4

AM I PRETTY OR UGLY?

Being “Authentic” Online

“Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself.”

—COCO CHANEL

“All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren’t.”

—MARILYN MONROE

“Happiness and confidence are the prettiest things you can wear.”

—TAYLOR SWIFT

Sally stands in front of a web camera, shifting her weight back and forth. A White tween girl nine or ten years old, Sally has long brown hair, wears a bright yellow tank top, and has on a noticeable amount of makeup, including eye shadow, blush, and lipstick. Smiling into the camera, she bounces up and down on her heels and plays with her hair, emanating nervous energy. She says,

Sally’s Pretty or Ugly YouTube video encapsulates the overall formula and ethos of the Pretty or Ugly trend. She represents the most common demographic of tween girls found in the videos: White, young, has access to a digital device (laptop, tablet, or phone), and makes the video by herself. The vast majority of Pretty or Ugly videos I analyzed feature one subject, somewhere between the ages of ten and fourteen, White, who films herself in a bedroom, bathroom, or shared household area such as a living room or den, asking viewers to comment on whether she is pretty or ugly. Though not entirely absent in my sample, videos made by groups of girls are rare. It seems to be most commonly an individual enterprise. Videos last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes but on average tend to be about thirty seconds long.

In some of the videos, the pretty or ugly question is posed clearly and immediately. In others, the question is couched well within the script, maybe hidden, only arriving in the final moments of the video. Yet the titles of the videos necessarily align with the trend, or they would not have been included in my sample for analysis. Sometimes the subject in the video does not verbally ask the question at all, and the only indication of her participation in the Pretty or Ugly trend—and of her desire to learn the answer to the question—rests in the name of the video and the tagline underneath. Most of the videos I analyzed include spoken words, but several feature girls who do not speak at all. While there is discernible variation in how tween girls present themselves in these videos and how they ask the pretty or ugly question, there are certain intelligible markers and modes of language and performance that render the trend very recognizable.

In this chapter, I unpack the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend and the reactions of my interviewees to the videos I showed them from the trend. Tween girls contend with performing “can-do” girlhood and ideal femininity in their Pretty or Ugly videos. As the epigraph quotes in this chapter demonstrate, gender, femininity, beauty, prettiness, confidence, happiness, and “being yourself” are all bound up with one another. Famed fashion designer Coco Chanel, mega−movie star and model for sultry American beauty Marilyn Monroe, and stratospheric ultracelebrity Taylor Swift each made perennial statements on the connection between girlhoods, feminine aesthetic, and exuding confidence. I noticed that when the tween girls I interviewed watched, reacted, and responded to the Pretty or Ugly videos, they often enforced a values system of digital authenticity. Tween girls emphasize realness and vulnerability in self-presentation and performance while also finding themselves caught within competing cultural models of contemporary girlhood—girls as both empowered and disempowered—and the confusion that results from circuitous demands. Interviewee responses to the Pretty or Ugly videos reveal important questions about a digital authenticity values system (what constitutes being real or fake in online space) and about bullying in physical space as a perceived motivation behind tween girls posting these videos—and how making the body visible on social media is a markedly gendered and raced practice.

Scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser theorizes that authenticity is not only viewed as “residing inside the self but is also demonstrated by allowing the outside world to access one’s inner self” (2012:60). After showing a series of three Pretty or Ugly videos to each tween girl I interviewed, a pattern emerged among interview participants highlighting and policing a right way and a wrong way to present and post a Pretty or Ugly video (Gill 2021). They approach the trend with a certain level of suspicion and irritation, as though preconditioned to read the girls making Pretty or Ugly videos as fake or phony from the outset. According to the girls I interviewed, the tween girls who make and post these videos in the “right” way are read as authentic in their performances; this authenticity is only legible as authentic if the girl(s) in question suitably self-deprecates and does not come across as obviously attention seeking.

Also compelling was how the tween girls I interviewed distanced themselves from the tween girls in the trend after watching the videos. Most of my interviewees articulate some version of “I would never post a video like that,” often voicing “Girl Power!” rhetoric and policing the girls in the videos using language such as “It’s what’s inside that matters” or “They already know they are pretty, so why would they post about it?” They emphasize a belief that a tween girl who chooses to post a Pretty or Ugly video must already understand herself as pretty, or she would never post it in the first place, rendering her fake and attention seeking.

Paradoxically, even as interviewees distanced themselves from the trend and/or policed the girls in the videos, they also see the practicality of posting a Pretty or Ugly video to get answers, particularly if the girl in the video indicates she is being bullied or receiving mixed messages about her appearance from peers at school, friends, or family members. Contradictions within interviewee reactions to the videos further indicate the nuance and complexity of how tween girls navigate protectionist discourses and compulsions, “Girl Power!” ideologies, and the pull toward digital visibility. Girls’ responses demarcate clear gendered approaches to using social media and offer key insights into the politics of appearance surrounding gender and race and the practice of making the body visible on social media.

The Formula of Pretty or Ugly

Sally’s video script is emblematic of numerous themes that came to the fore in the textual analysis portion of this study: tween girls facing confusion and uncertainty, desiring truth and honesty from viewers, balancing performances of empowerment and disempowerment, feeling pressure to perform perfection and realness, and reflecting on experiences of being called pretty or ugly in physical social settings (e.g., at school and among peers/friends). What follows is a glimpse of a handful of other Pretty or Ugly video scripts from my sample:

Each of these excerpts demonstrates a sense of confusion on the part of the tween girl making the video, not knowing what she is or how to categorize herself as either pretty or ugly. Reagan and Elodie indicate that people are telling them they are both pretty and ugly, and they want viewers to assess their appearances and give them honest opinions. Peyton pinpoints a specific attribute (her nose) that has been the subject of derision and negative feedback surrounding her appearance, but she seems to question the validity of this feedback and seeks further honest opinions from YouTube. Marie is called pretty by her friends at school but doubts this assessment of her appearance, specifically pointing to her lack of boyfriend as suspect and indicative that she may in fact not be pretty, even though people at school tell her she is. Her sense of self-worth seems attached to the question of whether she is pretty, which is by extension attached to the social meaning associated with having a boyfriend in this heteronormative context. Marie shores herself up for the truth, assuring her viewers, “I can take it; you can tell me.” In all cases, themes of uncertainty and confusion, the quest for honesty, the push-pull between empowerment (“Be honest. This is me”) and disempowerment (“Boys don’t like me”), and the blurring of the physical and digital are prominent across the Pretty or Ugly videos in my sample.

News media responses to the trend have emphasized how girls in the video are “feigning insecurity” (Waldman 2013) or “feigning nonchalance” (Maldonado 2013). After watching and analyzing hundreds of these videos, I suggest that it is more complex. Tween girls in this trend are not feigning or faking but are sincerely exploring the dynamics of gendered visibility along various axes of identity on a highly visible global public platform. The dueling expectations assigned to tween girls’ embodiments and sexualities are evident in the trend, and amid these contradictions, a girl is left questioning what she is (pretty or ugly) and, by extension, who she is. Because conventional notions of ideal femininity and achieving girlhood are deeply enmeshed with constructions of pretty as successful and empowering (Azzarito 2009; Banet-Weiser 2014; Brumberg 1997; Harris 2004a; Swindle 2011) and ugly as in need of correction or a manifestation of failing, if a tween girl is unable to identify whether she is pretty or ugly, it may disrupt her process of developing a sense of self.

