"The 'Am I Pretty?' YouTube Trend Makes Me Physically Nauseous"
By Amy Shearn, REDBOOK.
The "Am I Pretty?" video trend makes me physically nauseous, but it took me a while to put my finger on why exactly. For one thing, these girls talk about wanting to know if they are pretty as if asking whether or not they have something in their teeth. "Here are some photos," one says. "Can you tell me in the comments if I'm pretty or not?" She doesn't ask, "Do you think I'm pretty?" which is an equally pointless but altogether different question. No, she asks, "Am I pretty?" the same matter-of-fact way in which you might ask, "Is it snowing?"--as if it were a question with an objective answer.
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How does this happen? Has it never occurred to these girls that this might be a subjective question, that there is in fact no authority on the matter-not the popular kids at school, and certainly not some stranger on YouTube. Or even that beauty isn't really all that matters?
On the Huffington Post, Elizabeth Perle writes, "Maybe what the girls in these YouTube videos are saying isn't: I don't feel pretty. Maybe it's actually: I feel completely powerless when it comes to my sexuality." And that's the kicker about these videos, isn't it? These kids live in a world saturated with hyper-sexualized images of very young girls, and they are being asked to navigate the male gaze, their own desires, the fact that they are still kids, with very little guidance or context.
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I am not yet the mother of an adolescent girl, but in about eight years I will be (yes, I experienced a cold chill writing that). Now, set aside for a moment the fact that I will never allow my children any unsupervised time with a web cam. I know, I know, I also said I would never feed them nuggets or let them watch cartoons, and look at them now. But this time I mean it. In the strange case that my vigilance should slip, I hope to Peg & Cat that my daughter will have whatever stuff a person needs to not give a flying f*ck whether or not a bunch of strangers on the Internet, or the people at her school for that matter, think she's pretty.
How do you explain to a young girl that the idea that her entire value hinges on her beauty and sexual desirability is just meant to hold her back in life? Maybe I'll print out what Naomi Wolf writes in The Beauty Myth and paste it to the computer as a reminder: "The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us." A bit old-fashioned of me, I know, but if there's anything I want to figure out how to teach my daughter, it's that she is the one who has authority over her own body, beauty, and life.
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At least I can try. And maybe if she ever finds herself alone with a webcam, she will take the opportunity to do some long division in her head, rattle off every member of the UN, or translate some poetry into Slovenian. Then, she'll cock her head at the camera and inquire, "Am I smart? Or am I a genius?"
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