I, like millions of girls across the great wide-open interwebz, have uploaded a Facebook picture where my lips are pursed defiantly at the camera. I do it all the time, actually, and I think it’s badass. Recently, to my slight dismay, I found out that this facial expression is called “duckface." I also noticed a trend around the webz of people, mostly young men, dissing (for lack of a better term) the duckface; calling it “stupid” and “un-sexy”. There are entire sites dedicated to hating the duckface, including www.antiduckface.com. This set off my feminist alarm--to me, the anti-duckface campaign reeks of controlling how a woman presents her image and her body.
Seriously, how could pursing my lips bother another human being so much that groups of people have rallied to make sites and fan pages dedicated to stopping me from doing it? I don’t recall taking Facebook pictures to appear sexy to my male friends or to strange men. It got me thinking: if men were making something similar to the duck face, like giving a thumbs-up in every Facebook photo, would women feel like we had the right to create websites to stop them? Would we rally around something so minor?
I'd usually ignore the anti-duckface thing, but it grinds my gears to see that society still thinks they can tell women how to present their bodies to their friends, communities, or the web. What happened to just not looking at something you don’t like? At this time, I wish to kindly ask anti-duckfacers to mind their own business, and keep their gaze away from our bodies and Facebook pages.
