It’s not just girls asking “Am I pretty or ugly?” on the Internet by Casey Johnston

You only need to do a bit of reddit digging to find all of the insecure guys.

A sampling of posts from the Am I Ugly? subreddit.

r/amiugly

The Internet has disseminated its fair share of concerns about insecure teen girls who are asking “am I pretty or ugly?” to possibly the last audience they should be consulting (the ever-hostile ranks of YouTube commenters). But a new examination of reddit by PsychGuides shows that teen boys aren’t immune to appearance-related anxiety. They’ve just found a different place to express them: in subreddits.

According to PsychGuides, four out of five submissions to the r/amiugly subreddit are by a male redditor, and the average age is between 18 and 19. In this subreddit, users post photos of themselves for open critique of the 35,000 subreddit subscribers and any passers-by who have thoughts.

But while men constitute most of the submissions, women make up most of the responders: 62 percent of the responses to submissions were made by female redditors 18 and under. Female submissions also get the most responses at an average of 54 replies per submission compared to male submitters’ average of 14 replies.

There is another reddit, r/amisexy, where men dominate the scene slightly less, at 62 percent of submissions to women’s 38 percent. The crowd that wants to know if it is sexy also skews a couple of years older, sexiness being a slightly more adult concern than ugliness. Either way, if you’re an insecure teen so in need of validation that you’ll risk the drive-by cruelty of Internet commenters, you always have reddit as a YouTube alternative.

Why Do Poor People 'Waste' Money On Luxury Goods? by TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM

We hates us some poor people. First, they insist on being poor when it is so easy to not be poor. They do things like buy expensive designer belts and $2500 luxury handbags.
To be fair, this isn't about Errol Louis. His is a belief held by many people, including lots of black people, poor people, formerly poor people, etc. It is, I suspect, an honest expression of incredulity. If you are poor, why do you spend money on useless status symbols like handbags and belts and clothes and shoes and televisions and cars?

One thing I've learned is that one person's illogical belief is another person's survival skill. And nothing is more logical than trying to survive.

My family is a classic black American migration family. We have rural Southern roots, moved north and almost all have returned. I grew up watching my great-grandmother, and later my grandmother and mother, use our minimal resources to help other people make ends meet. We were those good poors, the kind who live mostly within our means. We had a little luck when a male relative got extra military pay when they came home a paraplegic or used the VA to buy aJim Walter house (pdf). If you were really blessed when a relative died with a paid up insurance policy you might be gifted a lump sum to buy the land that Jim Walters used as collateral to secure your home lease. That's how generational wealth happens where I'm from: lose a leg, a part of your spine, die right and maybe you can lease-to-own a modular home.
We had a little of that kind of rural black wealth so we were often in a position to help folks less fortunate. But perhaps the greatest resource we had was a bit more education. We were big readers and we encouraged the girl children, especially, to go to some kind of college.

Consequently, my grandmother and mother had a particular set of social resources that helped us navigate mostly white bureaucracies to our benefit. We could, as my grandfather would say, talk like white folks. We loaned that privilege out to folks a lot.

I remember my mother taking a next door neighbor down to the social service agency. The elderly woman had been denied benefits to care for the granddaughter she was raising. The woman had been denied in the genteel bureaucratic way -- lots of waiting, forms, and deadlines she could not quite navigate. I watched my mother put on her best Diana Ross "Mahogany" outfit: a camel colored cape with matching slacks and knee high boots. I was miffed, as only an only child could be, about sharing my mother's time with the neighbor girl. I must have said something about why we had to do this. Vivian fixed me with a stare as she was slipping on her pearl earrings and told me that people who can do, must do. It took half a day but something about my mother's performance of respectable black person -- her Queen's English, her Mahogany outfit, her straight bob and pearl earrings -- got done what the elderly lady next door had not been able to get done in over a year. I learned, watching my mother, that there was a price we had to pay to signal to gatekeepers that we were worthy of engaging. It meant dressing well and speaking well. It might not work. It likely wouldn't work but on the off chance that it would, you had to try. It was unfair but, as Vivian also always said, "life isn't fair little girl."

I internalized that lesson and I think it has worked out for me, if unevenly. A woman at Belk's once refused to show me the Dooney and Burke purse I was interested in buying. Vivian once made a salesgirl cry after she ignored us in an empty store. I have walked away from many of hotly desired purchases, like the impractical off-white winter coat I desperately wanted, after some bigot at the counter insulted me and my mother. But, I have half a PhD and I support myself aping the white male privileged life of the mind. It's a mixed bag. Of course, the trick is you can never know the counterfactual of your life. There is no evidence of access denied. Who knows what I was not granted for not enacting the right status behaviors or symbols at the right time for an agreeable authority? Respectability rewards are a crap-shoot but we do what we can within the limits of the constraints imposed by a complex set of structural and social interactions designed to limit access to status, wealth, and power.