Politics of Racial Performance

Racial identity is a key element of analysis of the trend, as Black and Brown tween girls navigate a perpetual thrust toward Whiteness as related to a constructed ideal femininity; proximity to Whiteness is historically and intrinsically bound up with girlhood corporeal politics of what it means to seen and understood as pretty (i.e., good) (Azzarito 2009; Carter Andrews et al. 2019; Rosario, Minor, and Rogers 2021). As Mikel Brown notes, “part of being an acceptable girl in a culture so deeply infused with white middle-class values, is to be, or at least appear to be, ‘nice’” (2003:6). The tween girls in the video scripts sampled here are all White or White passing, given how I read and categorized their racial identities in my analysis. What it means to be a pretty girl and how prettiness is associated with other values (e.g., being liked, being seen, being good) becomes more entangled when taking constructions of race and racial subjectivities into account, recognizing how Whiteness and proximity to Whiteness is privileged in embodying ideal femininity and can-do girlhoods (Avery et al. 2021; Banet-Weiser 2015; Harris 2004a; Hill 2019; Morris 2015). Renold and Ringrose (2011) relatedly argue that as tween girls navigate contradictory ideals of girlhood such as “sexual knowingness” versus sexual naivete, their performances of femininity are continually shaped and impacted by the raced and classed social contexts in which they exist.

In studying the trend, it became apparent that White girls, who seem to produce the vast majority of Pretty or Ugly videos and are overly represented in my sample, may perform elements of Black beauty and co-opt Black cultures with impunity through consumption and physical expression (e.g., hairstyle, dress, music, language, gestures), always within a safety net of White privilege (hooks 1992; Jackson 2021). In a hyperconsuming culture, there is social and aesthetic capital to be gained from White girls performing Blackness, not unlike how White female celebrities have capitalized on Black female bodies, especially fat Black female bodies, as work sites to reinforce and protect a dominant White beauty ideal (Bailey 2021; Butler 2013; McMillan Cottom 2013).

Some of the Black girls making videos in the Pretty or Ugly trend exhibit elements of performing Whiteness (Carter Andrews et al. 2019; Hill 2019; Mooney 2018). There remain culturally reified characteristics of successful postfeminist girl subjects (Gill 2007); a girl must be pretty, thin, gentle, educated, middle to upper socioeconomic status, and White. Pretty or Ugly videos featuring Black girls often exhibit adherence to these traits in terms of body performance via dress, gestures, and volume of voice (or lack of voice) that read doing successful girlhood (Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2009). This is not to suggest that all Black girls embody Blackness in codified and recognizable ways, or to essentialize Black girlhoods, but rather to emphasize the complexities of how racial embodiments are bound up with and reify gendered performances of ideal prettiness in a context of this YouTube trend and the creation of one specific form of digital girlhoods.

This subset of YouTube videos in my sample—White girls performing Blackness and Black girls performing historically White supremacist, colonialist notions of prettiness and associated embodied behavior—demonstrates how enduring White supremacy, racism, colonialism, and colorism operate both overtly and covertly within a postfeminist and consumer feminist, neoliberal colorblind landscape. Black girlhood studies scholar Dominique Hill writes,

The fact that tween girls’ self- and social developments now take place on social media to such a significant degree begs further questions about how social media participation has the potential to create space and opportunities for Black tween girls’ authentic expressions, resistances, and celebrations of Black embodiment via digital girlhoods (Barner 2016; Erigha and Crooks-Allen 2020; Hill 2018; Kelly 2018; Lindsey 2013; Tanksley 2016; Wade 2019a). Ashleigh Greene Wade speaks to this question in her work on Black girlhoods and social media, arguing that “in some ways, Black girlhood(s) already constitute alternative girlhoods among hegemonic conceptions of the white, middle-class girl figure, and the digital can function as one tool to visibilize Black girls as girls and demonstrate the complexities of Black girlhood(s)” (2019a:20).

I had the privilege of speaking with many Black girls during the interview portion of this study; they made up most of my sample of interview participants. This was not the case for the Pretty or Ugly videos, as most of the subjects in my video sample are White or White passing. As a White woman, I cannot embody or fully comprehend experiences of Black girlhoods. Black girlhoods themselves are expansive and manifold. But I can center what the Black girls I interviewed shared about their experiences on social media and their responses to the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend and offer analysis of the gendered and racial politics brought to the fore in the videos.

Though beyond the scope of this research in its specificity of Black tween girl embodiment as identity, transition, and process, this area warrants more in-depth local and transnational empirical investigation, in particular exploring dynamics of normalizing and celebrating Black girlhoods in digital space, homosocial relationships among Black girls online, and self-representation and self-actualization processes on social media platforms. Treva Lindsey argues there is great potential in “Black girls both creating and being the primary subjects of mass media representations of themselves” (2013:32), and as Wade suggests, “Black girlhood studies as a field still needs more accounts of Black girls’ experiences in their own words, and these accounts should represent the range of subjective complexities that Black girls embody” (2019a:17).

Am I Real Enough?

As referenced earlier in this project, broad spectrum response to the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend has categorized it in a variety of ways. Some news and popular media see it as evidence of girls in crisis, especially regarding negative body image. Some professional response to the trend has labeled it as normal tween-age anxiety, behaviors to be expected among female adolescents. Academic response to the trend is notably lacking, but the handful of articles that investigate it to varying degrees are equivocal in their take. One analysis sees the trend as reifying control of girls in public space and reproducing dominant gendered narratives (Nurka 2014). Another finds it symptomatic of brand culture and a manifestation of economies of visibilities in a postfeminist landscape (Banet-Weiser 2014). Yet another sees it as a potential conduit for increased self-esteem but that the public nature of the videos arguably functions as disciplinary action to further control and restrain girls, especially through the process of viewers commenting on the videos (Rossie 2015).

A significant number of videos on YouTube itself have popped up in response to the trend. People offer various commentaries and opinions, asking questions such as “Where are the parents?” and castigating video subjects for their ostensible bid for attention and what many considered to be self-esteem failure on the part of tween girls. Popular responses to the trend fortify the competing and contradictory expectations laden on the bodies and behaviors of girls. Those contradictions are readily seen in the performances of tween girls creating and posting Pretty or Ugly videos.

In a culture where tween girls are living their lives online, the question of what is real has become deeply relevant to this demographic. Digital authenticity is an intricate construct of identity performance, of tween girls managing their identities and impressions in digital space via their social media visibility. Garcia-Rapp writes, “Identity, as well as authenticity, is not objective or stable, but rather performative, contextual, and shifting. Both concepts are in practice contingent and dynamic, because people consciously and unconsciously ‘work on them,’ modify them, and ‘learn by doing,’ in their various social worlds” (2017:131).

I define authenticity using Dubrofsky and Wood’s (2014) conceptualization of authenticity as marked by behaviors that do not feel strategic or calculated; it is constructed and contextually bound rather than natural or essential. The notion of authenticity in digital space is already fraught by nature of the digital as inherently mediated. Perceptions of digital authenticity—whether someone is perceived as real or fake online—is a values system mapped onto the digital from the physical. Tween girls have long chided one another within peer groups for overtly seeking attention or feigning niceties (Mikel Brown 2003; Mcqueeney and Girgenti-Malone 2018; Simmons 2002), but because social media has become a normative part of daily life and social development for tween girls, this values system has now found its way into social media participation and homosocial behavior among girls online.

Tween girls continue to police one another and reinforce a hierarchy; it is undesirable for a girl to be seen and labeled as fake or superficial. I found that girls desire, even demand, authenticity and realness in how other girls present themselves and perform their bodies online. The digital landscape as mediated space, however, renders this demand a little more complicated than just expecting girls to be themselves. Insofar as my interviewees were quick to espouse “Girl Power!” rhetoric (“Be who you are!” and “It does not matter what other people think”), they were also quick to decry girls in the Pretty or Ugly trend who came across as overconfident or desperate, which, interestingly, were often understood as the same thing. It seems that the line between being seen as real or fake on social media is a thin one.

