Iโm really pissed off by PSHE classes at my school. These are a compulsory waste of my time. According to one of the internal documents I managed to photograph while a teacherโs back was turned:
Personal, social and health education (PSHE) is the traditional subject title for all aspects of personal development learning, including relationships, health and sex education and citizenship education. Following the DfE announcement (March 2017) that primary relationships and health education and secondary relationships, sex and health education is now statutory, schools must ensure that their policies and programmes comply with the statutory guidance published in February โฆ.
The prescription sounds bad enough. Delivery is worse. Mostly, classes are supervised by bored supply teachers, obviously looking at the clock. Classes then are just about tolerable, as I can get on with something more important. Every so often, though, one of the full-timers takes a class. Thatโs when those two periods on Friday morning become a drag on my will to live. We are supposed to use the time to express ourselves. The truth is that the time is used for teaching us to comply with whatever falsehoods are presently fashionable with the BBC and Guardian.
Still worse is the written work. The idea is that Iโm supposed to have eighty minutes of my life burned off every week in class, and then to burn off a couple of hours more every month on typing out some endorsement of the propaganda Iโve been fed. Well, here is something I wrote last week to one of the more stupid essay titles I’ve been given. Sadly, or perhaps luckily, I showed it to Dr Gabb in one of our Greek lessons. He read the first paragraph, and threatened to drive up and grass me to my parents it I wouldn’t promise not to submit. Though too old, he assured me, to be done over by the social workers, I was still subject to the safeguarding pigs. I might, if someone took sufficient offence, find myself subject to the real pigs.
So, here it is, exclusive to the Libertarian Alliance, though with the more inflammatory passages cut out by Mr Bickley on Dr Gabb’s instruction.
My Advice to the Year Elevens
Even if the Gods werenโt jealous, boasting is in bad taste. I accept that I may suffer some horribly disfiguring accident tomorrow, or I may be struck down by an illness that leaves me a pathetic cripple. This being said, people at school constantly notice how good-looking I am. They look at me as I go past. Some openly admire. Some do more than admireโthough may then learn what bodily force I can apply to those whose attentions I do not welcome. Others claim to mock. Those who mock, I have no doubt, use mockery to cover envy.
And what reason havenโt they to envy? The other boys in my year seem, from their earliest age, to have been fed a diet of chips and white bread covered over with margarine. Now they have greater choice in what to put into their mouths, they supplement these with beer and pizzas. The results, if you look at their growing paunches and spotty complexions, are plain. Nor are they just fat and spotty. Many of them smell. This is partly a result of not washing enough, partly the remains of poor toilet training. Mostly, though, it’s a further consequence of the crap they eat. I will stay outside the forbidden zone of noting what kind of people, eating what kinds of food, are most offensive in this regard. I will only say that I am required to attend every weekday at a place filled with the fat, with the spotty, with the smelly. In short, I am surrounded by ugliness.
Now, what is my objection to ugliness? I might say that it’s depressing. This school is bad enough already. Take away anyone else remotely worth looking at, and catching that bus every morning is a right pain. However, I should attempt a more formal argument. This is that, so long as the genetics are not in veto, everyone should think himself under an obligation of beauty. This obligation is a craft, something to be learned with serious intent and serious effort. Genetics are of course important. The basics of beauty are a gift of nature. But nature alone will give at best a transient prettinessโsomething soon burned away by habits of of a vicious life. Beauty in the real senseโof poise, of symmetry, of an overall appearance from which no one turns willingly awayโis an effect of deliberate effort. It’s an effort of exercise, or diet, of grooming, of dress or undress. I wonโt go so far as the Greeks, with their notion of the ฮบฮฑฮปแฝธฯ ฮบแผฮณฮฑฮธฯฯโthe close identification of beauty with moral goodness: I suspect I am not particularly good by any definitionโbut I will say that looking good is a sign of inner balance. Itโs a marker of self-respect and discipline. Anyone can put on pretty clothes. Given the right help, anyone can look impressive in them. But thatโs an achievement of money. What money canโt buy is the shape of yourself as the best possible version of what you can be. That doesnโt tell people what you have: it tells them what you are.
And thatโs why I find it so hard to tolerate those who do nothing to improve their appearance. Unavoidable ugliness is something to be pitied and tolerated, but the deliberate ugliness of certain people in this school deserves only contempt. The fat, the unkempt, those who let their body hair sprout unchecked, the ones who ignore their skin tone and let their complexions become blotchy or blemishedโthese are people who have abandoned even the most basic principles of self-care. They have no excuse. They could do something about it, but they choose not to, and that choice is disgusting. It is disgusting, and it has wider consequences.