I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel colored cape or knee-high boots but I know that whatever she paid it returned in hard-to-measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double-take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a form that you would not have known to ask about? What is the retail value of a school principal who defers a bit more to your child because your mother's presentation of self signals that she might unleash the bureaucratic savvy of middle class parents to advocate for her child? I don't know the price of these critical engagements with organizations and gatekeepers relative to our poverty when I was growing up. But, I am living proof of its investment yield.

Why do poor people make stupid, illogical decisions to buy status symbols? For the same reason all but only the most wealthy buy status symbols, I suppose. We want to belong. And, not just for the psychic rewards, but belonging to one group at the right time can mean the difference between unemployment and employment, a good job as opposed to a bad job, housing or a shelter, and so on. Someone mentioned on twitter that poor people can be presentable with affordable options from Kmart. But the issue is not about being presentable. Presentable is the bare minimum of social civility. It means being clean, not smelling, wearing shirts and shoes for service and the like. Presentable as a sufficient condition for gainful, dignified work or successful social interactions is a privilege. It's the aging white hippie who can cut the ponytail of his youthful rebellion and walk into senior management while aging black panthers can never completely outrun the effects of stigmatization against which they were courting a revolution. Presentable is relative and, like life, it ain't fair.

In contrast, "acceptable" is about gaining access to a limited set of rewards granted upon group membership. I cannot know exactly how often my presentation of acceptable has helped me but I have enough feedback to know it is not inconsequential. One manager at the apartment complex where I worked while in college told me, repeatedly, that she knew I was "Okay" because my little Nissan was clean. That I had worn a Jones of New York suit to the interview really sealed the deal. She could call the suit by name because she asked me about the label in the interview. Another hiring manager at my first professional job looked me up and down in the waiting room, cataloging my outfit, and later told me that she had decided I was too classy to be on the call center floor. I was hired as a trainer instead. The difference meant no shift work, greater prestige, better pay and a baseline salary for all my future employment.

I have about a half dozen other stories like this. What is remarkable is not that this happened. There is empirical evidence that women and people of color are judged by appearances differently and more harshly than are white men. What is remarkable is that these gatekeeperstold me the story. They wanted me to know how I had properly signaled that I was not a typical black or a typical woman, two identities that in combination are almost always conflated with being poor.
I sat in on an interview for a new administrative assistant once. My regional vice president was doing the hiring. A long line of mostly black and brown women applied because we were a cosmetology school. Trade schools at the margins of skilled labor in a gendered field are necessarily classed and raced. I found one candidate particularly charming. She was trying to get out of a salon because 10 hours on her feet cutting hair would average out to an hourly rate below minimum wage. A desk job with 40 set hours and medical benefits represented mobility for her. When she left my VP turned to me and said, "did you see that tank top she had on under her blouse?! OMG, you wear a silk shell, not a tank top!" Both of the women were black.

The VP had constructed her job as senior management. She drove a brand new BMW because she, "should treat herself" and liked to tell us that ours was an image business. A girl wearing a cotton tank top as a shell was incompatible with BMW-driving VPs in the image business. Gatekeeping is a complex job of managing boundaries that do not just define others but that also define ourselves. Status symbols -- silk shells, designer shoes, luxury handbags -- become keys to unlock these gates. If I need a job that will save my lower back and move my baby from medicaid to an HMO, how much should I spend signaling to people like my former VP that I will not compromise her status by opening the door to me? That candidate maybe could not afford a proper shell. I will never know. But I do know that had she gone hungry for two days to pay for it or missed wages for a trip to the store to buy it, she may have been rewarded a job that could have lifted her above minimum wage. Shells aren't designer handbags, perhaps. But a cosmetology school in a strip mall isn't a job at Bank of America, either.

At the heart of these incredulous statements about the poor decisions poor people make is a belief that we would never be like them. We would know better. We would know to save our money, eschew status symbols, cut coupons, practice puritanical sacrifice to amass a million dollars. There is a regular news story of a lunch lady who, unbeknownst to all who knew her, died rich and leaves it all to a cat or a charity or some such. Books about the modest lives of the rich like to tell us how they drive Buicks instead of BMWs. What we forget, if we ever know, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are, i.e. not poor. If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.

