When I was a teenager I knew three things to be true: Smoking cigarettes exponentially increased your cool factor, letting a boy touch your boobs was sure to bring deeper meaning to your relationship, and my thighs were visible from outerspace, possibly other galaxies.
A video in health class featuring gratuitous shots of a smoker’s lung ravaged by cancer was enough to convince me the risk wasn’t worth a lunch table upgrade in the cafeteria and the fact that Joe Mancino dumped me three days after I let him cop an under the sweater feel of my girls had me suspicious of the correlation between putting out and the formation of inseparable bonds — something I didn’t fully wise up to until college.
That last one, though, the bit about my thighs, that plagued me throughout adolescence. Wearing jeans through the sweltering Summers of the South seemed a small price to pay to cover my greatest insecurity. In private, I would bemoan my perceived flaw to my friends. I would flip through the television channels or the pages of Seventeen and, while it was a source of entertainment, it was also a parade of slender thighed women and a highlight of my inadequacy.
I was your average teenage girl of the 90s, rife with insecurity, and the eventual acceptance of the size and shape of my thighs took years to achieve. I imagine that the girl I was more than a decade ago is not much different than the teenagers of present day. Only, today’s 16-year-old girl has a smartphone in place of a pager and, for some reason unknown to me, shares her jeans with her boyfriend. But being uncomfortable with her body? That trend has persisted through the decades.
Self-loathing in some form is a teenage rite of passage, but it is the way in which the youth of the digital age are choosing to cope with it that is a cause for alarm. Facebook, Twitter, Formspring — the means by which today’s youth can solicit feedback and receive invited and often uninvited commentary on their physical appearance are numerous and growing. Perhaps the most disturbing is the recent trend of ‘Am I Ugly?’ videos.
They are popping up all over YouTube. Nervous-looking teenage girls stare into a camera and ask the users of the world wide web to be brutally honest about their appearance. The comments that follow would damage the most self-assured grown women. I can only imagine the emotional devastation experienced by the teen insecure enough to forgo the reassurance of her loved ones and seek an ‘honest’ opinion from strangers.
Teens are also taking to sites like Pinterest and Tumblr to create a place for ‘thinspiration,’ a term which describes images of often emaciated women used to motivate a person to lose weight. No longer are young people with disordered eating and low self-esteem isolated. They are now mere keystrokes away from a wealth of ‘pro-ana’ sites offering a sense of community, tips on purging, restricting, and ways to suppress their appetite.
Facebook and Tumblr have taken action against this movement, pledging to remove any content that promotes harmful behavior, while YouTube has yet to address the proliferation in ‘Am I Ugly‘ videos.
The internet is in many ways life-enriching. The click of a button enables us to expand our knowledge, book a trip, or connect with a friend a continent away. Unfortunately, for the first generation to ‘grow up online’ and those who parent them it has also become a dangerous way to magnify what a decade ago might have been a contained sense of self-doubt.
With the ways in which we access and use the internet expanding daily, how do we gain control of this disturbing trend?
Amber Doty is the managing editor of Go Mighty, as well as a slightly eccentric wife and mother of two. Her interests include eating meals she had no hand in preparing, making formerly professional business meetings awkward, and perfecting the emotional outburst. One day she hopes to travel to all seven continents, but for now she lives in North Carolina happily equidistant from the mountains and the beach. You can read more from Amber on her blog, The Daily Doty.
I just don’t even have words. I went to YouTube and made it through exactly half of one of these videos, and I just want to cry for them.
They are SO hard to watch. And, as someone who never believed my mother’s reassurance that I was pretty as a teenager, I could totally see myself doing something like this had I had access to a site like YouTube back then.
It breaks my heart and worries me for my children.
This is so sad and disturbing. It makes me want to forbid my daughter from the outside world and the internet FOREVER. Moving to a mountaintop and raising goats sounds good right about now.
The fuck? Another reason to keep my girls (6 & 8) the fuck away from the internet. Unfortunately, they learn so much from other kids at school. Right now, my 2 are still at the, OMG, how cute AM I?? – stage. I wish it would last forever.
This just hurts my heart. Just last night my husband and I were laughing at some of the “tech” in my teenage years- dial up internet, a SHARED email address for my ENTIRE family (oy. vey.) and no cell phones, just my very own land line and answering machine (that my parents unplugged after 10 pm). While these rules seem so archaeic today…part of me is glad that even with the limited technology we had my parents were so vigilant about how I used it.
I had my own landline, too!
I think vigilance is totally the key, but it gets harder and harder everyday to be vigilant. I feel like the ways in which kids and teens can get online are just blowing up.
It’s hard to keep track of.
I was thinking about how we all had the same email account until I went to college, haha! And thinking, in terms of my little guy, that this isn’t necessarily such a bad idea, still…..
Also, remember how the internet connection was interrupted whenever someone picked up the phone? Good times.
