You'd be forgiven for seeing that #FeministsAreUgly and #FeminismIsAwful was trending last night, and putting your head under the covers while groaning loudly.
This isn't the first time these hashtags have been trending, and they were originally started back in 2014 by feminists as a way to celebrate feminist beauty and take back a bit of power from the world of Twitter misogynists.
While the origins of this second wave of hashtags isn't yet clear - the result is exactly the same: the two hashtags are empowering, with a few women-haters confusedly adding pointless troll-tweets every now and then, only to be totally squashed. Score.
It's not clear how the hashtag was resurrected, but it was certainly helped by Twitter's new trends feature making a massive error thanks to its new algorithm, tweeting an old Inquisitr article from 2014:
Nice one, Twitter. But even weirder, is the fact that shortly after this was picked up, the hashtag dropped off the trending list despite having 7,000 more tweets than the other top trend #ExtremeRules. So the social media site just accidentally branded loads of feminists 'ugly', and attempted to scrub the dialogue off the face of the earth. Despite this, though, there are still thousands of messages of support, thousands of selfies being tweeted as a way to reclaim the common insult thrown at feminists, and the odd misogynist being a dick.
The only issue is that pretty much everyone is confused, and has presumed that it was started by misogynists (probably no thanks to Twitter), rather than feminists last summer, so there's been a lot of 'WTF ARE YOU EVEN JOKING' tweets that sort of miss the point. We're joking. Feminists are joking. It's ironic. Remember Confused Cats Against Feminism? Critics are also pointing out that the #FeministsAreUgly hashtag, looks like just an excuse for people to take pictures of themselves to show everyone how hot they are.
Again, it started off as feminists reclaiming an insult that the movement has been battling since it started - and while a load of people aren't quite getting it, and while taking a selfie, or tweeting something in support of the feminist movement isn't exactly going to lessen the gender pay gap right there and then, it's continuing a dialogue that needs to be pushed. Lily Bolourian, who originally started the hashtag, tweeted:
That explanation should clear up any confusion. She also goes on to explore the reasons behind feminists being ugly - and why there is such a complex conversation around what we perceive as beauty, in terms of societal ideals. Is it white women? Where do trans women fit into the dialogue? When will women stop being violated and abused for being women, or being women of colour? There's a reason she wanted to reclaim the insults in the first place, and until the world is equal and fair to women all over the world, we'll continue pushing this conversation.
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Picture: Matilda Hill-Jenkins** **
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.