I showed three Pretty or Ugly videos to my interviewees, randomly selected from my sample of 260 videos. I showed participants the video from Sally, whose video script opens this chapter, a video by Carlotta, and one by Donna. All three of the sampled videos feature girls who are White and between the ages of ten and fourteen. They all appear to be by themselves, using web cameras on laptops to record the videos. Sally appears to be the youngest in the sample at nine or ten years old; Carlotta appears as the oldest at thirteen or fourteen years old, with Donna falling somewhere in between, approximately eleven or twelve years old. All three are making their videos in bedrooms, blurring the lines between public and private in the digital epoch, as viewers can see into these intimate spaces (Kearney 2007; Kennedy 2020; McRobbie and Garber 2006). Sally wears a significant amount of makeup in her video. Donna also wears makeup, though it is less apparent than Sally’s. Donna wears an animal hat on her head and plays music in the background of the video while she speaks. Carlotta has very short hair and thick-framed glasses. She does not appear to be wearing any makeup.

Sally is standing up in her video and moving around as she speaks into the camera. Donna sits on her bed, facing the web camera and leaning toward and away from it so that at various points we can see her whole body and at other points close-ups of her face. Carlotta is sitting in a chair, ostensibly at a desk in her bedroom, and we see only part of her upper body, primarily her face. The commonalities among video scripts are clear, but there are nuances in how the girls perform their bodies (Butler 1990). The way they dress, whether they wear makeup, how they position their bodies in the videos—all these things matter in how the video is read and understood by a viewer.

Carlotta’s Pretty or Ugly video is an important example of the push-pull between performing the self in an authentic way and feeling pressure to conform to certain tenets of conventional femininity (Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2009; Gill 2021). She says,

Carlotta also demonstrates how girls in the trend itself often police how other girls have posted their own Pretty or Ugly videos. Carlotta positions herself as authentic in that she knows who she is (“I am just me”), suggesting to viewers that she is not putting them on or being fake. She sets herself apart from other girls in the trend by underscoring her own authenticity. Yet she is still seeking affirmation because she is asking the question and seeking answers from viewers. As she says, “I want to know if you think I am pretty.”

Donna’s video script goes as follows:

After watching these videos from Sally, Carlotta, and Donna during each interview, it quickly became apparent that my interviewees interpret the videos in two primary ways: 1) they feel suspicious of the video subjects, who they believe come across as attention seeking, and 2) they emphasize a practical understanding of why tween girls might post these videos if they are being bullied or picked on by peers. These reactions are not mutually exclusive and are at times expressed in conjunction with one another, which relates heavily to the contradictory demands of contemporary girlhood that tween girls embody through performances of empowerment and disempowerment. I first explore my interviewees’ initial interpretation of the trend regarding suspicion and then reflect on the second interpretation regarding practicality and motivation for why tween girls make and post Pretty or Ugly videos.

“She Already Knows She’s Pretty”: Suspicion and Scorn

During our interview, I show the three Pretty or Ugly videos to Ariel, a White ten-year-old. Her reaction is quick and telling.

ARIEL: People in these videos, they’re like, saying that they want honest opinions, but they really won’t care if they’re ugly because they simply know that they are pretty. They already think they are pretty.

KP: Why do you think they already know that they are pretty?

ARIEL: Well, it’s like, they are making this video and asking everyone, and like, anyone can see it. I don’t think they would post it if um, like, they really thought people would say “ugly.”

The public nature of the videos casts doubt for Ariel. She has a hard time believing a tween girl would post a YouTube video asking this question if there was any chance she would get negative comments or be called ugly in response, suggesting a presumed fragility of girlhood self-esteem (Brown and Gilligan 1992; Orenstein 1994). But rather than see this attitude as confidence in appearance on the part of the video subjects, who, from her perspective, already think they are pretty, Ariel finds it off-putting that a girl who seemingly already thinks she is pretty would seek such validation on social media. To Ariel, the girls in the videos are out for attention and come across as fake, or inauthentic, in their performances.

Other responses echo Ariel’s feelings about the girls in the videos. Kendra, a thirteen-year-old Black girl, finds the videos amusing. It is interesting to watch Kendra’s body language change when we start the videos. While watching, she rocks back in her chair and smirks, crossing her arms over her chest. When she watches the video of Carlotta in particular, she shows her exasperation in a humorous way and has a hard time getting her words out in response. She smiles, chuckles, and shakes her head, saying,

“Girl Power!” language is obvious in Kendra’s response, but it functions in such a way that Kendra ultimately scrutinizes and criticizes Carlotta for posting the video in the first place. From Kendra’s point of view, it should not matter what other people think, only what you think of yourself, so the video, by virtue of its existence on this public platform and within the purview of the trend, is already positioned as inauthentic.

For tween girls today, it is unattractive, even deviant, to come across as somehow desperate for attention. Within the logic of the “Girl Power!” cultural model, a girl should already know her self-worth and that she is good enough as she is. She should be confident—but not obviously so. Much emphasis is placed on charming and self-aware “imperfection” within confidence culture (Banet-Weiser 2017; Orgad and Gill 2022) and on being real in online space, especially as larger cultural discourses reproduce an ethos of social media being manufactured, false, phony, and inauthentic—discursively positioning tween girls’ gendered content creation around appearances and aesthetic capital as trivial, immaterial, and even petty.

In an analysis of online commentary surrounding selfies in particular, author Anne Burns posits that “selfies have a regulatory social function in that there is a connection between the discursive construction of selfie practice and the negative perception of selfie takers” (2015:1716). She goes on to suggest that “instead of being a positive tool for self-exploration and for mediating a position relative to one’s peers, photographic self-expression (particularly by women) is reframed as a matter of petty and squalid attention-grabbing” (2015:1723). Tween girls are continually disciplined into caring about their appearances because we associate appearance with girls’ worth and value in aesthetically driven, White supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. And then we turn around and call this behavior vapid, trivial, attention seeking. We render the question “Am I pretty or ugly?” a shallow concern expressly because we associate it with femininity. Indeed, we are most likely to celebrate girls who readily demonstrate a keenly balanced performance of the best parts of masculinity (logic, reason, strength, self-assuredness) while looking and acting suitably feminine. “I’m not like other girls” becomes code for easygoing, cool, carefree, happy, intelligent, low maintenance—a badge of honor in a system that privileges the masculine. Ongoing discipline and surveillance within postfeminist neoliberal confidence culture positions girls as self-disciplining subjects enlisted in the surveilling and disciplining of other girls. A theory of the importance of tween girls’ self-representation in digitally networked publics (and how those representations are received and mediated by other girls) matters a great deal. These videos are not shallow; they are a meaningful tussle with and toward selfhood.

Though the Pretty or Ugly videos are not straightforward selfies, they are certainly embodied performances of gender, race, class, and ability, and as artifacts of tween girl digital cultures, they richly demonstrate the constant negotiation of what performing successful girlhood means in a contemporary American cultural context. Further studies support these politics of negotiation and the enigma of conformity and authenticity that punctuates tween girls’ experiences of self-presentation on social media. A 2019 study by Yau and Reich finds that girls (aged twelve to eighteen) are influenced by peer approval and strategically configure their content toward entrenched norms more likely to gain them likes. Similarly, Farrell references a study by Zillich and Riesmeyer (2021) in her doctoral work on teenage girls on social media, echoing findings that teenage girls are “self-presenting in a performative nature, whereby they are adhering to social norms while at the same time balancing their own sense of self and a desire for peer acceptance” (2022:7). Findings from other studies suggest that girls perform the best version of themselves—curating content that is perfectly imperfect, self-effacing, and vulnerable but also full of girl-coded embodied norms and desires surrounding beauty and body work, femininity, and hetero-sexiness (Chua and Chang 2016; Davis 2013; Gill 2021; Jong and Drummond 2016; Van Ouytsel et al. 2020; Weinstein 2018; Zillich and Riesmeyer 2021).

