英文每周一文，本周談談青少年對外表的不安全感。

Tell Me What You See, Even if It Hurts Me

‘Am I Pretty?’ Videos Posed to the Internet, Raise Questions

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

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Sammie, a shy 13-year-old girl from New Jersey, stepped out of the shower and pulled on a plain gray T-shirt. She left her hair wet and decided not to apply makeup. Careful not to wake her family, she looked into the camera and spoke in a near-whisper說話的聲音近乎耳語.

“People at my school and camp say I’m the ugliest person they’ve ever seen,” she said, “and I could be the ugliest person that could ever be living.”

“Be honest and tell me if I am ugly or not,” she continued. “I can take it, but please don’t say really mean stuff.”

She titled the video, “Am I Ugly or Pretty” and — like thousands of other young girls who have made similar videos — uploaded it to YouTube. Several months, 72,000 views and more than 2,000 comments later, she was still insecure about her appearance對於外型感到沒有安全感, she said in a telephone interview in December. But she had learned a lot about the cruelty of people人們的殘忍.

“I don’t like to look at that video anymore,” she said. “It makes me upset. There are people telling me to kill myself, and it’s kind of heartbreaking to know there are people like that out there. All she wanted, she said, was some clarity更清楚(知道真相). “I had a lot of people telling me that I’m pretty, and then had a lot of other people telling me different,” she said. “So I figured, you know what? I’ll just find out what other people have to say.”

As long as there have been 13-year-old girls, parents and friends have had to field the question, “Do you think I’m pretty?” But as a generation raised on YouTube and iPhones enters middle school, these questions are increasingly being posed to, well, anyone on the Internet. Today, one could spend hours clicking through short clips of insecure young girls用滑鼠點選這些對外表缺乏安全感的女生所製作的短片, and the occasional boy, imploring請求/哀求 the Internet to judge their appearance.

Unlike the walled-off environments of Facebook or Instagram, or the one-on-one intimacy of messaging services like Snapchat, YouTube — stodgy笨拙的 as it may seem to someone who has never known a world without it — is where these girls find opinions from what they believe to be the larger world. “Be honest,” they often say. “I can take it.” Not surprisingly, results can be devastating讓人心碎的, particularly to fragile young egos年輕人脆弱的自尊心.

“Yes, you are really ugly. Now go cry to someone that actually cares,” wrote one male commenter on a girl’s video. “Ugly at first I thought you were a boy,” a woman wrote to a girl who appeared no older than 12.

Still, the videos keep coming. A YouTube search for “Am I Pretty?” turns up more than 23,000 results. Some of the videos date back to 2009, though most have apparently been made in the last year or two. And more are being uploaded (and taken down) every day. Lately, the phenomenon has spawned生出了 satires諷刺作品, spoofs愚弄或是嘲諷的文章, digital vigilantism網民們擅自處決( 動用私刑) and at least one piece of performance art表演藝術.

Others are inclined to see the girls as victims. Such videos are “a new form of self-mutilation一種新形式的自殘 in line with與…一致 cutting割傷自己 and eating disorder暴食或厭食等不正常的飲食問題,” said one psychiatrist心理治療師 talking to The Associated Press美聯社. In 2012, Jezebel asked, “How do we get YouTube to make this illegal?”

That nearly all the people in these videos seem to fall from 13 to 15 years old is not a coincidence, psychologists say. As young teenagers enter middle school, they start to leave behind the cocoon of family家庭的保護 and childhood friends and reassess themselves by society’s standards. It’s what the psychologist Erik Erikson called the Identity Versus Confusion phase自我認同與混淆的階段, when children struggle to understand how their emerging selves might fit into the larger picture. YouTube provides a modern resource for teenagers grappling with搏鬥 a timeless problem永恆的問題. “They don’t understand when they put themselves out there that they are opening themselves up to this wide community,” she said. “It’s not the safe family environment they’re used to.”

For Sammie, the experience was similarly affecting. “It left me pretty depressed,” she said. Still, until recently, she had remained defiant 抗拒/反抗about taking down the video, equating its removal with admitting she is ugly.

Before the video was taken down, Sammie said that she was thinking about making a sequel, this time with makeup. “So people can see how I look during the day,” she said, “and a little bit older than how I was.”