McMillan Cottom is a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Poverty Research at UC-Davis. Find her work at tressiemc, where an earlier version of this post was originally published, or follow her on Twitter @tressiemcphd.
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"Stock Photo: New York - September 13: Model Walks The Runway At The Oscar De La Renta Spring/Summer 2012 Collection During New York Fashion Week On September 13, 2011 In New York City." on Shutterstock.

Race: Two Narratives the Black Community Needs to Give Up in the New Year by Yolo Akili, on the Kyle Phoenix Blog

Two Narratives the Black Community Needs to Give Up in the New Year

by Yolo Akili, Writer from HuffPost: Black Voices

2013 is here, and it's time folks.

It's time to leave behind the tired stories and unhealthy narratives that hurt our communities.

It's time to re-commit our focus to the brilliance, beauty and resilience we possess, so that these things can grow exponentially and overshadow the death, gloom and despair that the media and many of us have focused on.

This is not about delusion. It is not about pretending that problems do not exist. This is about re-adjusting our gaze. It's about getting as motivated about the things people are doing to help our communities as we are when a celebrity says something racist, or when a white film maker produces a film that distorts or minimizes our historical experiences. This is about getting excited and celebrating what we have going for ourselves as a community.

This is about finding a new lens on life.

So in honor of the new year, I'd like to offer you (and me) an opportunity to abandon two narratives in particular that have done a grave disservice to black communities. They are the "Ain't No Good Black Men" and the " Black People are Deficit in Every Damn Thing" narratives. Leaving them behind may not be easy, but by questioning these narratives and our commitment to them, we may come to some fairly surprising conclusions.

There are No "Good" Black Men:

There is an entire industry that has been created around the idea of there not being any "good black men." Everyone from media moguls to R&B singers rely on it in order to sell products to emotionally starved black heterosexual women and black gay men.

In consuming their products, black heterosexual women in particular are either lulled into a sense of fantasy or beaten into psychological submission because of a perceived inability to express an "authentic" male defined womanhood. This narrative is not only present in black heterosexual middle class women's lives, but in black gay male culture, where ideas of the lack of "good masculine" men echo very similar themes.

"Good," in the context of "good black men" often means a number of things: how much money he makes, how "hard" his gender expression appears and his ability to perform sexually are among them.

Good in this context is not about black men's inherent value as human beings. No, good in this context is about external realities. It is about our ability to produce income, and perform a rigid idea of masculinity that we are learning is not only unhealthy for us, but unhealthy for black women and the black community at large.

Good in this context is not defined by ones' ability to care for children. Good is not defined by one's ability to care for home, or to express emotionality. Those traits are dismissed and belittled, both by black men and their potential suitors. This narrative has created incalculable chaos in our relations in the black community. That's why it's time to let it go.

It's time to recognize a few things:

Black men's inability to acquiesce to rigid of ideals of masculinity is not a commentary, nor a reflection of our worth. Our "goodness" is not defined through our ability to produce income. Our goodness is not measured by our desire to be monogamous. Our goodness is not about our ability to be heterosexual. Our goodness is not reflected in our car. Our goodness is inherent, as children of the universe. Yes, It may be marred, by the psychological conditioning of our communities that make it hard for us to effectively deal with our emotional trauma. It may be subdued by the rage that we have been taught is our only acceptable emotional option. But it is not gone. Our goodness is in us. And no other narrative from this day forward should ever be acceptable.

2012 Narrative: Ain't no good black men.

Its 2013 replacement: Good black men are everywhere, waiting for someone to see and celebrate the good they posses and already are.

Black People are Deficient In Every Damn Thing:

This one really doesn't need much explaining. Turn on the news, switch to your Facebook feed, or browse your twitter timeline. It wont' be long before you will come across articles, videos, memes and essays that rave on about how #%$% up black people are. They will tell you a statistic about how white people are better. They will tell you about what black people don't do right. They will not tell you about the issues that white people have that are never pathologized because, well, they are white.

They will instead tell you about how we as black people are wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

But lack is not synonymous with black and black is not a metaphor for wrong. Still many believe this, and because they do you will not hear about the innovative ways in which black people are taking back our communities. They will not tell you about the black men and women honoring andcelebrating their children's gender and sexual diversity They will not tell you about the barbershopsworking to address health issues, or the churches challenging homophobia. There will be no stats that show how many black people are taking up vegetarianism to address dietary concerns. No stats that tell how many of us are not imprisoned. In the "black people are deficient in everything" narrative, none of that information is necessary, nor is it exciting. What is exciting is our death and demise. Our imbalanced focus on these things erases and minimizes the skills and talents we have.

