Posting of pictures of the ill, disabled and handicapped.

[dbgtz]

Recently if you haven't seen, there is a "most beautiful teen" contest (which is absolutely absurd) and I often see people comment or like pictures related to it. I often see people posting pictures of who they say are relatives saying "my x has x syndrome, like if you think they're beautiful". So that's where this thread stems from.

These sorts of things frustrate me mostly because the poster of it is clearly fishing for attention. But also because if the person didn't have said illness/injury then people wouldn't really give a stuff and would just say they're ugly. While I'm not saying the person should be insulted and tormented etc. and I do have sympathy, I think that saying they're beautiful is just unnecessary and getting other people to say that they are beautiful through the internet just adds insult to injury as it is just sympathy when they would probably want to be treated like anyone else. Having said that, they probably never know what their relatives post on the internet.

So does anyone else bow to the peer pressure of saying that they're beautiful, ignore it completely or directly comment on any picture which does this? It would be interested to see how people react to these pictures.

[Mathew]

I was talking about this yesterday in HxHD because I've recently seen on Facebook how there's photographs of disabled children with captions like "everyone is beautiful, no matter what you look like". I think the bottom line is that disabled individuals simply want to be treated like everyone else - drawing attention to their differences is completely inappropriate. Wrapping it up in a cotton wool ball actually has the opposite effect (rather like political correctness).

[Jordy]

Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder but I honestly wouldn't take notice of compliments from the Internet or people I don't know, who's to say they're not saying that to everyone else and it's so much more complimentary to receive such comments from people you're close to. I suppose some people get kicks off compliments from strangers but chances are they aren't genuine and may as well be ignored.

[Jazz]

Its a bit like people posting on their fb pictures something like 'yh ik i look like a tramp' then people put nice things about them. I really don't like this form of attention seeking, or any. Its annoying

[GirlNextDoor15]

Like it or not, beauty is subjective!