As influencer has become a more entrenched part of the American cultural lexicon, the drive toward creating authentic and relatable content has burgeoned (Bishop 2021). My interviewees certainly emphasize this ethos in their responses to the trend, indicating that girls should just be themselves, be real, and not ask whether they are pretty or ugly, especially on a public platform like YouTube, understood in terms of its potential and promise for visibility, dissolve between the public and private, and new imaginings of microcelebrity (Jerslev 2016; Hackley and Hackley 2015; Hearn 2008; Marwick 2013a). Concurrent with this push for authentic visibility, dominant narratives of girlhood and femininity still situate being pretty as of the utmost importance in achieving girlhood success. In her work on girls’ visibility on social media and the Pretty or Ugly trend, Amanda Rossie writes, “Girls should be visible online but must not seem too desperate or straightforward while seeking approval” (2015:253). In other words, a girl is supposed to be pretty but not know or demonstrate awareness that she is pretty. Interviewees were clearly enacting a digital authenticity values system when they consumed videos from the trend; they do not like it when they sense that a video subject already knows she is pretty and is seeking validation from viewers regardless.

Twelve-year-old Maya, a quiet and bright Latina girl, is also suspicious of the girls in the videos:

Maya does not like how the girls seem to be showing off in the videos. The value of being real is prominent in Maya’s response, as she separates herself from the Pretty or Ugly trend and articulates a strong feeling that appearance does not, or rather should not, matter. During our interview, I am struck by Maya’s sense of self, the certainty with which she asserts her take on the videos, and the emotionally charged response she has to them.

KP: Can you tell me a little bit about what helps you feel that way? Just in terms of that confidence you have in being yourself?

MAYA: Because I know that I have people that really like me, and I have someone to talk to. I know they like me for who I am. And I shouldn’t change, even if like, another person brags about what they got or what they don’t got. Because I got what I got, and that’s all I got.

While still in this vein of discussion, I tell Maya that there are hundreds of thousands of these videos on YouTube of girls asking if they are pretty or ugly, and I ask her to give me her thoughts as to why that might be.

MAYA: Well, maybe something is happening in school. Or they don’t have no one to talk to. Because I have someone to talk to and I know who to trust. And they probably just want to show off, and check, “Oh yeah, I’m pretty. I know that already.”

KP: So, you think it’s possible they already think or know they are pretty?

MAYA: They know already. They just want to show off.

The theme of trust, or of not knowing who to trust, rings pertinent in relation to girls in the Pretty or Ugly trend seeking honest responses from viewers. Maya situates her own self-confidence and self-assurance within the discourse of trusting people and knowing that people like her for who she is. She has people she can talk to, and her perception of why tween girls might be posting these videos is that they might not have that same support structure. Maya’s response is a departure from what I saw happening among tween girls making the Pretty or Ugly videos. Again and again, video scripts in the trend expose some sense of not trusting peer groups or friends to tell the truth. Tween girls are likely to not believe what their friends are saying because they position friends as having to lie and not being able to tell you the truth about what you look like. While my interviewees are suspicious of the tween girls making the videos, the tween girls in the videos are suspicious of their peer groups and relationships in physical space, not trusting them to be objective in their assessment of girls’ appearances.

Girlhood studies and feminist scholars who theorize on the body and examine how ideal feminine beauty is perceived and felt among female adolescents indicate that girls are socialized to compare their bodies with one another, especially in relation to compulsory slenderness. Choukas-Bradley et al. write of this body of knowledge:

Use of “fat talk,” which depends on displaying a certain degree of self-deprecation and humility, is identified as a way of building social relationships among girls (Nichter 2000; Reischer and Koo 2004). Girls test the waters with one another by using self-deprecating language about their own bodies to secure affirming responses. For example, if a tween girl says, “I feel fat today,” she is likely to hear some version of “You are not fat!” in response.

In the case of the Pretty or Ugly trend, however, there is a rejection of assessment and affirmation by friends and peer groups, as the tween girls in the videos position their friends at school as being inauthentic, lying to them about how they really look. Tween girls seek objective assessments and affirmations from people they likely do not know but who feel like a community—the digital community or networked public of YouTube (Banet-Weiser 2014; boyd 2010; Burgess and Green 2018). Self-deprecation, negative self and body talk, and expressions of low self-esteem are heavily coded feminine and understood as a relational or common experience, referred to as “normative discontent” (Rodin, Silberstein, and Striegel-Moore 1984; Tiggemann and Wilson-Barrett 1998). If a girl is performing in a suitably humble or self-effacing way, she can be read by other tween girls as authentic and therefore worthy of a compassionate response. Within a digital postfeminist and consumer feminist culture, a tween girl must learn to expertly balance competing models of contemporary girlhood by being authentically themselves, which, within the logic of conventional femininity, means self-deprecating and self-ridiculing.

Pepper, a White ten-year-old, also finds the videos irksome, especially in how she reads the video subjects as specifically looking for attention from boys. Pepper says, “I think they’re just trying to get more attention. And like, I think they’re kind of getting, trying to get more attention, more followers, and then to be honest, I think they’re just trying to get guys. And it’s really kind of annoying.” Similarly, Jessie, Black and age twelve, demonstrates clear distaste for the girls in the videos when she says, “Ugh, it is just girls trying to make them feel good about themselves, just so they can get boys’ attention. I’ve rejected all the boys because I have to get my schoolwork done and bring up my grades.”

When tween girls read other tween girls as attention seeking, there is significant disdain and importantly, an appreciable use of “Girl Power!” language to separate girls who are being themselves from girls who come across as fake or just showing off. Jessie takes this a step further by positioning schoolwork as more important than the conventional heteronormative tween girl goal of obtaining a boyfriend. There is clear, heightened dislike when interviewees understand girls in the videos as seeking attention from boys.

Relatedly, the tween girls in the Pretty or Ugly videos who wear makeup in their performances (Sally and Donna) are perceived as less authentic than the girl who does not wear makeup (Carlotta), which translates to more derision and the associated assumption that the girls wearing makeup are just seeking attention from boys. Tessy, a White ten-year-old, comments on this phenomenon in our conversation after watching the videos. She explains,

These responses conflate wearing makeup with tween girl heteronormative performances and related outcomes of attracting the opposite sex. Girls in the videos who have more makeup on are seen as less real, and some of my interviewees see the use of makeup as a direct attempt to garner more attention from male viewers. This reaction seems explicitly age related in that they do not necessarily see makeup in and of itself as off-putting, rather seeing girls their own age engaging in practices conventionally meant for older teenagers and adult women as evidence of inauthenticity. This finding is especially interesting considering heightened recent attention in the last year around a beauty epidemic, even dubbed the “Sephora” epidemic, which traces a trend of tween girls “taking over” Sephora stores to consume beauty brands such as Drunk Elephant and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez (Poggi 2024; Camero 2024).

Coming from a tween girl demographic, defined in part by a burgeoning interest in body and beauty work, celebrity, and pop cultural content beyond their years, this finding really surprised me—that tween girls react with disdain in seeing other tween girls wear makeup, notably while asking the pretty or ugly question on YouTube. My interviewees are critical of the girls in the videos wearing makeup, especially if they themselves articulate not being interested in or wearing makeup. The language of a “beauty epidemic” suggests that interest in makeup products is spreading and communicable. The fact that it went viral on TikTok in the early part of 2024 begs further inquiry, but I find it relatively unsurprising that tween girls’ engagement with social media, brand culture, pop culture, and celebrity is translating into recognizable consumer interest in beauty products. Interest is not particularly new, but this level of broad visibility about it is.

Tween girls do not exist in a vacuum; they are influenced by the culture in which they live and must navigate the heteronormative expectations, both overt and covert, being mapped onto their bodies and associated gendered behaviors (Brumberg 1997; Thiel-Stern 2014). Girls are not supposed to come across as desperate or fake, yet they are often labeled as such when they emphasize their bodies in more sexualized ways, which, in the case of many of these videos, means wearing makeup to appear prettier or more attractive to the opposite sex.