Again, I wonโt insist on ฮบฮฑฮปแฝธฯ ฮบแผฮณฮฑฮธฯฯ. But I will make the negative insistenceโthere is an undeniable correlation between ugliness of form and ugliness of substance. Those who corrupt their bodies also corrupt their minds. To be more specific, the uglier someone is, the more likely he is to believe ruling class lies. Tell me that that beauty isnโt real, that itโs a social construct, that aiming for it is oppressive, that accepting mediocrity is somehow noble: say this, and show at once without wasting your breath that you never question the legitimacy of our rulers, that you willingly comply with whatever malicious nonsense they dictate, whether itโs hatred of our people and history, or belief in the myth of COVID-19 as an apocalyptic plague, or the blind insistence on vaccine safety despite mounting evidence of harm, or the fraudulent Green propaganda that demands we embrace poverty and self-denial in the name of โsaving the planet.โ Iโll also take it as given that you donโt approve of periodic sentence structure.
The rejection of beauty is not an act of independence but of submission. It is not defiance of the System, but abasement before it. Just as in Old China, the inferior showed their inferiority by making themselves ugly, so in Modern Britain, the willing slaves of the order imposed on us show their own insignificance with every unkempt hair, every excess pound of flesh, every ill-fitting and slovenly garment they wear. They are the perfect subjects of a corrupt and manipulative eliteโbecause only the ugly and weak-willed can be convinced to embrace their own degradation.
So here is my answer to the predictably weak question I have been set. Here is my advice to those who are younger than I amโturn back from the path on which I have no doubt you are already started. Do not allow yourself to grow into a copy of the other youths in this school, or in this post-industrial dump of a town. Instead, begin by stripping yourself naked. Look in the mirror. Tell yourself that whatever grotesque parody of humanity you see isnโt the real you. Form an image of what the real you looks like. Write it down and keep it close. Then begin work to achieve it. Cut out carbohydrates. Swim. Join a gymnasium, and go there. Dump anyone who doesnโt approve. Make new friends. Watch inspirational videos on social media. Buy new clothes. Learn the correct use of a razor, and explore its many alternatives. On your journey, learn to switch off the television news. Learn that everything said by someone in authority is a lie, or a minor truth uttered in support of some greater lie. Learn Greek. As soon as you are able, get out of the North.
Do these things, and you will respect yourself. Do them, and you may in time become as easy on the eye as I know that I am.
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[…] Keith Preston on March 23, 2025 • ( Leave a comment ) 23 March, 2025 Bryan […]
It is hard to express the mix of horror and weary disbelief that washed over me as I read โYour Duty to Be Beautifulโโa piece so riddled with aesthetic fascism and philosophical sleaze that it could have been cribbed from a Mussolini youth camp if not for its self-conscious modern polish. That it was penned by a schoolboyโyes, a schoolboy, allegedly educated in the British state systemโis more than scandalous. It is proof that something has gone terribly, irreversibly wrong in our civic institutions.
Let us start with the core message: that there exists a โdutyโโnot an aspiration, not a private desire, but a dutyโto be beautiful. And by beautiful, the author does not mean kind, or creative, or emotionally radiant. No, he means the rigid, muscle-bound, marble-chiselled ideal of male physicality lifted wholesale from Greco-Roman statuary and filtered through adolescent Nietzschean fantasy.
He means the male bodyโhairless, symmetrical, lean, and crushingly conventional. And he has the gall, the absolute gall, to present this as moral truth. He calls it order. He calls it virtue. He calls it freedom.
Let me be abundantly clear: this is not a work of political commentary. It is not a brave opinion piece. It is a barely disguised adolescent crush on a body type, elevated into a universal law. The author is not interested in liberty. He is not interested in human dignity. He is interested in pectorals. He is interested in thighs. He is interestedโno, obsessedโwith the male form as a kind of ideological sculpture, a fascistic icon of perfection to be enforced, adored, and, one suspects, worshipped.
Nowhere in this textโnot onceโdoes he mention the female body. Not in admiration, not in critique, not even in passing. Women, apparently, do not exist in the merciless golden ratio of his thought. He is too busy casting longing glances at Antinous and Doryphoros to notice that half the human race lives outside the gymnasium. The article is so soaked in homoerotic subtext it practically drips. And yet, rather than coming out as the queered aesthete he plainly wants to be, he insists on dressing his lust in jackboots and moralism.
What makes this truly despicable, however, is not the subtext (which I would otherwise celebrate, were it not buried under layers of proto-fascist sanctimony), but the betrayal of everything he has supposedly been taught. This is a child of the state school system. He has been given accessโat public expense!โto an education grounded in equality, inclusion, mutual respect. He has no excuse.
