#FeministsAreUgly

Overview

#FeministsAreUgly is a satirical hashtag campaign started to poke fun at the backlash against recent hashtag campaigns such as #YesAllWoman and #WhyINeedFeminism which often attacked the physical appearance or feminity of the feminist Twitter users.

Background

On July 22nd, 2014, Twitter user LilyBolourian^[1] tweeted a selfie of herself with the hashtag #FeministsAreUgly. She then tweeted out encouragement for other Twitter users to tweet their selfies with the hashtag.

Notable Developments

Media Coverage

On August 8th, 2014, Buzzfeed,^[3] published a post titled "Feminists Are Tweeting Stunning Selfies In Response To The #FeministsAreUgly Hashtag" which featured a collection of selfies tweeted out with the hashtag. Within a month the hashtag^[4] was tweeted out over 91,000 times.

Also on August 8th, Flavorwire^[2] published an article titled "#FeministsAreUgly Doesn’t Deserve Your Gorgeous Selfies" which argues that the hashtag features mostly women trying unironically to prove feminists can be pretty and thus excludes unattractive feminists, explaining:

"That “all shapes and sizes” constituency includes “pretty” feminists, yes. It also includes feminists who aren’t conventionally attractive, because part of feminism’s goal is to reject the equation of a woman’s appearance with her self-worth. And therein lies the problem with attempting to reappropriate a certain hashtag instead of letting it die."

They later included an update which LilyBolourian clarified had started the hashtag:

"“to create our own narrative and question what ‘ugly’ means.”

On the same day, the hashtag was also featured on several other websites including The Telegraph^[5], Bustle^[6] and The Huffington Post.^[7]

Notable Examples

Twitter Description FAIL

On April 26th, 2015, #FeministsAreUgly underwent a huge resurgence on Twitter, drawing more than 183,000 mentions over the course of the following 48 hours.^[15] While the exact point of origin for the sudden spike still remains unknown, many Twitter users^[11][12][13] familiar with the backstory behind #FeministsAreUgly began criticizing the microblogging service's official description for the hashtag (shown below), including @LilyBolourian^[10] who had originally coined the hashtag.

According to The Daily Dot's report^[8], the description was lifted from the headline of an Inquisitr^[14] article about the trending topic published during its initial takeoff in August 2014 (shown below). As the backlash against Twitter's algorithmic failure continued to spread, it also rekindled the debate at large about the standards of feminine beauty.

Search Interest

External References