Much like the internet itself,boy having sex with a girl in bed video I am old and exhausted, and I’ve seen too much to really get worked up about whether people want to post attractive black-and-white pictures of themselves. If you’ve been within 10 feet of your phone in the last few days, you may be experiencing the same #challenge fatigue.
You’ve no doubt noticed that your Instagram timeline has been inundated with black-and-white photos in which your friends and various celebrities look casually stunning. They’re captioned with the bland but intriguing hashtag #ChallengeAccepted. Sometimes they talk about empowering women, and almost always they tag a few other people to take the challenge, too.
In the comments, the person’s friends typically lift them up and tell them how amazing/gorgeous/inspiring they are. In that sense, sure, it’s empowering, but beyond that why are we doing this and who is it helping? It turns out to be a rather thorny question. The lack of a clear answer ended up spawning a deeply exhausting fight, which is just about the last thing anyone needs right now.
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How did we get here? Well, if you, like me, clicked through on #ChallengeAccepted when it first arose to try to figure out what the actual challenge was, you were met with...no obvious explanation. There’s a lot of #womensupportingwomen and spreading the love, but no concrete connection to a more specific cause than “women” and no indication of how posting a flattering picture of yourself is useful to womankind.
For a brief time, it appeared as if it had originated as a movement to raise awareness of femicide in Turkey, and a number of tweets and Instagram posts went viral in a secondary effort to raise awareness of the raising of awareness. (I know, it’s a lot.) As the New York Timeseventually uncovered, it turns out there's no great rationale for the mountain of selfies that continue to pile up as we speak. This challenge had already happened once on a smaller scale in 2016 to spread cancer awareness, and it just kind of came back — as often happens in the endless cycle of internet tail-eating.
Predictably, things got sloppy after a day or so of the challenge going wide. As people began to search for meaning in the meme, the educational commenting phase began in earnest, which only made the whole thing more viral. Problematic women like Ivanka Trump joined in — and got immediately slammed. Some who’d shared their pics in turn began posting updates (sometimes only in Stories) and then updates to those updates when they learned their first update was off base. A mildly shame-y discourse simmered in the group chats: “Did you see X posted a pic? This whole thing is so pointless lol.”
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And, yeah, it IS basically a useless sweep of vanity that’s devoid of any actual feminism. #ChallengeAccepted may be the most vague viral internet challenge to date, but it’s one of literally hundreds to clog our timelines in recent years. They were fun at first, but, as Mel Magazine wisely pointedout on Wednesday morning, they’ve become so abundant and such a part of daily internet life, that the word challenge itself has lost all meaning.
In many ways, #ChallengeAccepted and the subsequent backlash is similar to what happened in early June with the Blackout Tuesdayeffort. People posted black squares on their timeline to raise awareness of Black Lives Matter. It was seemingly a simple act of allyship — even easier than digging through your camera roll for the perfect picture of you to post — and it spread like wildfire. But it got messy fast.
It soon became clear that Blackout Tuesday was not actually started by a racial justice organization but was instead an initiative that had bled over from the music industry. The biggest issue was that the flood of black squares hashtagged #BlackLivesMatter ultimately made it harder for people to find necessary information about the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests.
The important difference with #challengeaccepted, though, is that it’s basically a victimless trend. (In fact, whether it was meant to or not, it did end up giving attention to femicide in Turkey, even while others argued using the hashtag was silencing those voices.) In its best light, it was a chance for a certain segment of women to feel better about themselves for a brief moment. And that’s OK! If you want to post a picture of yourself looking good, you should. Quar has left so many of us feeling more alone and isolated than ever, and the desire to be seen and appreciated is a real one. It’s nothing fundamentally more complex than “felt cute, might delete later.”
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The error many committed, obviously, was conflating the need to be seen with the desire to be seen as doing good. That’s this challenge at its worst: An empty gesture of performative allyship. And, yes, that’s deeply and rightly irritating to those who need allies to put in the work offline to help raise awareness of their cause — and that includes many women that this challenge was supposedly trying to empower.
But those are the two most extreme viewpoints.
We’re living through a years-long nightmare and we’re all exhausted and doing our very best to get through this. We have a lot of vital fights to fight in the months ahead — a pandemic, an election, and now demon spermon top of it all. There are many reasons to battle with and harshly judge your close friends and distant Facebook enemies, but black-and-white selfies are not chief among them. There is no benefit to expending our few remaining shreds of bandwidth on scolding people for not properly handling a vague Instagram hashtag.
So here’s your gentle reminder that you’re under no legal obligation to engage, in the challenge or in schooling other people about why they shouldn't be doing it. If you really want to wade in, assess why you feel the need to and if doing so will actually help anyone. But you can also just swipe out of Instagram and go sign a petition or make a donation or learn something new about an issue that’s important to you. (Mashable has a very helpful guide on how to be an effective ally, if you want to start right now.) You don’t even have to tell anyone you’re doing it!
All of this performative selfie allyship and subsequent bickering is petty and tiring, and the end result is to drive us down deeper into our individual tunnels of numbness. So the next time you see all your friends jumping on a hashtag bandwagon, take a deep breath and then just… don’t.
Then take the little pile of energy you’ve saved and turn your attention to taking the actual #2020challenge: Doing the work to fight for real change.