This narrative has also severely hurt our sense of self worth. It is time to let it go.

2012 Narrative: Black people are deficient in every damn thing.

Its 2013 replacement: Black people are an abundant embodiment of brilliance, crafting new ways of being and thriving from our boundless creative legacy.

2012 is at an end. At its end we have choices to make. Will we continue to commit ourselves to unhealthy narratives that deny and dismiss the power and inherent brilliance of our community? Are we going to be honest with ourselves about how deeply internalized forces have impacted our perceptions of each other and work to change them? Can we simply take a moment as a collective to celebrate what we have learned and what we are doing? Yes we can. And we don't have to sacrifice acknowledging the pain. We don't have to sacrifice acknowledging the injustice. We can hold both, in balance, and move forward with a full and more cohesive vision of who we are for 2013 and beyond.


Enjoy!!!

Thank you for reading,

Kyle Phoenix

Email: kylephoenixshow@aol.com

Website: http://kylephoenixsite.com/

Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/2012

Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on Facebook or Follow Us on Twitter! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast

Relationships: Cra(z)y Cra(z)y Men, Part 1 by Kyle Phoenix

You've seen him around or maybe you've never seen him before and you "Meet Cute"---a Meet Cute is any chance, casual encounter that happens when you're not looking for it and one or both of you could be played by someone from a romantic comedy.  One of my more memorable Meet Cutes was on 44th Street and 8th Avenue.  I had decided to take in a Tuesday evening flick---Kinsey with Liam Neeson---and was strolling up the block to get a Pepsi to put in my bag (the theater only serves Coke.)  As I was standing at the corner about to cross to the deli someone in my peripheral vision leans out from the line of us standing on the curb and winks at me.  He did it a couple of times because at first I didn't notice but then I realized it was for me and smiled back in a big smile and he smiled and I smiled and he smiled and then I forgot to cross the street then I remembered and we crossed and we started chatting on the other side   I got my Pepsi, we sat at one of the dessert places in Times Square to kill an hour before my movie and he then joined me for the movie.

That was the beginning of 36 hours of cray cray on a stick.  I was distracted by how handsome he was---Black and Dominican mixing for all it was worth, his glob charm and quite frankly, I was high from the Meet Cute.  A really good Meet Cute to anyone can dislodge your good sense for a while and this was 2004.  Within 36 hours he revealed that he was 4 days out of prison, HIV+, somewhere between confused and bisexual, a former Calvin Klein model (yes, he was THAT kind of handsome), a drug addict, hated dated one of Diana Ross' daughters, his mother was dead, his stepmother was evil, he'd done several pornos, his father was mad at him, in jail there's a private space covered by a tent of sheets that's known as the Boom Boom room to go and masturbate, he had but refused to take his HIV medication, he was an on and off again prostitute, he'd been a drug dealer.....oh, and he was a Scorpio.

He was my last official cray cray date.
He stole a broken laptop from me.
He left his HIV meds.
No, we didn't have sex.

What I learned from this when I realized he was nucking futs---about 3 hours after the Meet Cute---was how I was responsible for all the other cray crays I'd met and dated over the years.  I'd let them in.

When you see crazy coming down the street, cross the street.  Don't give him your number.  Don't ask him how you can help.  Don't act as a referral service to anything but the local police station for him.  Don't feel bad about not being the world's social worker.  (Even if you are a social worker, you can take some time off too.)

Character
A man is his character.  Is he generous, caring, considerate, loving, thoughtful, courageous, responsible, keeper of his word.  I've learned to not excuse any of the really good traits for silly superficial traits--masculinity (personality put on), funny (who isn't?), charming (practiced), dysfunctional (drug addicted/neurotic/passive aggressive/narcissistic, not taking care of their health).

If you are sharing your body before you have an understanding of a man's character, you have to take every lump whether that's emotional, physical or STD related.  No one else is responsible for you not being able to control your desires though good character in another would have them extend their responsibility trait.

Reasons Why
Earth, Wind and Fire tore up that song!  But when someone starts telling you the reasons why, it should make sense.  if it doesn't make sense, it ain't true.  I've learned that crazy people are amazingly good at telling you how they are constant, continuous and unwitting victims to reality.  Racism, the police, their parents, drugs, women, men, the prison system, the color blue, oxygen and the dog sitting over there minding their own business.  Life challenges us all.  In fact it should be called Challenge and not something as simple as life.  And yes, we all need loving and understanding and a second chance.  But we also need the truth to be told to us as well as being able to tell it to ourselves.  Powerful people can handle the truth, weak people crumble from criticism.

