Back in 2013, Katherine Phelps was surfing YouTube when she stumbled upon the “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” trend. In this trend, young girls would post a YouTube video asking their viewers to evaluate whether they’re “pretty” or “ugly,” as measured by conventional standards.
Galvanized by this, Phelps began searching for the reason why young girls felt the need to post content like this. Interestingly, she found that a lot of the news media and popular media were covering the trend.
“The adults who were writing these articles had a lot to say about what these girls were doing within this trend,” says Phelps, a teaching faculty for the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies.
This caused Phelps to wonder why the media cared so much about what the girls were thinking. Why was everyone so up in arms about young girls wanting to feel pretty, when girls have been conditioned to seek that sort of external validation for centuries?
“I really wanted to understand how tween girls themselves were characterizing their experiences on social media, how they were using it, what they liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, what they thought was important and how it informs their daily lives,” she says.
This compelled Phelps to write Digital Girlhoods, a book about her research on young girls existing in social media spaces. She wanted to learn how girls navigate social media and the potential dangers and benefits of doing so.
To begin her research, she studied 260 of these “Pretty or Ugly” YouTube videos and interviewed 26 girls between the ages of 10 and 13.
To her surprise, she found that the girls she interviewed weren’t necessarily using social media for validation.
“Tween girls are not generally engaging in behavior that we might deem to be unsafe or risky or reckless on social media,” Phelps says. “They’re really using it to communicate with their friends and have fun with their friends and engage in their interests.”
What Phelps discovered is that the way we talk about girls on social media is influenced by the perceived amount of risk they face being endangered or threatened online. The girls were okay with talking to their parents and caregivers about online safety and moderating what content should be public and private.
“They really care about safety, and they care about boundaries,” she continues.
One of the drivers behind Phelps’ research is to dig down on the revelation that many girls are taught to be safe on social media, but we perceive them as “at risk” because they’re girls, and the internet can be a dangerous place.
“I think we need to have a very different conversation about how we have conditioned girls as both targets for sex, the sexualization of girls in larger media and how girls have internalized that,” she says.
Girls are conditioned from a young age to feel the need to be pretty, Phelps says. She learned in her research that a lot of the “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” videos showed a distressing desire for external validation, which Phelps discovered was because of their perceived physical appearance.
Phelps said that her research is a more “nuanced take” in her field of study; it offers the narrative that girls are taught to be relatively safe on social media, but that their learned safety is a product of a much larger system that teaches girls that they need to constantly be vigilant.
“We think of social media and online space as being this really secretive and unregulated place where risky behavior is inherent,” Phelps says. “And that’s not what I found. That’s not what girls are sharing with me.”
Instead, Phelps found that girls seem to just want to use social media to communicate with their friends and participate in cultural and political conversations in ways that girls have never had access to before.
“Girls today are among the first generations to really grow up completely immersed in the digital landscape,” she says.
But social media can still be a dangerous place, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and Phelps believes that’s an important thing for people to remember.
“Is it devoid of risk? Absolutely not,” she says. “But negative body image has been a plight of American girlhoods for well over a century, and social media is not the thing that caused this.”
Phelps says her students enjoy learning about this content because of its relevance to them and their personal narratives. Students appreciate Phelps’ fresh takes and interest in research that directly affect people who are not too much younger than themselves. It’s one of the reasons Phelps was recently given a 2025 College of Letters & Science Academic Staff Teaching Excellence Award.
“[Phelps] connects deeply with her students, teaches them well, and encourages them to take themselves seriously as thinkers and scholars,” Judy Houck, professor and chair of the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, says.
Phelps understands how short the semester is to cover such wide and complex topics, but she feels empowered by the effort and enthusiasm that students put into her class.
“The most important thing for me is that it does not stop and start in the classroom. You carry it with you,” Phelps says of her teaching methods.
She draws inspiration from School of Medicine and Public Health researchers Dr. Megan Moreno and Dr. Ellen Selkie. Moreno and Selkie do research on the same subject from a pediatric point of view; psychologists, sociologists, MDs, and pediatrics all take different angles when researching the impact of social media on young people.
Phelps’ research reminds us that young girls’ digital presence is not just based on trends that can be cause for alarm like the “Am I Pretty or Ugly?” trend. This is how a new generation expresses themselves, shares ideas and communicates. Phelps found that young girls need to be listened to, not just policed.
As the world changes, our conversations about young girls’ digital presence need to change, too. Phelps found that girls are not inherently unsafe on the internet. And she believes the way we view girls as perpetual victims is framed in a societal narrative that subjects girls to a life of fear and subjugation without addressing the problem of predation on young girls at its core.