Women around the world, with their exquisite beauty, come in all shapes and sizes. However, mainstream media only recently has decided to pave way for representation for all those women who don’t fit the tall, 6 foot, slim figurine description.
As recently as thirty years ago, it was incredibly difficult for curvy women to find a store that sold clothes that not only fit them but also adorned them in the same way the clothes adorned their “slimmer” female counterparts. You’d think that an increase in representation has led to an influx in self-acceptance, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
As harsh as reality sounds, women have become hyper-aware of their physical appearance due to societal and media inflicted beauty standards. In today’s world, the media has played a vital role in establishing a benchmark for beauty standards.
It has induced perpetual body image issues, because of its constant scrutiny towards those who don’t fit its so-called depiction of what the ideal female body should look like.
Take Instagram models, for example, they like to give the perception that the bodies that they flaunt on Instagram are the result of the insane diet and exercise regimens they’ve undertaken.
With varying sponsor posts flooding their feed, it is no secret that following those very regimens – they swear by – is the last thing they do. Although they might not outright say it, they do portray to their young impressionable viewers that if they lose enough weight, they’ll magically be blessed with plumper lips and insanely high cheekbones. As humans, the need to be socially acceptable is wired into us.
So we convince ourselves that our arms need to be thinner or our thigh gap has to be wider, and here we enter a whirlwind of insane diet plans and a constant state of unhappiness towards ourselves and our bodies.
Social media‘s increasing role in promoting unhealthy habits has become a point of concern. Almost every impressionable adolescent has an account on any one of the leading social media platforms hence exposing them to toxic narratives at an age where individual ideologies, mindsets and points of views are not yet developed.
This exposure not only leads to younger people feeling more self conscious about their looks but also them reflecting their own insecurities on people around them, consequently perpetuating body image issues in society.
As any responsible user of social media, it is our duty to remind ourselves how the social media world is a world of fantasy, and how we can only love ourselves once we recognize how social media’s standards are unrealistic and dormant in real life.
