Pretty Ugly

A while back, there was a trend going around Youtube.  Teenage girls would make a video of themselves asking anyone who watched it to comment, saying whether they are ugly or pretty, and to rate them on a scale of 1-10. The comments ranged from flat-out mean, to creepy, to some earnestly offering advice.






Louise Orwin first saw this trend when she was on Tumblr and found the "thinspiration" tag. In this tag were thousands of pictures of slim women, ranging from naturally slim to practically emaciated, that are shared as inspiration for teenage girls trying to lose weight. "I got obsessed with the way these teenage girls were using Tumblr. I felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole." She thought it was strange, saying "when I was a teenager, I was writing in a diary. Today teenagers are posting onto Tumblr." During this course of research she saw one of the "pretty or ugly" videos pop up. " I saw a really young girl pouting and posing in front of the camera. Her language was something that struck me. It was really teenage language; she was talking about how boys at school were picking on her but there was one guy who fancied her and she didn't know why boys didn't like her," Orwin explained. "I was horrified by it. Then you look at the comments below, they were horrific...I couldn't imagine myself posting a video like that, because I would have thought that she was opening herself up to a huge amount of criticism."

So as an experiment, Orwin created three teenage alter-egos: Becky, an emo girl, Amanda, a nerdy girl, and Baby, your average conventionally attractive popular girl, and posted a video as each of them. Immediately, she received floods of responses. "I got torrents of abuse. People were telling me to fuck of and die." Becky especially was targeted, with 200 comments in a week, nearly all of which were vicious. "I woke up and read all of this abuse and I really felt it in my stomach. I had to remind myself that it's not me, it's the character. Meanwhile, for her character Baby, she received hundreds of private messages, most of which from men, asking her to post more videos of herself or contact them directly despite the fact that Baby was supposed to be only 15 years old. Upon noticing this, she sat down and analyzed the comments and messages she received on her videos, finding that 70 percent of the feedback was from men, and most of the commenters were under 18.

One commenter that stood out in Orwin's mind was a user named RookhKshatriya, who wrote "you're a 4, and without glasses you are a 5". Upon looking at his channel, she discovered that he is actually a London-based academic who works in education and labels himself an "anti-feminist", making videos stating that the "Anglo-American brand of feminism that emerged in the 60s is has an ulterior misandrist agenda'. (View his hideous blog, Anglobitch, here.) "He takes himself very seriously, but he's going on Youtube and rating 15-year-old girls," says Orwin. 

Another thing that was intriguing to Orwin was the fact that these videos were sometimes as much about being on top of a trend as asking the question. "Part of the reason that a lot of them post the videos is yes, they want to know whether they are pretty, but they also see the trend going round and it's just another subject to make a video on. Which is strange."

Orwin now runs a show, Pretty Ugly, following the trail of her research, studying the relationships Becky, Amanda, and Baby have with the commenters and the people that messaged them. "Conversations with trolls, friendships...it also covers all the creepy side of it."

Interestingly, the show begins with her asking the audience the central question: do they think she is pretty or ugly. "I need to show how irrelevant that question should be.  Would you go up to a person on the street and ask them that? I am trying to make this world into a live, face-to-face world." She is struck by the way digital media is changing the way we perceive ourselves and each other, wondering what it will mean for feminism in the future.  She says she remembers coming to a certain age when we people were starting to talk about the pressure of media, and how it represents beauty. "Nw if you look on Tumblr, Youtube, Twitter, it's not the media, but the teenage girls themselves perpetuating this myth. They're resharing these images, reblogging. There's always going to be peer pressure, but I think social media makes these issues worse." But the issue isn't about removing the social media entirely. "It's about changing attitudes toward things and teaching girls to take responsibility for themselves online."

Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to go unfollow all of the beauty boards I have been following on Pinterest.