When Beauty Becomes Tragedy

Paighton Marie Hoffman was a young woman in Ontario (Canada), and she committed suicide sometime around late November. Here is a GoFundMe for the family, which has already exceeded its goals. There are not many details about the exact arc of her life and how it ended as it did, and that’s really not for us to know, honestly. If you look at some Facebook memorials, most of which seems to be public, you will see comments about mental health and SSRIs and “freeing yourself,” so I guess we can generally assume maybe this was a longer-term mental health issue. I get it. I have been there.

I was looking for information this morning about a different crime case, a seeming murder-suicide out of West Valley City (Utah), and usually 4Chan has details about stuff like that ahead of the media. (Don’t ask what that says about society.) I saw this woman over on 4Chan and the entire discussion was about how — and remember, 4Chan is a very notable incel haven — this girl was too hot to kill herself, and she could have had anything, and what does this say about how young women perceive themselves?

First of all, I don’t think anyone is “too hot” to do anything, much less kill themselves — which is a deeply emotional and troubling thing. That line of logic doesn’t hunt.

Second, I guess I do understand if you’re a chronically-online incel boy and you see a beautiful girl and think “If only I had met her and showed her love, it wouldn’t have come to this,” well, I kinda sorta get that line of thinking, although obviously you never would have met her if you live outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan and she lives in Ontario, Canada. I suppose there’s a 1 in 10 million chance.

Third, about young women: this is a very complicated issue. I’ve never been a young woman and I have never had the pleasure of raising a young woman, so I can’t speak too deeply to it. What I could tell you is that we’ve had a lot of narratives about this in the past five to ten years. I think the common argument is “the damn phones,” and there are graphs about when young women get Instagram vs. their generalized mental health.

For a minute in the lead-up to the 2024 “seismic” elections, we blamed teenage female depression on “liberal parents.” Noice.

There has been some weird shit of late with female predators and groomer behavior, too. I’ll admit that.

That is all different from the main case here, of Paighton. I don’t know exactly what happened with her, and I hope she rests in both peace and power, and I hope her parents get some peace as well.

I definitely do think we need to look more at what the modern female adolescent experience is like, and where we could support it more. I think that’s only logical.

And as for hot people not wanting to unalive themselves, well, lots of hot people are just as depressed and feel nothing as ugly people. That cuts across both facial and body type lines.