Continued policing of the girls in the videos occurs among my interviewees as they internalize and reckon with the contradictions of protectionist discourses and “Girl Power!” ideologies in their responses to the trend. Social theorist Amy Shields Dobson offers a useful lens through which to understand these conflicting responses. She writes that “protectionist/moralist discourses have invoked fear about the damaging effects of cultural ‘sexualization’ on girls in particular, and have tended to associate any forms of so-called ‘self-sexualization’ with pathology and ‘low-esteem’ for girls” (2014:99). Tween girls themselves project these notions of low esteem onto girls in the trend in convoluted and contradictory ways. The ultimate contradiction is that a girl can only demonstrate the power of being herself by performing disempowerment. By inciting “Girl Power!” rhetoric and distinguishing themselves from the girls in the Pretty or Ugly videos, my interviewees reinforce a model of digital authenticity that emphasizes girls being themselves, and any departure from that, whether it be makeup or an essence of “already knowing the answer” to the pretty or ugly question, is read as suspect or outright deceptive.

Practical Posting: Perceived Motivations for Making Pretty or Ugly Videos

Even while the girls I interviewed enact a digital authenticity values system in how they respond to the videos, there is a strong sense among them that posting a Pretty or Ugly video can be useful, even practical, especially if the video subject is experiencing bullying or teasing at school. Tween girls recognize the potential and practical motivations behind posting a Pretty or Ugly video, citing getting at the truth of the question as a meaningful reason to join the trend. From their perspectives, tween girls are motivated by gaining attention and approval (Farrell 2022; Yau and Reich 2019), but they can also see why girls want to get some kind of objective sense of honesty and truth about appearance from viewers on a public platform, especially a platform like YouTube. Girls do not want other girls to be fake or to already know that they are pretty, so performing humility and self-deprecation is an important part of tween girls recognizing other tween girls as authentic, as being themselves. How does this push for authenticity intersect with the perceived motivations of attention and affirmation? In my interpretation of girls’ responses to the videos, it seems that this exposure of humility and vulnerability (e.g., getting bullied or picked on at school) balances out the quest for attention, so often met with contempt.

I meet Samantha, a funny and energetic ten-year-old White girl, at her after-school program on a bright October afternoon. We spend about thirty minutes talking about social media and how she makes YouTube videos with her sister—a humorous and playful stuffed animal puppet show series. Samantha really likes YouTube and spends most of her daily online time looking at videos or making videos to post to her channel. Our conversation eventually turns to the Pretty or Ugly trend. After showing her the sample of three videos, I ask Samantha to give her reactions.

SAMANTHA: Well, I kind of get why they’re asking that because I ask myself that sometimes. But I don’t think they should be asking the world. They should just be asking themselves if they’re pretty or ugly, and if they think they are ugly, then that’s their opinion on whether they are or not. But they shouldn’t be asking other people.

KP: Why not?

SAMANTHA: Well, there’s like, a billion people on YouTube, so like, sometimes people are going to say mean stuff, and that will make them feel bad.

Several of my interviewees respond to the videos with protectionist discourse couched in “Girl Power!” language. My interviewee Dominique, a Black eleven-year-old, offers a response akin to Samantha’s, saying,

Both Samantha and Dominique are concerned that the girls making the videos are going to be hurt by mean comments, so they see the public nature of the YouTube videos as potentially threatening to girls’ well-being. Questions of how video subjects and tween girls in general engage with comments and responses to the digital girlhoods they create and what impact engagement has on mental health and self-esteem should be explored further. At the same time, Samantha and Dominique deliver these feelings via the use of “Girl Power!” ideology, for example, “They should just be asking themselves if they are pretty or ugly” and “They should care about their own opinion.” The tension between protecting girls and empowering girls manifests in how tween girls view and scrutinize other tween girls online.

During our interview, I tell Samantha that there are a lot of videos like the three we just watched—thousands, even—and ask her what she thinks about there being so many girls asking this question on YouTube.

SAMANTHA: I mean, I do kind of see why. Because these days people are like, being criticized a lot more than usual, I guess. And girls just want to know their truth, I guess. People are being mean to other people and teasing them and there are more ways to criticize them now.

KP: Can you say more about there being more ways to criticize? What do you mean?

SAMANTHA: Like, there’s more than just, “You’re ugly.” Now, it can be like criticizing them like “They’re rich and you’re poor,” or, uh, “Your hair is messed up and mine’s all pretty,” or “I go to the best stores, and you don’t.” That kind of thing.

Samantha recognizes that people are being teased about a lot of things, which translates to a lot of expectations: about how to look, where to consume, what products to consume, and how to maintain appearances. There are significant class connotations apparent in Samantha’s acknowledgment of this issue. Girlhood success is certainly enmeshed with socioeconomic status. The ideal feminine is constructed as White, middle- to upper-class status, educated, able, and conventionally attractive and pretty (Bettie 2003; Currie, Kelly and Pomerantz 2009; Harris 2004a). Samantha relates this uptick in criticism and ways to be criticized to a rationale for posting a Pretty or Ugly video. Though she does not overtly support the trend, given her use of “Girl Power!” parlance and the protectionist approach in her initial response to the videos, she nonetheless shows understanding for why a tween girl might post a video to cushion criticism and learn the truth.

In my discussion with Brooklyn, a quiet and reserved thirteen-year-old Black girl, she similarly responds to the videos first with disapproval but then contradicts herself and suggests that she would also post one of these videos for certain reasons. After watching Sally’s video, she says, “She shouldn’t do that. Because for me to see that, it’s like, I don’t like it when people ask people if they are pretty or ugly. It’s basically, it doesn’t matter what other people say. If you think you’re pretty, then you’re pretty. It’s your mind.” The themes of individual empowerment and having a strong sense of self are prominent in tween girls’ initial reactions to the trend, which tend to be negative. Most of my interviewees readily assert a “Girl Power!” mindset in their feelings about the videos. Most wonder why a girl would post a video like this online. However, the tension between empowerment and disempowerment tints many of their responses, and it becomes apparent that girls often offer certain disclaimers in how they situate themselves in alignment with or against the Pretty or Ugly trend. This most often has to do with whether the girl in the video is experiencing bullying or other negative treatment in physical spaces. When I ask Brooklyn if she would ever post a Pretty or Ugly video, in transparency, I expect her to say no. Instead, she says,

My interviewee Noelle, also Black and thirteen years old, mirrors Brooklyn’s response to the videos in terms of motivations for posting.

NOELLE: [It’s] probably because they feel insecure, and [posting on YouTube to get responses] make them feel good, and at least make them feel safe.

KP: Feel safe?

NOELLE: This way they can find out what people think of them, and that can really make them feel good. Then they just know.

Noelle brings up compelling ideas about safety and “just knowing,” especially as these ideas suggest a decidedly static nature of whether someone is pretty or ugly, as though it is not a subjective interpretation and that girls can be safe in the knowledge of having the truth. In the preceding section on digital authenticity, my interviewee Maya indicates that she would not post a Pretty or Ugly video because she feels supported by a community of people who like her for who she is. Distrust of people in physical spaces in their ability to be objective or honest is a very prominent theme across the Pretty or Ugly videos, often qualified further by tween girls in the videos sharing their experiences of being bullied or receiving mixed messages at school, with some people telling them they are pretty and others telling them they are ugly.

My interviewees Brooklyn and Noelle bolster this connection between bullying, distrust of peer groups, and motivation for posting a video. A desire on the part of tween girls to know the truth, to feel safe, and to be affirmed in what they are becomes a catalyst for posting. The common tween girl questions, Who am I? and, What is my worth? have become remarkably conflated with another question: How do I look? While some girls in the trend present themselves as being “just curious” as to whether they are pretty or ugly, just as often, if not more so, tween girls in the trend frame the answer to the pretty or ugly question as something they “need to know.” In this way, seeking responses and asking for comments from viewers can feel quite consequential for the girls participating in the trend.