As a side note, I notice how MSM are the most damned by criticism; they get an immediate case of the can't takes.  You tell an MSM that he didn't do something correctly or he was directly wrong and if there's room he'll dramatically fall out on the floor or throw himself at the window.  Why?  I trace it all the way back to MSM growing up with a hidden sexual preference/identity and the social pressures of manhood and masculinity around them that acts as a form of constant identity criticism.  Therefore when criticized their super tender to criticism---it must be homophobia, it must be racism, it must be misandry!

Nah, sometimes it's you, you did something wrong.  There are things for you to learn that you don't know or have learned incorrectly.

Heterosexuals learn how to separate (the healthy ones) criticism about their actions and criticisms about their identity.  That's a big distinction to learn, to move through, to internally know and it leads to a healthier sense of self-esteem and ability to be intimate and bond in successful relationships.  Are you seeing how the inability to handle criticism can aid in MSM not finding or creating satisfying relationships?

Self Esteem
I learned from my 2004 Meet Cute that I didn't have any feelings for him.  There was a time when he would've been the Bees Knees Life Project for me to take on!  For me to comfort and coddle and save!  Oh, Lordy, I could've saved him!  But by 2004 I'd been in several short and long term relationships, done some year long therapy tune up twice and was at a job that started out as a consulting favor but turned into a career changer.

Confidence and self esteem are not the same things.

Confidence is internal---it's that I feel adequate and capable and balanced enough to act.

Self esteem IS the action occurring and being put forth externally.

For a long time I confused the two, I thought because I felt good about myself that I had good self esteem when in fact I would allow all kinds of foolishness around me.  But by 2004 I'd thrown out friends, families, lovers, fools and even jobs who crossed my confidence.  I'd finally actualized my self to self esteem in action.  I distinct remember sitting and listening to Mr. Meet Cute in 2004 and hearing allllllllll of his cray cray and having no desire to fix it.  The real truth of being involved with cray cray MSM is you, not him.  You think you can change him, fix his nuttiness, deal with his problems (and your own---you're always putting yourself on the back burner to help the nutballs.)  Sitting across form him, I understood that while, yes, I felt sympathetic to his problems, I couldn't fix them. Not simply I'd decided wouldn't but couldn't.  Real power knows it's limits.  He'd made some adult decisions in his life, he was in his thirties that had detemrined a lot of where he was and where he wasn't.  I wouldn't and couldn't repair that.

Guilt
When I tell my 2004 tale in workshops to example how you have to be conscious of taking care of yourself and maintaining your character people often ask about my sympathy, about how I can be detached, how I can tell them to not pick up the phone, text the dude, answer the door, resist their compulsions.  I point out simply, the object of your desire is not in a room somewhere (or on this blog) talking about you.  Sit with that for a second.  Really sit with that.  Guilt ans shame are two different things.  Guilt is you did something wrong, shame is you are wrong as a person.  Setting boundaries doesn't feel bad.  If it does it means that you have issues with guilt and shame.  MSM who announce proudly their self-worth and that they're men of power who take care of themselves don't understand, power doesn't have to announce itself.  It simply is.  Like a flower or a mighty oak tree.

You simply stand.

I felt sympathy for all the stuff in the guys life in 2004 but you know what?  I didn't make those choices that he had in his life.  And he was actively not working on fixing those things.  That's a big thing.  He wasn't in recovery, he wasn't taking his meds, he wasn't working----he simply wasn't.  When you check out your own guilt look at what is that man doing to rectify these problems.  Desire is bluntly, bullshit.  Actions speak louder than words when people talk about making change.

Never trust a big butt and a smile.  POISON!

All people have trials and troubles, effort is how you tell cray cray from people with problems.  People who are just looking for attention or relief won't put in the work.  You can pay some attention to them, I do.  I pay attention to the cray cray who tell you the laundry lists of what went wrong.  But I listen as instruction on what not to do: whether that be drugs or unsafe sex or emotional drama untended to (yeah, those two therapists I went to for a year each---that's attending to all your drama in the right space.)

Responsibility and Accountability to your internal self confidence matching your external self esteem is how you avoid those how are destructive to themselves or you.

I was able to observe and hear and walk on by that guy in 2004 after 3 hours of observation because my internal (confidence) No and external (self esteem) No, are aligned.

Are yours?

Coming Soon: Part 2, Your Arrogance and Crazy Men

Thank you for reading,
Kyle Phoenix
Email: kylephoenixshow@aol.com
Website: http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/2012
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on Facebook or Follow Us on Twitter! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast onhttp://kylephoenixsite.com/