Tag Archives: pretty or ugly

Our You Tube video reaching 6000+ views in one day!

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You Tube video girls asking I am pretty or ugly

I’ve decided to make a video collage from bits of the PoU clips in You Tube (yes..very time consuming I know…) hoping to raise awareness of the issue.

The video reached 2000+ views in the space of just a few hours thanks to retweeting and other sharing on social media platforms. I woke up this morning and saw the viewers count at 6000+ : I am amazed!

Even if the funds in Indiegogo are not growing as fast as I wish (I know that without a specific selling point or product to show/pre-buy crowdfunding is notoriously difficult!) I remain optimistic in the power of collective awakening about these issues and the many emails received from supporters along with the growing number of subscriptions to the channel are something which really spurs me to do more.

I would like to publicily thank all the lovely supporters who have written their emails: I hope you will all appreciate that I won’t have the time to reply to each one of you as I am still managing things mostly on my own (will be soon recruiting a team of volunteers so get in touch if you wish to help!) and need to prioritise the writing up of my thesis at this stage 😉

Please keep sharing and don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to keep up to date with our progress and receive new blog posts directly in your email box.

Update Feb 2014: the video was removed by You Tube after I started a petition to remove or disable abusive comments. The visitors count was reaching 134,000 in one week due to Upworthy contribution.  I think this shows how much profits can get in the way of ethical conduct. You can still watch the video in Vimeo:

 

500,000 girls in You Tube asking: “Am I pretty or ugly?”

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Pretty_9

Today I became painfully aware of a disturbing phenomenon in You Tube: 500,000 videos of young girls asking the same question over and over: “Am I pretty or ugly?”.

At the beginning I thought they were just a few isolated cases and that it would be interesting to include them in a separate playlist for our You Tube channel, but then my playlist started to grow and grow until the number of URL links associated with this search started to become overwhelming.

So I decided to investigate further: how many of these videos are actually there? 100, 200, 1000, 10,000? Apparently much more than that: 500,000 (and still growing by the day).

These videos are not pranks or acting: they are made genuinely by young girls who are simply insicure about their look, seeking strangers’ approval, whatever that might be.

The scary thing is of course that:

  • the phenomenon touches mostly only girls (so far I found just a few exceptions)
  • many of these girls are incredibly young
  • their videos are not monitored or removed from You Tube despite their young age
  • these videos provide an irresistibile tentation for the millions of trollers and cyberbullies out there, just waiting to unleash their hateful comments.

Indeed if you scroll down through the long list of comments for each one of these videos you will invariably find many spiteful ones and I wonder how much damage has to be done before some action is finaly taken.

British performance artist Louise Orwin is trying to raise awareness of this growing phenomenon by starting her own “Pretty Ugly project”, a three-part experiment involving her own (fake) “I am Pretty of Ugly” (POU) clips, a live performance in London, and a call for feminist dialogue and debate.

I am including below the link for other three videos discussing this alarming trend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrdK4diJurM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16KBFq4PxtQ

http://bit.ly/1dHRiMy

You can also have a look at the relevant MSG’s playlist if you want to watch a selection of these POU’s clips in one place – but I warn you: it does make for a pretty depressing watch… 🙁