The workshops, the assemblies, the inclusive reading lists, the endless hours teachers have spent trying to unwind the damage done by centuries of beauty-as-dominanceโand still, here he is, scrawling swastikas in the margins of The Picture of Dorian Gray. What kind of arrogance does it take to reject so completely the shared values of oneโs community? And to do so not with curiosity or self-doubt, but with smug teenage certitude, as if Ciceroโs barber had whispered the secrets of civilisation into his ear?
He dresses it all up in classical allusions, of courseโhow original. A schoolboy with a copy of Xenophon and a desperate need to be seen as mature. But Plato is not your alibi, my dear. Aesthetics without compassion is not philosophy; it is tyranny. And tyranny draped in abs gives us not Athens, but Leni Riefenstahl.
Let me ask the obvious: who is this โdutyโ for? Who decides what beauty is? Who enforces it? What happens to those who fall short? The fat, the disabled, the ageing, the gender-nonconforming, the survivors of trauma? Where do they go in your perfect city of glistening torsos?
Ah, but of courseโhe doesnโt care. His city has no use for the imperfect. They clutter the view. They ruin the symmetry. They must be ignored, erased, or forced into silence with shame.
I am sick to death of boys like thisโclever enough to sound dangerous, cowardly enough to pretend theyโre joking, and incapable of seeing that the world they pine for was always a nightmare for those not born into its narrow forms. I am sick of watching the same old statues hauled out as if they absolve you from basic decency. And I am particularly sick of being told, again and again, that beauty is some transcendent value when all it really means, in your mouth, is compliance with a regime of visual control.
You are not Marcus Aurelius. You are not a philosopher-king. You are a sixth-former with an internet connection and a closet full of aesthetic longings youโre too afraid to name.
Enough. Enough of this fascist cosplay masquerading as moral clarity. Enough of this cult of surface. Enough of boys in uniform telling the rest of us how to look, how to act, how to be. We are building something betterโmore diverse, more tender, more just. And we are not obliged to look beautiful while doing it.
Not to you. Not to anyone.
You haven’t seen it all, I assure you. As Director of Communications, Bryan Mercadente also sends out a weekly newsletter in which he sets out a rigorous physical training programme that would put the SAS to shame. It’s all in aid of the forthcoming paramilitary take-over by the man they call The Doctor, better known as Dr. Sean Gabb, chief of staff of the Provisional Army Plenary of the English National-Libertarian Revolutionary Command Council.
You will find that Mr Pozeram’s grammar is much too correct – by American standards – for him to be a frenzied serial killer. We check these things very stringently.
Oh, sweetheart. Sit downโif your perfectly symmetrical thighs will allow you. Because we need to talk.
I just read โYour Duty to Be Beautifulโ, and Iโve got gravy stains on my copy, because I was enjoying a late breakfast while browsing the fascist corner of the internet again. But nothing prepared me for this: a declaration, from a child who probably shaves once a fortnight, that people like me have a moral duty to look like something off a Roman coin.
Let me be clear, Bryan: I weigh 32 stone. Thatโs 448 pounds, give or take a celebratory scone. And Iโm glorious. I am a walking act of rebellion against the clean, tight, cold little world youโre trying to buildโwhere men are supposed to look like Doric columns and everyone else is supposed to disappear. I take up space. I bend chairs. I order two desserts and make eye contact. And your little rant? It only made me hungry.
You talk about beauty as if itโs virtue. You want the body to be a temple, yes? Well mine is a cathedral of flesh, with echoes, mystery, and room enough for a choir. And youโpoor boyโyouโre still lighting incense at the altar of repression, clutching your copy of Plato for Fascists, and muttering about order and symmetry while nervously eyeing your own waistline.
Letโs call this what it is: a young man whoโs terrified of softness. Terrified of difference. Terrified, frankly, of fat. Fatness, after all, breaks the spell. It reminds you that bodies are not machines built to be admired but messy, complicated, joyful things. My body is not an affront to civilisation. It is a rebuke to your fantasy of it.
Iโve seen your kind beforeโstarving yourselves into control, counting almonds, taking cold showers, quoting Marcus Aurelius like he was your personal trainer. And always the same refrain: โTo be beautiful is to be virtuous.โ No. To be beautiful is to be wanted by people like you. And that is a very small ambition indeed.
Not once in your essay do you mention women. Not once do you mention queerness, difference, disability, softness, fragility, or joy. Instead, you recite a love letter to male musculature, as if describing a sculpture youโd very much like toโwell, letโs leave that to the imagination, shall we?
Itโs not beauty you love. Itโs control. And it shows. You want men to be chiselled, hard, inexpressive. You want them to be order incarnate, because chaos frightens you. But bodies are chaos. Desire is chaos. And Iโm here, waddling into your marble mausoleum of thought, dropping crumbs and laughing.
