'There’s A YouTube trend among teenage girls called “Pretty Or Ugly,” and it’s hugely troubling
Almost half a million girls have uploaded videos onto YouTube, inviting internet trolls to validate their appearances
That’s almost half a million girls between the ages of 9 and 14 posting videos online asking strangers to assess whether they’re pretty or ugly
The weird thing is, the girls uploading these videos aren’t stupid.
They’re part of an internet-savvy generation. They’ve seen the other videos. They know that uploading their own and putting themselves up for scrutiny will invite brutal criticism from internet trolls.
And yet they do it anyway
Louise Orwin, a 26-year-old artist from London, decided to explore this disturbing phenomenon
“For the last couple of years I’ve been looking at how teenage girls use social media,” Orwin said. “That’s how I came across a Tumblr video of a young girl asking strangers how attractive she was. She was so earnest. I found that really interesting; the way she was talking about something so dark but expressing it so innocently.”
It didn’t take long for Orwin to find Reddit threads, Yahoo! Answers boards, and over 40 pages of YouTube videos, dedicated same question.
“I’m an artist and I’m a feminist,” Orwin explained. “I thought: I’ve got to do something.”
So Orwin created three teenage alter egos and uploaded two-minute videos of each of them to YouTube.
All three asked the same question: Am I pretty or ugly?
“They were called Becky, Baby, and Amanda,” Orwin told BuzzFeed. “Becky was your standard rock chick, wearing heavy eye makeup and playing an emo soundtrack in the background. Baby was a Britney Spears wannabe. And Amanda was me, without makeyup, in a wig, wearing glasses.”
In total, the three videos received 4,000 comments. Baby, “the most conventionally good looking of the characters,” received the most the most attention, but it was the internet’s reaction to Becky that shocked Louise. “About a month after I posted it, there was a real spike in interest,” she said'
..the rest of the story/Youtube vids and some of the comments they have attracted...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/tabathalegge...pretty-or-ugly