The Damn Duff

hey bitches!

there is something really liberating  and cathartic about writing a blog post which anyone in the world can see, but no one actually knows who you are. Its like being handed a microphone but being able to wear a mask when you’re talking.

anyways, this brings me onto the subject of this post; a certain label which has crept oh-so-stealthily into our vocabulary – The Duff. This word is relatively new to me and until a couple of weeks ago I  didn’t even know of its existence. The word Duff stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, and so has the power to hurt people a lot more than classic lables such as jock or nerd.

Let me set the scene; I have two best friends, lets call them D and N. Well, D and N, to put it frankly, are hot as fuck. they are the type of gorgeous that people turn around in the shop to look at. boys literally fall over themselves to talk to them. Next to them I am, in a word,  unextraordinary.

My first encounter with this word was a couple of weeks ago when a few of my friends and I  went to get ice cream and a busload of boys drove past us. N, D and another girl called M started fixing their hair and sticking out their asses for the boys. I, on the other hand, face covered in ice cream, just waved at the bus. Afterwards, M turned to me and said “Oh my god you are so definitely the duff”. And, not knowing what that meant, I laughed along.

And then, last night, I watched a movie called The Duff.  It has Robbie Amell in it and oh my god, super hot. But the point is that i related so much to Bianca, the main character a.k.a The Duff for her VS model type friends. She was the friendly one, the one with loads of boy friends but no boyfriend She was seen as smart and approachable, but not pretty or sexy.

May I also just say that Bianca was neither ugly nor fat, and so made the whole point of the film redundant. So, of course she found an incredibly hot boyfriend by the end of the movie, but that left me stranded. i had identified my ‘label’, if you will, as The Duff of my friends, but i didn’t know how to use that label, mould it to fit myself personally.

As well as this, the movie all but wrote in neon letters that a woman must get the hottest boy in school if she wants to break free of being called fat and ugly. I call bullSHIT. No woman needs a man to find validation. She should gain this validation from within herself, not some man telling her that she is beautiful, so this whole concept is utter horse crap.

To be honest, I was actually feeling quite mugged off. because I had been led to believe that labels were a thing of the denim-clad ’90s, and here I was, branded with a new label and completely unaware of how to brandish it in the terrifying world of a pubescent teen.

So, dear reader(s?), I ask you this; were you ever branded with a label? comment down below. Make me feel less alone in my struggle against yet another unwanted label.

Bye for now, bitches xo