Am I Ugly?

If we want to know if we're pretty or ugly, whom do we ask? Tweeners ask strangers on YouTube. The apostle James has a different suggestion.

Her screen name is "sgal901" -- and she wants to know if she's pretty or if she's ugly. But rather than ask her parents or ponder it with her friends, this middle-school student decides instead to pose the question to the world at large, via YouTube.

That's right. Smiling sweetly at her laptop and donning a knit-cap made to look like a koala bear "sgal901" does what middle school girls do: She complains of being called ugly by some and "oh-my-gosh-so-beautiful" by others. But rather than simply lamenting the craziness and confusion of being 13 years old through scribbles in a diary, this is, after all, the digital age, "sgal" has turned to the Internet for insight. Is she pretty? Or is she ugly? And the Internet has responded. This one young girl's public pondering of her own beauty has been viewed more than 5.5 million times and racked up over 130,000 comments.

This girl is not alone. In fact, she's representative of a growing trend among young girls who have been jumping on sites like ...