Even though the small sample of videos I showed my interviewees does not directly employ the language of bullying, the videos made by Sally and Donna both give indication of receiving mixed messages from peers at school (Sally) or being picked on (Donna). During our discussions, I asked my interviewees why they think a tween girl might post a Pretty or Ugly video, and their responses almost all frame the motivations for posting as being a direct result of girls being targets for bullying behavior. Taylor, White and age ten, and Chrissy, Black and age thirteen, have comparable reactions to this question. Taylor suggests,

Chrissy offers a similar response, saying,

Further examples of videos from the Pretty or Ugly trend exemplify this potential motivation of posting a video as a response to bullying behavior. Some tween girls put their bodies online in this format precisely because they are targets of bullying in offline spaces, so they seek affirmation, support, and clarity from alternative, digital communities. Given the sheer volume of these videos posted by tween girls, in becoming a trend, a virtual community was generated around tween girls asking this question online (Banet-Weiser 2014). In her work on young women, relationality, and digital culture on Tumblr, Akane Kanai writes,

A similar phenomenon of adaptation and reinterpretation of production in the Pretty or Ugly trend created shared space around a common question and concern relevant to the tween girl demographic in the United States.

Indicative of how news media, parents, and other adult authority figures have responded to the trend with sadness, outrage, and alarm is the copious concern surrounding an ongoing self-esteem crisis among tween girls, set against an ongoing emphasis on tween girls being self-empowered subjects within confidence culture (Orgad and Gill 2022). The onset of the trend came before YouTube was even a decade old; tween girls were already using YouTube in mass numbers for posting and consuming content. Today, YouTube is by far the most popular social media platform among children and teenagers (Nesi, Mann, and Robb 2023; Perez 2020; Vogels, Gelles-Watnick, and Massarat 2022). While so much of the content tween girls were and are watching on YouTube is geared toward beauty and body work, discipline and self-surveillance, and cis-hetero-femininity (makeup tutorials, beauty vlogging, fashion hauls, celebrity news, etc.)—content that readily positions tween girls as empowered subjects on the cusp of becoming adults (Banet-Weiser 2017)—I argue that how tween girls use YouTube to make Pretty or Ugly videos is set apart from other digital manifestations of tween girl confidence culture.

The vulnerability element of crowdsourcing for honest answers to the pretty or ugly question throws a major wrench into tween girls’ positionality within broader discourses of gendered confidence culture, and all the while, the response to the trend falls back on simplistic dominant narratives of tween girls’ body image crises. Lack of nuance clouds something compelling in the creation of these videos. Tween girls are looking in mirrors (webcams) when they make Pretty or Ugly videos, and thus they are necessarily looking at themselves in the production of these videos. Importantly, they are also making a conscious choice to post these videos as public content. The whole process—from choosing to create the video to making the video to posting the video—is crucial to consider in understanding intent and impact of the trend. There is more to explore here in relation to questions of tween girls’ agency when they hit the publish button and establish themselves as a part of the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend.

Luella makes her Pretty or Ugly video in her bedroom. She is White, twelve or thirteen years old, and wears a plain black T-shirt and no discernible makeup. She sits on her bed and glances back and forth, her eyes focused beyond the screen, not looking directly at the webcam. She brings her hand up to her face, tucks her hair behind her ear, and says quietly,

Luella’s Pretty or Ugly video script exemplifies several overarching themes from my analysis of the trend—bullying in physical space, desire for truth and honesty, distrust in friend group assessments of appearance, and confusion brought on by competing cultural models of girlhood. Luella demonstrates how the question of pretty or ugly is so often conflated with being “good enough.” She expresses pain and hurt associated with being called ugly at school and indicates directly that she is making the video because she is being bullied. She makes the video to gain clarity and truth about her appearance, using the digital medium to garner alternative opinions and potential affirmations.

Jasmine’s Pretty or Ugly video is yet another example of how a tween girl may take to social media to share her feelings about being bullied, and she notably uses her video to speak directly to the people who have been bullying her. Jasmine, who is White, approximately thirteen years old, with black framed glasses and blond-streaked hair that falls across her face, leans in close to the webcam and says,

Jasmine’s video poignantly demonstrates the competing cultural models girls must navigate as part of their everyday lives in a postfeminist neoliberal digital landscape. Her ambivalence is obvious. She indicates that her feelings will not be hurt by what people think and asserts power and agency in her response, but she also asks the pretty or ugly question and implores people not to write mean comments. The way she talks to her viewers throughout the video (“you guys”) evokes a sensibility that she is addressing people she knows, speaking to a known community. She makes a connection between people bullying her and a level of immaturity and how the people she interacts with in physical space are starting drama.

Jasmine uses the medium of a YouTube video not only to talk about how she is bullied but also to directly address those bullies, claim some power and control over how she represents herself (i.e., “I am not any of those things”), and make herself feel better (i.e., get this “off her chest”). Also notable is that her bullies are boys, targeting her using gendered and sexualized language of “slut,” “bitch,” and “whore.” Though some scholarship suggests that the reclamation of these terms can serve as a form of resistance to gendered oppression and established norms of acceptable sexuality, especially for White women and girls (Sylwander and Gottzén 2020), this is not necessarily the reality for women and girls with historically marginalized identities, for whom this language may reify racialized violence and ableist logics.

Reclamation and resistance are possible primarily when girls and women use this language toward themselves or level it at other girls and women. All these terms, especially when exercised by boys and men, function historically and contemporarily to discipline girls and women across identity categories and threaten “ideal” femininity (Attwood 2007; Bailey et al. 2013; Jackson and Vares 2015; Kofoed and Ringrose 2012; Ringrose 2011; Willem, Araüna, and Tortajada 2019). Furthermore, contemporary confidence culture, postfeminist sensibility, and the surge of popular feminisms suggest that women can express themselves freely on social media in terms of sexual liberation and desires, yet women’s bodies are far more likely to be policed and censored online than men’s bodies. Discernible double standards and moralizing of women’s embodied behaviors remain, especially around sex and sexualities. I address this enduring landscape further in the final chapter but suggest that continued exploration of gendered power imbalances in self-presentation on social media is necessary, though more is being done in this vein of inquiry (Farrell 2022; Mascheroni, Vincent, and Jimenez 2015; Ringrose et al. 2013). As Farrell explains, “the ideal of being postfeminism and the reality of girls’ experiences are not aligned, as girls are being treated differently to boys in respect of their sexuality” (2022:26).

Annabelle is a very young, White tween girl, nine or ten years old at most. She is quiet and somber, positioning herself in her Pretty or Ugly video in such a way that much of her face and body are obscured by shadows and low light. She pleads in her video,

Annabelle is looking for answers. Through tears, she emphasizes how she is bullied at school and does not understand why. She indicates that she has gone to multiple schools, and her palpable emotion in the video suggests that she might experience social isolation from physical peer networks. She does not just ask her viewers to tell her if she is pretty; she also wants to know if they like her. Annabelle essentially equates being pretty with being good or liked and being worthy of male attention. She shares her pain and seeks affirmation about her appearance, about herself, on YouTube to mitigate impacts of the bullying she experiences in offline space.

Though I did not show my interviewees these Pretty or Ugly videos specifically, their reactions to the Pretty or Ugly videos we did watch together support the act of posting a video as a response to being bullied at school—a rational or reasonable avenue to seek out alternative modes of validation, affirmation, and clarity as a part of self- and social developmental processes. I think it is oversimplification to suggest that tween girls are only looking for objective truth or clarity surrounding appearance in these videos; there are obvious and significant stakes in girls being understood as pretty, as prettiness directly relates to and influences the power and aesthetic capital they have in their social worlds. They are also looking for affirmation and validation via participation in the trend, and this goal often marshals critical reactions toward them as attention seekers unless, as I outline through interviewee reactions to the trend, they suitably present themselves with humility and vulnerability.

