Selfies, Children's Masks, Full Stops, Zoom Face, Social Media, BAME

 

Proserpine
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( 1828-1882)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

A third of girls and young women will not post selfies online without using a filter or app to change their appearance, while a similar proportion have deleted photos with too few "likes" or comments, research has found.

About half regularly alter their photos to enhance their appearance online and "find acceptance", Girlguiding's  annual Girls' Attitudes survey found.

...One respondent said: "I find it hard to go through Insta because everyone looks perfect and it lowers my self-confidence."

Phoebe Kent, a Girlguiding advocate from Reading, said she felt influencer culture was one of the most damaging phenomena on social media.

The 20-year old...said "I think now because I'm older I'm able to critique the things I see online and overcome it, but for the younger girls and young women it just absolutely knocks your self-esteem. I know  so many people that have just ended up coming off social media because they can't deal with the detrimental impact on their confidence and wellbeing.

(PA Media, The Guardian, 2020)

So what helped Phoebe Kent to "critique the things I see online and overcome it."? Surely it was not just her age? Did she have discussions with her peers? Was it just a personal response? Some answers might just help those who are struggling with the whole notion of enhancing their appearance online.

Children's Masks

A Man Holding His Nose to Avoid Breathing in a Miasma 
unknown artist 
Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain]

Children will swap their masks, ping them, spit in them and pass them around for fun, shout obscenities through them, bully each other over not having the right type of mask, lose them. That's why we should ask whether masks in schools make children less safe.

(Katharine Birbalsingh, Headteacher, The i, 2020)

Refreshing to hear a teacher saying what some children will do with their masks. 

Full Stops, Part Two

The Old Man
Francis Reily
Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery Collection [ CC By-NC-SA]

Young people, say linguists, have ditched the full stop in online communications not because they are being lazily ungrammatical, as I had assumed - ... but because the full stop is now seen as "angry" and "aggressive" and "not sincere" and marks you out as "old", and the fact I can't understand why it might do any of the above does, I suppose mark me out as "old" which I don't wish to be marked out as, just as I don't wish to be seen as "aggressive" or "angry" or "not sincere"...

(Deborah Ross, The Times, 2020)

So if you don't mind being seen by young people as "angry", "aggressive", "not sincere" and "old" then carry on using the full stop as before?

Zoom Face

Meditation
Gustave Jean Jacquet (1846-1909)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

"Are you suffering from zoom face?" Grazia asked. "Looking at ourselves on video-conferencing calls is taking a toll on our faces and our minds."

While carefree male users were still chewing gum in glistening close-up, it emerged that women, including very young women, were experiencing agonies of self-consciousness in meetings via laptop, which were only exacerbated by the lockdown ban on hair and skin treatment.

"I just look tired. Droopy, jowly, tired," one Zoom face sufferer told Grazia's Polly Vernon.

"I'm literally always frowning," another told Glamour magazine, where the writer concluded: "Just keep reminding yourself that as soon as lockdown is over, you can book in for as much Botox as you want. Just kidding."

...Reopened clinics are reporting a surge in inquiries. By last week this Zoom-fuelled phenomenon had featured on Radio 4's Today programme, one of whose male presenters sounded strikingly keen to normalise Botox for "the Zoom [young] generation". His interviewee, 29-year old Rebecca Reid, had sought treatment, persuaded by the sight of her own face in meetings. It was, she said, "seeing myself from all sorts of angles and realising I was starting to look older than I actually am."

...But it seems fair to wonder who benefits if, helped by successive endorsements, regular Botox comes to seem as routine (for people who can afford £200 per treatment) as hair-colouring, leg waxing, brow threading, as the chorus from lockdown confirmed, already are.

...In Botox Nation: Changing the face of America, Dana Berkowitz described some users' addiction as "crack-like". In 2017 she told the Observer's Lucy Rock : "The problem for me is that in targeting younger women the doctors are trying to create this lifetime consumer." The problem, three years on, is they seem very close to succeeding.

(Catherine Bennett, The Observer, 2020)

So does botox, lip filling etc become just another fashion accessory, an extension of the makeup bag? Cosmetic enhancement  isn't just about delaying the ageing process for these young women. Isn't it also  about them wanting to make themselves look more attractive? 

Social Media

Wise Government Holding a Bridle above Intemperate Discord
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) (and studio)
Photo Credit: The Banqueting House - Whitehall Palace, Historic Royal Palaces
[CC BY-NC-ND]

... Social media is the enemy of moderation because it empowers verbally incontinent people to make life hell for those in charge of anything. A friend who has been for many years a county councillor plans to quit at the next election because she can no longer endure the sheer nastiness of online abuse. Social media can no more be uninvented than atomic weapons but controlling its excesses through regulation seems essential to raising the quality of both politicians and political debate...

(Max Hastings, The Times, 2020)

Anonymity on social media seems to encourage a disappearance of restraint and an increase in personal nastiness. The issue being debated  becomes secondary to the belittling of the individual taking a point of view. Must critical thinking and the right to disagree be overwhelmed by personal abuse?

*Sir, Max Hastings is right to seek to moderate the incontinent abuse displayed by many on social media, which is driving good people out of the public arena.

Equally, though, measures need to be proportionate and should minimally impact on freedom of speech. There must be a strong argument that, to comment on the activities or posts of others, people must be willing to identify themselves. It cannot be beyond the wit of platform providers to implement a policy of allowing access only on provision of an authenticated ID, which is then displayed on all messages.

(Dr David Bogod, West Bridgford, Notts, The Times, 2020) 

BAME

Why is the acronym BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) offensive? Because people of Jamaican origin, Indian origin or Chinese origin are not all the same.

UK Music, the trade body for musicians, has now said that music companies should stop using Bame and should instead refer to artists' racial heritage if needed. Quite right. Bame is meaningless. My parents are from the Caribbean and I am black and British, as is a friend of mine whose origins are from Zimbabwe. For the most part, we are very different. It's about rejecting the grossly insulting assumption that all non-white people are the same.

(Katharine Birbalsingh, The i, 2020)

Seems like common sense to me.