Glow Up Culture Makes Me Uncomfortable
Have we become our own bullies in our quest to “glow up”?
“I bet you regret being mean to me when I was an awkward pre-teen… because now I’m hot!”
Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but this is the plot of nearly every glow-up video or post across social media. People talk about some bullying they experienced or an unkind romantic rejection and then show how ‘hot’ they became afterward as if it’s a sort of revenge. Or they show awkward pictures of themselves, usually between ages 11–16 (an awkward time for many), and then say how proud their younger self would be because now they’ve grown up to become conventionally attractive.
They went from feeling rejected by oppressive beauty standards to conforming to and upholding them. Yay?
The lesson many of these seem to hinge on can be summarized as: don’t bully people for how they look, because they could become more attractive later. Rather than: don’t bully people because we are all struggling on this floating rock together and deserve basic human dignity.
Ultimately, we are still linking a person’s value, even our own, to how aesthetically pleasing we are according to a specific set of cultural guidelines. Guidelines that are created to sell us things and keep money in the pockets of a small number of people.