It reminds me a bit of ‘hot or not.com’ … my brother (almost 40) was on this site constantly (6-7 years ago) and it was extremely painful to witness. We lived together at the time and he would ask me 100 questions for every low rating he received. I finally told him to STOP or else! The need to feel attractive to your peers is pervasive at every age, but some of us feel compelled to garner approval from strangers and THAT is where we need to draw the line.
You make an excellent point. Some people, regardless of age, still have not learned that the only important opinion is their own. Your worth is not determined by what other people think of you, but what you think of yourself. Sadly though, many people have no self-worth and therefore feel the need to try to find it by soliciting the opinions of others.
It is done: I’m wrapping my girls up into a bubble.
Sheesh. Yesterday my 13 soon-to-be 14 year old put on her facebook status “like this if you think I’m pretty, share if you’ve ever been called ugly”. She said all her friends are sharing it and she shared if from someone else. Why are these girls obsessing about how they look? Well, sadly, because we (society) told them to. No matter how many times I tell my girls and my boys how great/wonderful/good looking/incredible they are, I can only say it so often. Even a hundred times a day wouldn’t compete with the literally thousands of messages they see hurled at them through television, movies, commercials and untold visuals on the internet. I just can’t match that kind of mental bombing that the media can. Do I cut out tv, movies, etc? Well, even that wouldn’t be realistic because they still go to school with hundreds of more kids who are getting the same messages and sharing them and there are still magazines in every grocery and corner store. It feels like they’re all being set up for failure and I am exhausted trying to battle against it.
When, oh when will they all realize that they are enough, just as they are??
That’s why I love places like this site. At least the conversation is happening. At least we are talking about it. And if we take it home and talk about it more with our kids, it’s just a step in the right direction.
My sister in law is 13. She has a tumblr “blog” which I came across this week. Wow. Half naked pics, depressing sayings, talk of suicide, comments from peers and interest from the WRONG boys or men. I passed on the link to my husband, MIL and FIL. If I ever find this from my kids they. Will be in counseling and I will bot back down until all issues are resolved. She is cutting for the scars to get attention and her MOM believes they’re cat scratches, she is anorexic and noone moniters her food. I eel like I should do more, but were not close and if her parents don’t takeit seriously how can I get her help?
Of all people, YouTube commenters? Those are the people whose comments no-one needs. They just want to make themselves feel better by hating everything and everyone.
This left me feeling sad, only because I remember so well reading Seventeen & Sugar (UK equivalent) and later, Cosmopolitan, and hating my “fat” unstylish self. And I feel so bad for doing that to myself as a teenager because I WAS NOT FAT nor was I ugly, I was just a normal girl.
At one point, I was actually able to recognize that reading those mags was not good for me and they always left me hating myself so badly that I wanted to curl up and die, and I stopped doing it altogether for some years. I’m proud of that.
I want to swear never ever to allow my little girl to do that to herself, subject herself to that kind of commenting and let her body image and confidence be destroyed by ANYONE, not YouTube viewers, not magazines. If only I knew how to do that.
Oh my God. Thank God there wasn’t YouTube when I was that age. I may have done it. At 33 I’m still trying to undo years of damage just from regular teasing. This? It would have put me right under. For sure.
I, too, am boggled by the whole androgynous jeans wearing thing.
That aside, had we had this kind of techonology when I was a kid, I would never have done anything like this. I already hated myself enough. I heard enough comments about my body and my looks the old fashioned way. I didn’t need to read those kinds of comments from people online.
My friend monitors her daughter’s internet use, cell phone use, etc. If she wants to update her status, she has to check with her mom first. Once upon a time, I thought this was a little excessive, but now I wish more parents monitored their kids’ social networking like this and took the opportunity to explain why they were doing so. If my friend doesn’t approve of something, she makes sure her daughter understands why such a comment would be hurtful or offensive to someone.
My twin daughters have been raised without cable Tv.No Internet unless for school purposes until they were 16 and when they got a facebook account it was mandatory that I was their friend. They did not own a cell phone until they were 17. We also all use one computer in the family room so we can all see what is going on. Yes they complained but not as much as you would think. I believe that all questions they have or problems they encounter should be brought to me and we figure it out together. Not by asking random crazy people on the Internet. They are 18 now…. very social, responsible, and have great self esteem. Don’t want to point fingers but too many parents use technology as a babysitter instead of doing the work.
I can’t even bring myself to watch this. It breaks my heart to know that this is something that people do, and it breaks my heart that people would be so mean to someone who is this vulnerable. I’m starting to have a really intense aversion to the internet in general – maybe I’m becoming too sensitive, I don’t know. But I find that I’m limiting myself to visiting only a few websites (this being one
that I find thought-provoking, uplifting, or fun, and avoiding everything else because I can’t stand how viscous everything has gotten. And although I’ve taught my little guy how to navigate his way to Netflix Just for Kids section, I’m wary of teaching him anything else.
vicious, not viscous. ARGH!
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