I do not suggest that this desire for affirmation and validation necessarily or cleanly translates to crises of self-esteem and negative body image. Rather, I argue that the trend is indicative of a complex interplay between accommodation and resistance to enduring gendered protectionist discourses, dominant ideals of conventional feminine appearance, and “Girl Power!” ideology in a postfeminist/consumer feminist cultural context. In other words, the tween girls in the Pretty or Ugly trend are clearly struggling with a simultaneous desire and expectation to be seen within contemporary economies of visibility, gendered pressures associated with being pretty/attractive, and risks associated with making their bodies available to view in digitally networked publics. All the while, they want, in earnest, to self-represent in digital space as a way to navigate the frustrating and painful experiences they may be having in physical space as tween girls (Banet-Weiser 2018; boyd 2014; Farrell 2022; Shields Dobson 2015).

News media and popular media responses to the videos can hardly rationalize or critically examine why a tween girl would post a public YouTube video asking if she is pretty or ugly and subject herself to the possibility of getting trolled or cyberbullied. Many of the tween girls I interviewed feel this way, but they distinctly frame protectionist feelings within “Girl Power!” language (“She should only care what she thinks of herself”). Notably, however, tween girls also see practicality in posting as means of navigating and mitigating bullying behavior in physical spaces. Bullying then becomes not the presupposed outcome of posting a Pretty or Ugly video, as is the widely shared fear. Rather, for many tween girls, bullying is the impetus for posting one of these videos in the first place. Themes of homosocial bullying and girls’ relational behavior and connections with one another on social media are explored in more depth in the next chapter.

Why Girls? Gendered Differences and the Pretty or Ugly Question

One of my longest interviews is with Noelle, an energetic and assertive thirteen-year-old Black girl. I show her the same sample of three Pretty or Ugly videos, and she has a lot to say in response. I interpret Noelle’s reactions to the videos as a striking embodiment of the tension between empowerment and disempowerment discourses. Within a span of only a couple of minutes, Noelle articulates “Girl Power!” ideology, distances herself from the Pretty or Ugly trend, reasons bullying as a practical motivation for posting a Pretty or Ugly video, and finally, offers a soliloquy on gendered characteristics and what she sees as innate differences between girls and boys. We chat after watching the Pretty or Ugly video made by Donna.

NOELLE: So, basically, what they’re saying is, you want people to say you are pretty.

KP: Why do you say that?

NOELLE: Well, it’s obvious that she wants people to tell her she is pretty. And she’s also doing it to get “likes.” She says that. She wants people to like the video if they think she is pretty and not like it if they don’t.

KP: Why do you think she wants to get likes?

NOELLE: I mean, that’s just like, she wants attention. She wants people to watch her videos so she can be seen.

KP: Do you think that is important for girls your age?

NOELLE: For some girls. But not for me.

KP: Why not?

NOELLE: Trust me. I get it. I mean, I have felt that from my experience. I have learned from my experience, from people calling me ugly and bullying me. I have learned that. But now I just stick up for myself and tell them I don’t care what you think, that’s your opinion . . . [When] I look at myself, I see a beautiful, bright girl that is sweet and kind.

KP: I think that’s awesome that you feel that way about yourself . . . [So] why do you think there are so many girls asking if they are pretty or ugly on YouTube?

NOELLE: They are probably getting bullied at school, and they just want to know if they are pretty or ugly.

KP: Does that matter to girls, do you think?

NOELLE: Yes. Because the girls be the ones that are insecure and the boys, they don’t be so insecure. They don’t care what [other people] say. The next day they are like, “Oh okay, I don’t care.” But with girls it’s different. Because we have more emotions, and we feel sad inside. We have a lot of different things that’s going on with us and stuff. So, there are more girls than boys in [the Pretty or Ugly trend] because girls have more feelings and more emotions than boys do.

Amid contradictions manifest in cultural models of contemporary American girlhoods, tween girls must also navigate restrictive, reductive, and harmful heteronormative social forces that reify belief in a natural gender binary: the idea that there are certain traits or characteristics inborn to males and others to females (Butler 1990; Schilt and Westbrook 2009; West and Zimmerman 1987). Indeed, Noelle is not alone in her feelings. Tween girls articulate significant differences between boys and girls in how they use social media. At the root of these differences are elements of widely recognized and normalized socially constructed gendered scripts; girls are coded as more sensitive, more immature, needing more attention and assurance about how they look, while boys simply do not care. These beliefs permeate social structures and interactions between and among girls. Tween girls may be lambasting each other for overtly seeking attention from males (viewed as an undesirable quality and as inauthentic), but at the same time, they have been conditioned to compete with one another for male attention. This conditioning is not so easily cast aside.

The “Girl Power!” cultural model being sold to tween girls complexly intersects with continued insistence on compulsory heterosexuality and adherence to heteronormative behaviors and hegemonic gender roles. While academic research in girlhood studies, cultural studies, media studies, and other areas of inquiry is gaining ground on queering girlhoods, there is still a long way to go (Brickman 2019; Gonick 2006). Persistent contradictions in dominant narratives of girlhood result in toxic and backbiting behavior among tween girls, often undercutting rather than supporting one another (Mikel Brown 2003; Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2007; Hadley 2003; Hadley 2004; Mcqueeney and Girgenti-Malone 2018; Simmons 2002). The Pretty or Ugly videos showcase that tween girls understand their worth as being attached (in no small part) to appearance and ability to attract the opposite sex. A tween girl’s ability to attract the opposite sex is directly tied to her ability to embody and perform ideal femininity, which requires a skillful balance of concurrently performing empowerment and disempowerment.

During our discussions of the Pretty or Ugly videos, I asked my interviewees why there might be so many of these videos, but more than this, why tween girls specifically might be asking the pretty or ugly question on YouTube. Ariel, White and age ten, offers, “Boys don’t really care. Usually, ladies want the man. So, men don’t really care about whether they are like, ugly, or like, handsome.” Ariel’s answer suggests a learned knowledge of how gender roles and scripts work when it comes to caring about appearance, and it is directly related to cis-hetero attraction between men and women. She positions women in the role of seeking or desiring the man, so women take more care in their appearance because it allows them to attract male attention. Conversely, according to Ariel, boys do not care about what they look like because men do not care about what they look like.

I do not speak with tween boys in this study, so I will not project or purport to know how they feel about pressure and care surrounding appearance—even then, their answers would likely be delineated by a variety of factors surrounding different identities and embodiments. I hesitate to even situate a tween prefix in front of boys because the term is so heavily gendered feminine. Tween boys, to the extent that this demographic has been explored in academic inquiry, have also been framed as a consumer category, especially in relation to interests such as gaming, e-sports, and athletics (Cook and Kaiser 2004; Searle and Kafai 2012).

I consistently find that tween girls perceive boys their age as not caring about appearances. Tween girls caring about appearances is a recognized and accepted (though often lambasted and lamented) gendered script. Boys, on the other hand, may be coded as feminine if they come across as caring too much about appearance, which throws their proximity to hegemonic masculinity, and thus embodied privilege, into question. If they do emphasize care in appearance, it needs to be performed in conventionally masculine ways, such as building strength and cutting a more powerful and dominating image (Bordo 2000; Callen 2018; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The connection my interviewee Ariel makes between young people enacting gender roles that are projections of what they will experience as adults reinforces how these characteristics are learned and understood in the context of social media participation.

I ask Brooklyn the same question about why tween girls specifically are asking if they are pretty or ugly, and she has a quick response.

BROOKLYN: I just don’t think boys really care if they are ugly or not.

KP: Do you think it is more important for girls?

BROOKLYN: Uh, yes. (Rolls her eyes.)

I chuckle at her sardonic reaction, not least because I relate to her sentiment while reflecting on my own experiences as a tween girl navigating gender dynamics pertinent to expression, appearance, and performance. She conveys that the answer to my question is so obvious that the question did not even need to be asked.

