Beauty Standards and Social Media

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I’m almost certain that most people have heard of the “don’t judge challenge” (stylized as #DontJudgeChallenge) that surfaced around the time “beauty blogger Em Ford posted a viral video of herself removing makeup from her face, revealing her acne, and encouraging viewers to accept themselves rather than feel ashamed” (Linshi). Many more videos surfaced that showed the entire removal of makeup or the partial removal, with one side remaining intact. The purpose of the partial removal was to illustrate the difference between the “natural” beauty and the “made-up” beauty of the individual, both of which, however, were still aimed at accepting all forms of individuals as beautiful. Relating to Kathleen LeBesco’s Sexy/Beautiful/Fat, Em Ford's video worked to reposition what society thought of as beautiful, and place a stereotypically “ugly” quality within the context of beautiful, ultimately recoding the aspects of what can and cannot be considered beautiful. This movement was arguably started in order to blur the lines between “ugly” and “beautiful.” And it was successful—for a brief moment.

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Of course, when uploading something on the internet, especially something that makes an individual vulnerable, backlash is going to ensue. The YouTube trolls are going to crawl out from under their bridges and comment maliciously, or, in the era of multiple available social media platforms, short videos and photos will douse site pages with the equivalent of malicious comments. In the case of the #DontJudgeChallenge, users arguably used this as a parody of Ford's original video and took to the platform Vine to express their feelings toward the campaign, making videos that had three seconds dedicated to an “ugly” version of themselves and the other three seconds dedicated to illustrating their “beautiful” transformation. This directly juxtaposed Ford's message because the users took the stereotypical “ugly” traits that she worked to recode, and put them back into the context of being unattractive. The traits that I’m referring to include unibrows, acne, ratty hair, dark under-eye circles, freckles, and facial hair, among other things. I thought of the idea of exploring the #DontJudgeChallenge after considering the introduction to The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public by Susan Schweik. One part stuck out to me, where Schweik described the arrest of a man on the basis of the “ugly law” in the 1970s, which eventually went to court, and then “[required] the impossible: courtroom proof ‘that someone [was] ugly’” (6). How, in society today, do we define someone as ugly? Obviously, in reference to the aforementioned “ugly” traits, it’s defined externally versus internally and has been placed outside of dominant structures and beliefs relating to what constitutes as visually “acceptable.” The “ugly law” was just that—a law—that prevented individuals from standing on street corners if they were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” (qtd. in Schweik 1). I cannot help but wonder if this law is still in place; not through government structures but, instead, in the very belief system of dominant ideology.

Though we do not prevent “ugly” people from standing on the sidewalk or coming into public view, some individuals do still ridicule those who are “less fortunate,” as evident in the #DontJudgeChallenge backlash that picked up with great speed all over Vine. Going back to LeBesco’s article, she writes that a piece by Rosemary Bray “can be considered assimilating in that it concentrates on resigning fat women to the presence of a losing battle with food” (42). Though my analysis is not concerning fat women, this idea can be applied because the people who are parodying Ford's video with the #DontJudgeChallenge are assimilating “ugly” individuals by asserting that certain stereotypical traits are ugly, as well as by assuming that the individuals desire to be “pretty.” This also comes back to the question I asked before—what distinguishes the “ugly” from the “beautiful?”

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This thread of conversation can be likened to a dream within a dream—there are multiple layers to the intended message behind Ford's video. While it started off as a positive movement, then slowly segued into the perils of online trolls, there was arguably light at the end of the tunnel, when another group of people on the internet came forward and created a “beauty in all challenge” (stylized as #BeautyInAllChallenge) that worked to support the original motive behind what started the #DontJudgeChallenge. This was a form of backlash to the backlash, or, as I consider it, a resistance. As LeBesco writes, “a fat ‘liberationist’ celebrates fatness and tries to secure for the fat a positively valued experience of difference from the norm” (42). Much like the “fat liberationists,” the #BeautyInAllChallenge highlighted the positive aspects of Ford's original video, refuted the claims made by the parody videos on Vine, and recognized the beauty in all individuals, thus resisting dominant “norms” that calculate what is and isn’t beautiful. What got positioned as being a parody of “ugly” people by those who would stigmatize difference eventually regained its ground in the form of the #BeautyInAllChallenge. 

Ultimately, it’s a shame that what started as a positive movement shifted to a parody of “ugliness.” This illustrates how arguably easy it is to lose something to the dominant “norms” of society, but at the same time, the #BeautyInAllChallenge illustrates how easy it is to resist these norms and recode certain meanings. I still question the reasoning behind how something gets labeled as “ugly” versus “beautiful,” and why certain traits are considered more “hideous” than others. For now, I leave knowing that the internet is a powerful tool—both good and evil, salient yet easily negated.

sources: 

LeBesco, Kathleen. Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity. University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. 

Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York University Press, 2009. 

Linshi, Jack. "Here's How the 'Don't Judge Challenge' Totally Backfired." Time. Time, 7 July 2015. Web. 01. Nov. 2016.