Bryann Lehman
ENGL-101-24
Information Synthesis
November 8, 2018
Misconstrued Ideals
According to the National Report on the State of Self-Esteem, 92% of teenage girls feel like they need to modify part of their appearance to conform to society’s expectations of them. It is a common notion that women who seem obsessed with their looks and weight, sometimes to the point where they develop depression or eating disorders. Alternatively, when women are confident in themselves, they are supposedly conceited or naive for thinking that they are perfect enough to not constantly worry about how attractive they are. Even from a young age, girls learn that they should hate themselves, with 81% of ten-year-old girls admitting that they have dieted at least once. The truth is, the society we live in makes a profit off of women hating themselves, and though many preach about loving ourselves no matter what, nothing is ever done to change anything. However, if we, as a society, decide to take action, the rates of girls who harm themselves because of how they feel about their appearance would decrease significantly.
So, what are the causes of poor body image? There tend to be three main ones. Firstly, the media affects everything a society does and believes nowadays. Television, magazines, and social websites tell consumers what is cool, what they should care about, and, more subtly, what people should look like. All actors in shows are conveniently attractive, and women in commercials are all beyond gorgeous. Many television shows make fun of overweight people, and if they don’t do it explicitly, they make them the comedic relief characters that no one takes seriously. Plus sized models appear more often in the media nowadays, but it is rare, and even then, many people online still say fat people should not be “praised for being unhealthy.” The truth is, the sight of people with the same body type as a consumer makes them feel more confident about themselves, yet these critics take their happiness away with their words.
Bullying can also be a main factor in why girls can be so insecure. Though many people would agree that bullying does not occur as often anymore as it used to, it still very much exists, especially by way of fat-shaming. Many people believe the connotation that “fat” means “ugly”, despite how beautiful a woman may really be in her face. Bullying also does not just happen in schools anymore; it occurs very often via the Internet, meaning people who have never ever met someone can make accusations and assumptions of people based solely on his or her looks and weight. People tend to think that, since their saying it behind a screen, it is somehow not as insulting. However, cyberbullying can be just as, or more, damaging, since complete strangers are insulting someone who is just trying to enjoy their time on their social media accounts.
Lastly, a reason that people can be so high-strung about another’s appearance is out of pure ignorance. There is a beauty standard that all girls want to live up to, and though people don’t want to admit it, it is often racially biased in favor of the Caucasian look. Desired traits tend to be delicate features, light skin, straight hair, and light eyes in women nowadays. This leads to the bullying of people’s skin color and style of their hair, or the way their nose looks, even if their facial features are classically beautiful in their own culture. Media hardly ever portrays people of dark skin color, and beauty products are being sold even to this day that is meant to lighten the user’s skin, sometimes permanently. It is also common that white women receive praise for having traits that women of color have, yet the others receive hate for it instead, just because they are not white and are, supposedly, uglier than those of European descent. Society is ruthless to anyone who looks different than what they want them to look like, even if they can’t help it.
Giving females negative thoughts about their looks can give them more than some hurt feelings and motivation to buy some new clothes. According to Stephen Hinshaw, the author of The Triple Bind, psychiatrists diagnose one in four girls with eating disorders, clinical depression, and other mental disorders due to the perfectionism of society. From personal experience, there are many girls, especially in high school, who develop anorexia nervosa or bulimia due to the belief that they are too overweight for anyone to love and appreciate them. As most people know, females are not born with this idea in their mind; they learn it. It is damaging for other people to be around people who think like this as well. Other girls tend to think, “If they think that they are too fat, what do they think about me? Am I too fat too?” As irrational as that seems to people who have never had to deal with problems such as these, it is a very real thing that girls, teenagers especially, worry about more often than they should.
The best support system, for a lot of people, would be their own families. The best thing that a parent can do to help their daughters is raising them in a positive household to make them thoroughly believe that they are beautiful and valuable. However, this doesn’t always protect them from society’s harsh judgments. Often times, girls feel that the opinions of their peers matter more than to those related to them, especially since parents tend to believe their children are beautiful no matter what. Due to this, many people do not take family compliments as seriously as those given by people they go to school or work with. Cutting out negative media and refusing to resort to frustration when a family member in need of support gives in to their temptations are the best things that parents can do for their children. However, sometimes that is not enough for someone to recover.
