Earlier this year, an image doing the rounds on social media sites whipped users into a frenzy of indignation. It was a diptych of a little girl of four or five, her hair askew, her dress slipping charmingly off her shoulder, her face radiating joy. The accompanying text read: 'The person who shared this with me said "This would never go viral, she's the wrong colour", and I wanted to punch something.'
The reverse psychology employed by whoever it was who launched this communique worked, for enraged viewers liked and reposted it in such numbers few social media users would have missed it. Actor Blair Underwood's own posting of the image on his official Facebook page received more than half a million likes, 300,000 shares and 33,000 comments.
The girl in the photograph was black, with sharp cheekbones and bright eyes the likes of which Somali models Waris Diri and Iman would no doubt have also possessed at a similar age. The original poster's implicitly racist comment was quite obviously aimed at stirring debate. But there was something deeply worrying about the response it provoked, for those tens of thousands of commentators were focusing their collective ire not on the child's skin colour, but on her looks.
'Stunning!', 'Beautiful!', 'She could be a model!', 'Gorgeous little stunner her parents must be so proud', 'Such a rare beauty', they exclaimed, falling over themselves in an effort to fulfil the poster's mischievousness intention of making the post go viral.
It was as though the child had been called ugly rather than black. And so appearance-obsessed is our society that responders countered this racist jibe with an unintentionally ironic, unselfconsciously sexist response.
Their comments reinforced the fact that beauty is a currency which — as People magazine demonstrated when it declared Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o its most beautiful person for 2014 — has finally caught up with the times and is now measurable and tradable and worthy of appraisal in any female, no matter her race, no matter if she is a little girl barely out of nappies.
And it's not only women 'of colour' who are now being recognised for their physical attributes: 'plus-size' role-models are lionised for their curvaceous deliciousness (think Adele and model Robyn Lawson); women who post make-up-free selfies in the name of cancer research are declared 'stunning' by their social media followers; and new mothers with their misshapen bellies and drooping breasts are stripping