Ah, Netflix. A staple of everyone’s hangover, Saturday night in, and every students preferred method of procrastination. Netflix is great in many many ways, and it’s bad in many others. You would have thought that after the (entirely justified) uproar after the release of ’13 Reasons Why’, Netflix would have thought through the subject matter of it’s original TV shows. Well it didn’t. It has continued produce more and more programmes, which are incredibly harmful, and to market them at young teenage girls. Not in the least of these, is the 2018 film, ‘Sierra Burgess is a looser’ and the TV show ‘insatiable’ which have proved that Netflix has no interested in rectifying it’s ridiculously detrimental obsession with appearances, but that it will only endeavour to create more genuinely harmful content, that teaches young girls that they are nothing more than how they look, that they are abnormal if they don’t look like a supermodel, and that they can only be granted a narrative to talk about their lives, if it’s about their appearances.
These Netflix originals reduce the experience of young girls in high school, to nothing more than their appearances. Plot lines are centred around young women grappling with the fact that they don’t look like a Kardashian, perpetuating a narrative that the only value people have, is related to their appearances. Who cares if you are kind, intelligent, a virtuouso or a bookworm, who cares if you are anything other than a face.
I would define ‘the ugly girl trope’ as a storyline revolving around someone who is not conventionally attractive, and how she looks is the only important or interesting thing about her. Rather, than this be portrayed in an effective way, say, dealing with the issues of body image or discussing how social media affects body image in young girls, this is done in a way that completely reduces the experience of young women, to just about how they look.
‘Sierra Burgess Is A Loser’ is a ‘love story’ based on a case of mistaken identity, where the coolest girl in school and the biggest loser (seriously, Mean Girls aired in 2004) catfish a popular jock. This film does nothing other than conform to harmful stereotypes of popularity and reduces the experience of young women to just about how they look. The character of Sierra Burgess says to Veronica during the film, “Do you have any idea what it’s like, to be a teenage girl and to look like this?”, because of course, thinly thing young teenage girls have to worry about, is how they look, and of course, the best way to rectify this, is to make a film where the only aspects of someone’s character that get any screen time, is how they look. Good job, well done.
The ‘Ugly Girl trope’ is also an issue in the TV show ‘Insatiable’, which was incredibly controversial from when the trailer was released. Again, we see the same characteristics – a young girl in high school, bullied for how she looks, reduced as a human being to nothing other than her appearance, and only given a plot line when she looses weight.
Well, it’s body shaming, and it’s sexist, (please show me a film where young teenage boys are reduced to simply their appearances) and damaging. What does this say about us as a society, if the predominant aspect of someones life, is how they look? ‘Sierra Burgess is a loser’ and insatiable are both to young teenage girls, how is it conducive to a healthy attitude in life, to say that the most important thing is how you look? At what point can we step back and acknowledge this for whats is – incredibly damaging to one’s sense of identity.
This simply isn’t something that I can reconcile with. Women are more than how we look, people are more than how they look, you cannot reduce human beings to their appearances, it is irrefutably problematic and harmful. We as a society, need to start thinking about the gross overvaluing of appearances and how thoroughly normalised it is, and dear God, we need to stop feeding this into the lives and minds of young people, or nothing is ever going to change.
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