KP: Can you say more about why you think that?

BROOKLYN: Well, like on social media, boys just use it to like, text and stuff, or post stuff about them doing basketball. It’s all sports and stuff. But then girls post beauty stuff and like, “I just got my hair done.” All this stuff. It’s more about what they look like. They care more about that stuff.

Phenomena such as the Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend are normalized via conventional cultural understandings, dominant narratives, and central findings in the tradition of girlhood studies of girls’ loss of self-esteem in the tween years, as well as societal emphasis on girls’ appearances being attached to their overall value and worth (Brown and Gilligan 1992; Brumberg 1997; Orenstein 1994; Pipher 1994). These knowledges elucidate the mixed and contradictory popular and news media responses to the trend as both evidence of girls in crisis and normal adolescent female behavior. Because girls are seen differently from boys, see themselves as different from boys, and have different societal expectations attached to their bodies and behaviors, it follows that their use of social media, as an extension and reflection of their physical social world (boyd 2014; Palfrey and Gasser 2016), would also be markedly gendered, especially related to the politics of appearance.

Tania, a soft-spoken eleven-year-old Latina girl, emphasizes the importance of appearance for girls after watching the sample of Pretty or Ugly videos. She says,

Tania’s final statement comes across as a contradiction, but I think it necessarily speaks to the gender codes that structure a politics of caring about appearance. Tania indicates that boys might be embarrassed to ask the pretty or ugly question, which suggests that it is less acceptable for them to care in the first place and that they might be stigmatized for asking. They likely also would not use the language of pretty if they were to ask, as it has deep gendered connotations attached to girlhood and young womanhood. The idea of a boy being embarrassed to seek validation about appearance on a public platform resonates with constructions of hegemonic gender norms in American culture (Connell 1987; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; West and Zimmerman 1987). Boys may feel insecure about their appearances, but that insecurity is perhaps less accepted, and certainly less expected, when compared with girls during adolescence.

Conversely, a tween girl can confidently ask the pretty or ugly question on a public digital platform, but her social position much more fervently obliges her to ask the question in the first place. Tania’s response implies the high stakes that tween girls place in seeking validation and affirmation about their appearances, especially when it comes to the moral values system attached to being pretty or ugly and performing and achieving girlhood in successful ways (Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz 2009; Harris 2004b). She positions it as being a “bigger deal” for girls.

My interview with Dominique reflects similar gendered differences in her response to the Pretty or Ugly trend. I ask Dominique what she thinks about tween girls asking the pretty or ugly question on YouTube. She lets out a quiet laugh.

DOMINIQUE: It’s girls asking because, well, because boys don’t care.

KP: Why don’t they care?

DOMINIQUE: Because they’re boys. They can come on however they want. They just really don’t care. Like they don’t care what other people think. They’re like “Oh, it doesn’t even matter.” You can say whatever you want. Like I have a friend and he’s like “Okay, let them talk and it doesn’t even matter. Let them say what they want about me, I don’t care.” Because literally people talk about him a lot and he’s just like “Okay, I don’t care. It’s not that big a deal.” And every day he still comes happy. Even though people are talking about him behind his back . . . [We] always be talking on the bus. We be laughing. We be cranking and laughing and he’s always happy even though people always talk about him behind his back.

KP: Is it different for girls?

DOMINIQUE: Yeah, girls just care more about what people think. And as we get older, I think the older girls really, really care about what boys think.

KP: You think it’s about boys?

DOMINIQUE: (laughs) Like they really, really care what boys think about them. And boys don’t even care. They barely care. They’re just like, “Do it, you’re not bringing me down.” But for some reason, it always brings girls down.

Dominique’s response recalls what Noelle expresses about girls being more sensitive and insecure, and it speaks to some of the crucial themes that emerge within this research: how tween girls must strategically navigate strict expectations of body, beauty, and sexuality while demonstrating and embodying confidence, the compulsion for tween girls to seek attention from boys based on hegemonic cis-het gender norms and to compete for attention, and how tween girls identify with and engage with one another related to these things, often through gendered bullying behavior. This confluence is then reified within popular culture representations of teenage girls, which champion narratives of teenage girls relating to one another in toxic, nefarious, and aggressive ways (Mcqueeney and Girgenti-Malone 2018).

A sense of tween girls feeling isolated from one another comes to the fore within interviews, especially within this framework of gendered differences among boys and girls. Michelle demonstrates this feeling in her thought-provoking response to my question about why girls specifically are posting the videos.

MICHELLE: Because guys don’t really care what anybody thinks of them.

KP: Why do you think that is?

MICHELLE: Because they have each other.

KP: Can you tell me what you mean?

MICHELLE: So, this actually leads to a good story. These two, well, there was one guy in my class, and a girl who was saying “You’re ugly” to him and all this and this other guy walked up to the girl and said, “He’s not ugly, he’s my bro” or something, and like they have a bro code or whatever and they stick to it.

KP: Oh, I see. Do you think that is different for girls?

MICHELLE: Yeah.

KP: How so?

MICHELLE: Well, like, girls bully girls. And a girl might be bullying a boy, but I don’t think the boy really cares, because it’s a girl. Like, that doesn’t matter as much because it’s a girl.

Implicit in Michelle’s explanation of how boys support one another and how girls bully one another is a gender hierarchy that positions boys as somehow more impervious to bullying behavior, especially if carried out by a girl against a boy, which reproduces gendered power dynamics that devalue femininity. According to Michelle, bullying matters more to boys if another boy is doing it. Michelle’s statement renders girls powerless against boys in these circumstances and against the “bro code” boys have with each other.

Earlier in this chapter, bullying is teased out as a motivation for why a tween girl might post a Pretty or Ugly video. I see the logic and rationale behind this reasoning in how my interviewees react in similar ways to the question of the “why” behind the videos. What I am more surprised to find is how deeply gendered that “why” is, and how it results from complex and nuanced gendered expectations, politics of appearance, relational behaviors between boys and girls as well as girls and girls, and importantly, how girls are conditioned to respond differently than boys to what people think of them, especially when it comes to seeking attention and approval about appearance.

Conclusions: Conditioning Tween Girls

Well-trodden gendered scripts such as girls being more emotional and sensitive are prominent in how the girls I interviewed reflect on how and why girls use social media differently than boys. However, the tween girls I talked with are also quick to employ “Girl Power!” ideology in their responses to the Pretty or Ugly trend, shoring up a spirit and attitude of internal worth, self-empowerment, and confidence. The contradictions that underscore contemporary American girlhoods are evident in the Pretty or Ugly videos as well as the interview reactions to them. The Pretty or Ugly YouTube trend is a digital manifestation of clear tensions between empowerment and disempowerment in how tween girls perform their bodies and ask the pretty or ugly question. Interviewees’ responses to the videos reveal these tensions as enacting a digital authenticity values system. Currie, Kelly, and Pomerantz write,

These competing ideas are readily apparent in how tween girls respond to the videos and police the girls taking part in the trend.

Through all the contradiction, tween girls articulate a perhaps obvious but nevertheless affecting overarching motivation for why they participate on social media and what they like about it: they just want to feel connected to each other, and they do not want to miss out on what their friends are doing (Barry et al. 2017; Underwood and Ehrenreich 2017). Taking into consideration the gendered politics of visibility on social media and the digital authenticity values system explored in this chapter, the next chapter further investigates themes of bullying and friend connections prominent across my interview findings. Tween girls are conditioned to relate to one another in complex, often pernicious and harmful ways. Social media participation among tween girls facilitates a compelling spectrum of relational behavior, from girl-to-girl bullying to manufactured “drama” to homosocial support and affirmation. This behavioral spectrum is reflected in how tween girls characterize the depth and breadth of their experiences on social media and its importance to them—the “how” and “why” behind their prolific use of these platforms.