZkQkpNRW1vTm4iLCJwIjoiL3RoZS1oaWdobGlnaHQvNDgwNTI5L2NhbGYtcmFuY2hlcy1ncmltbWl1cy1pbnZlc3RpZ2F0aW9uLWRhaXJ5LWNvbmZpbmVtZW50IiwiZXhwIjoxNzczOTI1NzUwLCJpYXQiOjE3NzI3MTYxNTF9.kq7fNqPLF6NjDlpHx_rLF2l4Ker0xRyDTG2TGRWO-m8&utm_medium=gift-link