Soapbox Moment

I don’t write these things often, mostly because I don't often find myself this appalled. There are times that I have to jump up on my soapbox though, and this is absolutely one of them. 

The #uglygirlsarenotallowed tag on Twitter is utterly disgusting. I’m not going to insult or swear at the people using the tag either, because where would that get me?

Honestly, with the type of visually focused society that we spend millions of dollars following, this doesn’t surprise me at all. We buy magazines that wear headlines about who has the most cellulite, and articles that demean or even pity the poor soul with a BMI higher than 3. The same magazines then turn around and write articles about who is too skinny, just to narrow the pool of acceptable body types to only the most impossibly perfect varieties. Worse, even the pretty ones are subject to being photoshopped beyond recognition, because even perfect isn’t perfect enough. 

This hashtag is so inflammatory not just because it’s spawning the kind of misogynistic drivel that has reduced people, not just women, to surgically altering their bodies and injecting toxins into their skin. It’s so infuriating because it says that this kind of defamation and negativity is a commodity for public consumption. You just have to log into a website to publicly humiliate and demean those that society don’t label “pretty”, and you’ll get a pat on the back because you’re just following what is trendy. We have now literally made public humiliation and defamation trendy. 

You know what I think? I think that:

#uglygirlsarenotallowed to be subject to this kind of drivel.

#uglygirlsarenotallowed to be called ugly, because “ugly” is not skin deep. Ugly is the kind of person who starts a hashtag like this. 

#uglygirlsarenotallowed to be told what they can and can’t do based on the fact that someone else had deemed them “ugly”. 

#uglygirlsarenotallowed to consider themselves part of this tag. They should look for the #youarebeautiful tag.

Better yet, we can outlaw the words “pretty” and “ugly”. We can deem them no longer applicable to someone, because worth is not decided by what you look like. And if someone ever asks me if they are pretty, I will look them in the face and say no. 

I’ll say that they are not pretty. I’ll say that they are pretty intelligent. They are pretty amazing. They are pretty capable. But they are not just pretty.