What about those who do not live at home, or who are too embarrassed to ask for help from their parents? There are, of course, ways to up one’s self-esteem with their own help, though professional help is definitely the best solution to the problems caused by one’s body image. It is difficult for someone to change the way they think, especially when they believe something so strongly, so getting better takes time for women with eating disorders. Alternatively, one should not discourage themselves by the amount it takes to recover from such a mental illness. Healing takes time, and it can be painful and sometimes more difficult than struggling with the depression and disorders that they are fighting against. With cases such as this, psychiatrists tend to use cognitive behavioral therapy, which takes negative thoughts and breaks them down so that they are able to build them back up into positive ones instead. As well as this, some use dance therapy, which is exactly how it sounds, in order to make someone more comfortable in their body.
In the study of Visual Eating versus Associative Learning as Mechanisms of Change in Body Size Preferences, women were shown pictures of beautiful women of all types, but, more specifically, of some who were fat and others who were thin. In the study, one group were shown more pictures of heavier women, and by the end of the experiment, those women said that they preferred the heavier body type over the thin ones. For another group, however, they preferred the thinner bodies because they were shown more pictures of those than the heavier ones. This proves that having more diversity in the media, such as heavier models and actresses, tends to cause a more positive look on those body types and, in turn, a more positive look on the women who see them. If so many people would stop criticizing companies when they support body positivity, as mentioned above, it would be much more likely to occur and could improve the mental welfare of women across the nation. It would be a slow change, and it wouldn’t be a complete change either, but a step in the right direction can lead to a whole new chain of activism that our society needs.
Despite this, the prevention of poor body image and eating disorders really lies in the person. Many research findings say that poor body image usually isn’t actually rooted in simply the appearance of one’s body, but rather how someone feels in his or her body instead. A girl thinking that they’re “fat and disgusting” is usually them projecting their frustration about the things happening around them, and they develop this idea that their life would be so much easier if they were skinnier. The first thing a victim of eating disorders has to do is accept the fact that a particular weight or appearance is not going to bring them pure happiness. Along with this, they must stop comparing themselves to girls who happen to be thinner than them, both by their appearance and their achievements. The girls’ successes usually have absolutely nothing to do with how much they weigh, but people with dysmorphia tend to not recognize this. Nothing and no one can force someone in need of help to get it, especially when that person doesn’t see that what they are doing is wrong. Every change has to start with them.
Although the main focus nowadays is on the way that women experience pressure into being perfect, we should not ignore the struggle that some men face. Though studies of men prove that they are more confident than women are, some even believing that they are more attractive than they really are, 10% of people with an eating disorder are men. Males are also statistically proven to be less likely to seek help for their mental illnesses since many of them learn to believe that they can not show emotions or weakness. However, unlike females, men’s body dysmorphia lies in their desire to be muscular rather than skinny, leading them to adopt abnormal eating patterns, excessive hours at the gym, and the use of steroids and other supplements. The reasons for this insecurity are the exact same as women’s, being teased for being too scrawny and only seeing athletically built men praised on television for being attractive.
Many people argue that sometimes people need the push in order to lose weight and that their mean comments aren’t meant to bully the recipient, but to save them from their own unhealthy lifestyle. Comments like these can be found on just about any popular post featuring a plus-sized model or a heavier girl just trying to enjoy herself, and it is ignorant of someone to think that their insults would do anything by way of encouraging someone without damaging their self-confidence and mental health along the way. The best way to support someone who wants to lose weight is to, first of all, make sure that they actually want to lose weight, then support their decisions to work out and eat healthily. Speaking from personal experience, it is an awful feeling when someone pushes someone else to lose weight when he or she is already perfectly content with his or her body. After all, one’s body should not be anyone else’s business.
In conclusion, our corrupted society has a very specific and virtually unattainable beauty standard for women, and it is leading to the downfall of strong and confident females who just want to love themselves in peace. The solutions to this problem are not quick and easy, and it will be near impossible to get everyone on board with making the change, but there can no longer be so much silence when so many lives are ruined and taken by people’s harsh words. People need to begin to speak up when they hear others talking badly about someone else’s, or their own, appearances. If someone has a suspicion that his or her friend may have an eating disorder, he or she cannot stay silent in fear that he or she will make things uncomfortable between the two. Many people would agree that they would rather have an awkward conversation than to find out their friend has been hospitalized from fatigue, or that they took their own life because starving themselves just was not working the way that they wanted it to. Eating disorders are real and serious, and they are not something a person can just “get over” when they realize they are being “ridiculous.” The worst thing that someone could do is invalidate the feelings of someone who has mental health issues since it isolates them and makes them feel even more different and alien than they already do. We, as a society, need to make a change for the sake of the women of the future.