“Ugly” as an insult does more damage even it’s aimed at a person who was taught their only value in the whole world was how cute they look, regardless of gender. It just happens that the majority of people who were taught that from birth were women.

Nobody does beauty and the beast with an ugly chick and a cute guy without explicitly trying to undermine the ideal of beauty as intrinsically the sole function of a woman. Men get to be primarily funny, sweet, handy, clever, etc, with handsome as a potential secondary add-on; women generally need to be beautiful, with any other characteristics being the secondary add-on.

And we’re not taking about things you can choose, like hygiene and smoking status. Just looks. A woman who’s kind but ugly always turns into a beautiful swan at the end of the male fantasy story.

If you call someone an inbred thickhead it hits about the same. If you call someone a slimey booger it hits about the same. If you call someone a useless empty ghoul it hits about the same. But you gotta know visual insults like ugly have broader social context.

And to be clear. A HUGE amount of this problem is intensified and maintained by the billion dollar beauty industry, which LOVES insecurity. It’s working hard to monetize men too! But it’s still a work in progress there.