I'm not doing the "I'm not conventionally attractive" pity party with you guys anymore

A Rant

This is your big sister speaking. I’m here because I care. If I seem disappointed, it’s because I am and that’s okay.

Photo Cred: Tomythings on Pinterest. This is what I’m going to be doing instead of joining the self-hate sharing circle with y’all.

There are a lot of things I am inundated with regularly on TikTok that grind my gears. This is all by design of course. TikTok thrives on negative emotion to guarantee your continued use of the app and it’s a brilliant strategy I can’t lie. Because I am keenly aware of what they are doing, I’ve been able to ignore most of the rubbish I see. One Piece fans who are fascists? Scroll. Weird, all-too-local drama? Blocked. A million love island think pieces? App closed for the day, sorry guys. This is a skill that took months of effort to build up. A skill that goes completely out the window whenever I see another TikTok of a Black girl going into detail about how “conventionally unattractive” she is. I see that and I find myself typing in the comments before I can even process what I’ve just read. This is how they get you.

One of these TikToks in particular was doing so much psychic damage that I had to literally throw my phone to keep from losing any more XP. This young lady was admonishing the audience for “not letting her call herself chopped in peace”, referring to the people calling her beautiful in the comments as dismissive liars. The plot isn’t just lost, it’s evaporated. At this point I doubt it ever existed.

To start, it takes a lot of icky self-obsession to sit online and call yourself ugly all day. That much preoccupation with your “looks” isn’t healthy, I don’t care how you try and spin it. It’s normal to feel insecure and to think about ways you might be able to change yourself to fit some mold. But the moment it inhibits you from living is the moment when it should all go out the window. You are not “too ugly” to live so go do that.

Second, the elephant in the room just backhanded me with its trunk so it must be acknowledged:

You all aren’t ugly, you’re just visibly Black.

You have all of the features we have come to understand as Black. This wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t sit online all day obsessively consuming content from people who look nothing like you. But you do. And rather than interrogate that, we have to hear how your wide nose makes you ugly for the millionth time. How you have just the worst hair type imaginable and you pray to God every night for loose curls. How chopped you are because you have xyz. Boooo, tomato.

The reason this blows me is because I’ve been online for a long time. I started my Twitter in 2012 and never looked back (although I’ve been off Twitter for a blessed 6 months). So I’ve watched this play out time and time again in different iterations and I’m frustrated it keeps happening. It’s frustrating to see young girls fall in the cracks we worked to fill up. It pains me that every natural hair moment turns into 3A palooza and we have to start all over again. I just want everyone to get it, idk is that crazy to ask? I’m tired of listening to frankly stunning women decry their own beauty because it isn’t white beauty. As if it ever could be?

More than anything, it’s a reminder of the millennial failure that seems to hang in the air now. As a generation we had incredibly lofty goals for the future of our society. I would say we even started to make some progress. But it seems that, in talking to anyone much younger than me, that’s all vanished. It’s one thing that we can’t afford houses but to know that we couldn’t even make ONLINE a little better for the next generation? What was it all for? What do you mean the youth is body-checking in videos and calling each other the R-word? At the very least I thought we introduced a healthy level of embarrassment to the internet. I guess not.

Maybe we gave up and relinquished control too soon. Right now, I actually miss the blue-haired optimism of the 2014 internet. The body positivity, the follow threads, Steven Universe like, hope was really in the air. I think we should bring it back. Anything but listening to beautiful women call themselves chopped and worthless for the unacceptable transgression of being black. Anything but that.

---