I was recently on the internet (though quite frankly to say that would mean I’d have had to get off the internet) and I was doing my rounds on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter when, on Twitter I came across a hashtag. #FeministsAreUgly was a worldwide Trending Topic and I was mortified, because not only are Feminists beautiful but all women and all people are. I clicked the hashtag and while the page was loading, in those two flash seconds, I was dreading what would come up. I was expecting a lot of cocky young men to be tweeting out sexist, crude, misogynistic sentiments (of 140 characters or less) but I found none of that. Perhaps the topic first emerged because one man did so, but instead I was pleasantly surprised.
Instead what I saw was a mass of women posting selfies in reply. None of them were saying “Am I ugly” or looking towards other people to validate their beauty, but instead their captions were “Are you sure?” “If that’s the case then I like being ugly”
I admit, at first, I thought isn’t that a little bit… vain?
But I was horrified by what I had just thought. It was the type of thoughts that come from the mouth of misogynists, not feminists. It was what a society had taught me to think when someone, especially a woman *gasp*, was outwardly showing their confidence, and I hated that I had let myself think such a thing, even for a split second. Because behind these captions and comments was what I love most about humanity.
What this thread was actually, was a bunch of women and men, all standing up for themselves against the sort of people who tell them that they are not enough. It was people having the confidence in themselves to say “no. I’m beautiful” and that’s a sort of confidence that I greatly admire. It was actually women and men standing up for each other and when you look at all the selfies collectively and see how many people have the confidence, and the power to stand up and say “I am beautiful” it is truly wonderful. It is not vanity, it is simply self-worth.
So I retract my initial thought.
That is just what society has told me to think.
Instead I think that these people are owning it in ways that words cannot properly describe, even if I am trying to with this blog post. I think that these people are amazing and all beautiful. I think these people should be celebrated and given a round of applause because they have a level of confidence that I am still trying to work towards. But you know what?
I am a feminist,
And I am NOT ugly.
I am beautiful.
The Hobbs Collective 
I don’t really get it, tbh.
It’s just people posting their pictures. Cute young people who are yet to be hit in the face by the full brunt of the gender divide. It’s narcissism under the guise of feminism which, honestly, sucks.
Tackling gender issues in 140 characters or less though to be fair is a pretty big ask.
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It’s not narcissism, it’s people telling other people that they aren’t going to let these opinions affect them. They’re not letting people tell them they’re ugly, because they’re not. No one is. Yes, they’re yet to experience the wage-gap and some of them are probably yet to experience sexual harrassment (i know people who have experienced sexual harrassment as young as 14), but sexism and mysogyny runs deeper than people in work. There are people at university and on my facebook feed that think it’s okay to say these things, or do these things when it’s not and that’s what this is saying. They’re putting their face to what they feel, because that’s, in part, what it is about. The fact that it’s young people may not just be down to the fact that they haven’t experienced it, it may just be that they’re the majority of the people that use twitter and share in a selfie culture. It may just be that they haven’t experienced these things that they’re the sort of people who do not find it commonplace to be demeaned and are therefore the sorts of people who won’t just put up with it. Maybe.
It’s a complicated world, but people have voices, and opinions and feelings, and they’re saying that by doing this. So what if it’s a selfie, it shows that they have absolute confidence in themselves. So what if they’re young, so what if it could be done differently, the point is that this sort of thing is being done at all.
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They’re the people too concerned about ‘what makes a feminist’ and needing to prove that they’re not ugly/bra less/dressed in dungarees/hairy-legged (although they’ve not chosen to post selfies of their shaven legs…or mercifully their bras!). Instead of navel-gazing about that perhaps it would be better to look at ‘what makes it necessary to be a feminist, rather than just, say, a person doing their thing’ or ‘what needs to be tackled to make things fair’. It’s the economics of the world that’s stitching people up, supported by politics and conditioned through history. Posting cute pictures isn’t going to help that.
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