#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

Search Interest

External References