Photo: Instagram / TikTok
This is no way for women to treat other women.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Mar 27, 2022
A 17-year-old junior from a high school in Alabama went to homecoming with her boyfriend and took plenty of beautiful pictures to mark the occasion — posing with him in their dress and showing some harmless Public Display of Affection (PDA).
However, when her boyfriend’s mother posted the photos on Facebook, all of the Facebook moms from their town had something negative to say about the photos, her boyfriend, and her as well.
Grace Brumfield went viral on TikTok after showing the adults’ reactions to her Homecoming photos.
Brumfield’s TikTok video has well over 12 million views and the story was promptly picked up by Buzzfeed and she spoke out about what went down.
“I hate my town,” read the caption to her video, while the subtitles read “I loved how my pics for homecoming came out. My boyfriend’s mom posted them on Facebook…this was the feedback on the photos.”
Everything from comments about the dress to the poses her and her boyfriend, Zach, struck — everything was a problem for the “Karens” in her town.
“Whew my mama woulda killed me if I dressed like that and my dad would’ve killed my date if he put his hands on my lower half,” read the first comment in the TikTok.
Brumfield was wearing a black dress that she altered and customized herself to loosely resemble Princess Diana’s black revenge dress.
“That dress is inappropriate. You don’t have to show private parts to get attention. You will get the wrong kind of attention. Girls wonder why they get raped,” wrote a mother on the Facebook post.
“Don’t dress like you are asking for it. And, no I’m not jealous. I’m disgusted that girls dress like tramps instead of beautiful young women.”
Equating the way a girl dresses to asking for rape is something you would expect from a misogynistic man, not from a mother in your own town talking about a teenage girl.
“Paying for a homecoming date!! That’s wrong,” read another comment, making the joke that Brumfield was a sex worker that her boyfriend had paid for to go to homecoming with him.
Not a single one of the comments that she had posted in her TikTok came from a man, but instead, they all came from women — mostly mothers.
"It shocked me because most of them were from women — and they were all mothers and grandmothers,” Brumfield says.
“The only question I had was, Why? I didn’t see anything wrong with my photos, so why were there negative comments?"
The photos were taken in a sunflower field. As such, Zach’s mother decided to post the images in a Facebook group called “Sunflowers and Daisies” that she had been a part of but didn’t expect any of the backlash it received.
"My boyfriend's mom started telling me how the pictures had somewhere around 32,000 likes,” Brumfield said. “She was talking about all the nice comments, and then she said, 'And of course, there are the negative ones as well.'”
“My heart kind of immediately sank because I felt so confident about my appearance and attire that night,” she said about the situation, “and I didn’t want that confidence I had to be in a way stolen from me. I have been picked on my entire life — my freshman year, I moved schools because it got so bad."
Zach’s mother defended her up and down the post, which had been removed by a group admin for the controversy.
She also had reassurance from her boyfriend himself which helped her get through the tough situation — enough that she could even joke about it in the form of her viral TikTok.
She received an outpouring of support from the younger demographic that exists on TikTok and had one final message she wanted people to take heed of.
"I think that what any man or woman decides to put on their body is their choice. As long as no one is being harmed, it’s nobody’s business,” she told Buzzfeed.
“I dress the way I dress because I know what looks good on my body and what makes me feel confident in my own skin. Nobody else has the right to tell someone to cover up more because it’s distracting — older men and women need to be taught to control themselves."
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.