I will never fit into your world. Thatโs not an accident. Thatโs the point. I am the contradiction you canโt solve. I am the silhouette that ruins your symmetry. I am the reminder that beauty is not a duty. It is a marketing scheme, a weapon, a cage.
You tell us that we have a duty to be beautiful. I tell you that you have a duty to sit with that discomfortโthe discomfort of seeing someone like me and realising I donโt care what you think. Iโm not here to be improved. Iโm not here to be corrected. I am not here to be made into anything. I already am.
So go back to your mirror, flex your virtue, suck in your belly, and tell yourself youโre saving civilisation one bench press at a time. Meanwhile, Iโll be at the pub, ordering chips, living fully in the only body Iโve gotโand loving every inch of it.
Because I may weigh 32 stone, but your soul is lighter than air.
And that, darling, is the real problem.
Iโve read โYour Duty to Be Beautifulโ three times now. Iโve read it between sets at the gym, on my phone in the changing room, and once, aloud, to my own reflectionโbecause for the first time in years, someone had the courage to say what Iโve been trying, awkwardly and half-formed, to believe: that the body matters. That effort matters. That how we present ourselves to the worldโespecially as menโis not something to be shrugged off with irony or hidden under layers of shame.
Bryanโs article didnโt make me feel oppressed. It made me feel seen. It didnโt bully me. It challenged me. And unlike the reactions itโs provokedโhysterical, defensive, drenched in adolescent irony or performative rageโhis essay actually treated the reader like a moral agent, not a victim.
The response from the โ32-stone and proudโ contingent was particularly revealing. It wasnโt an argument. It was a tantrum. And a smug one at that. I donโt say that out of crueltyโIโve spent most of my life avoiding mirrors and gymnasiums, and I know what it is to feel scorned, judged, dismissed. But I also know that comfort and pride are not the same thing. One is necessary. The other is dangerous when weaponised against any standard at all.
And then there was the furious feminist critique, all boot-stamping-on-a-face and state-education-has-failed. The sort of prose thatโs written more in anger than in comprehension, as though it were an intolerable act of aggression that a young man might prefer Achilles to Lizzo, or a six-pack to radical softness.
But hereโs the truth: a lot of us do feel ugly. A lot of us are lost. And in a world where beauty is either commodified or declared irrelevant, where every moral judgement is dismissed as fascist and every effort to rise above mediocrity is mocked as toxic, it was genuinely moving to read something that took virtueโand yes, formโseriously.
Since reading Bryanโs piece, Iโve added twenty minutes of incline walking to the end of my gym sessions. Iโve started shaving more regularly. I cut my nails properly. Not because I want to be adored, or because Iโve swallowed some Nietzschean Kool-Aid, but because I want to feel that my body reflects the discipline Iโm trying to cultivate in other parts of my life.
This is the opposite of fascism. Itโs a quiet, personal commitment to order, effort, and self-respect. No one is being marched into a bootcamp. No one is being weighed at the gates of virtue. But Bryan is right to say that uglinessโwhen it is chosen, when it is celebrated, when it is used as a cudgel against aspirationโis not neutral. It is a retreat.
So Iโll say it plainly: thank you, Bryan. Youโve given voice to something that needed saying. Youโve reminded us that the pursuit of beautyโespecially male beautyโis not shameful or oppressive. It is difficult. And it is worth it.
If that makes me a heretic in the eyes of the body-positivity church or a foot-soldier of aesthetic reaction, so be it.
Iโll see you in the gym.
Chris
And worth remembering that being beautiful (or at least not unpleasant to the eye) is kind as you only look at yourself, hopefully, for a few seconds of the day. Other people have to spend much longer and so you are making their life more pleasant.
[…] as he will gladly remind you, one of the best-looking sixteen-year-olds alive. His recent essay, Your Duty to be Beautifulโ, is wholly in character: part sermon, part cultural critique, and in both parts philosophical […]
You have my deepest sympathies. As an indolent fat slob, I am in favour of fat shaming and have been since I saw a picture of Bernard Manning with his clothes. off
As for PSHE – the only thing I find more sickening than this PC waste of time and space is the Conservatives failing to do anything about it. I suppose you have to go along to get along , as they believe in your right to their opinions! I’d like to meet you and your friends some day – I’m 66 and live in London.
I’ve also known Sean for many years.
Why is Bryan so keen on a smooth face? It doesn’t seem to follow from the thrust of his argument. If I can prove to Bryan that I could bench his bodyweight while striding up a nearby mountain…. can I keep my beard?!
[…] would be difficult to imagine a piece like Bryan Mercadenteโs Your Duty to Be Beautiful appearing anywhere in the United Statesโand impossible to imagine it being published by any […]
Narcissistic, moi? lol Remember,
Socrates said ‘give me the beauty of the inner man’. Think about it. Laurence Hughes.