Can we really win in today’s society? To be completely honest, I am not sure if we can.
But whose fault is that? Is it our own fault? Is it social media? The internet? Our peers? We could make a list a mile long about who is to blame for creating these “ideals” that women should strive for. Part of being a woman in today’s society should be acknowledging each of our flaws along with all of the societal pressures and struggles that women face everyday.
Today, society puts such a large focus on these “ideals” of beauty that are honestly unrealistic. We call out celebrities for Photoshop fails and for perpetuating these ideals, but they are not solely to blame. When all of the tabloids call out those same women for every unflattering photo, it is not surprising that these very real women feel the need to hide their flaws and insecurities.
Society’s definition of beautiful is certainly one definition of beautiful. But in the melting pot of the world, we should recognize that those standards of beauty are not genetically possible or realistically attainable for so many of us to emulate. We cannot all be 5 foot 10 with blonde hair and blue eyes, just like not all men can have 6-packs and ripped abs. What I want to know is how we decided that these unattainable bodies should be the normal, expected ideals for real people. How did we decide that these are the standards? And how do we expect people to feel when they cannot or do not live up to these standards?
When we present society with an unrealistic “ideal,” we introduce body image problems and self-image issues. We cause feelings of ugliness, hatred towards our bodies and hurdles of negative emotions that we shouldn’t feel. And with the rise of social media and the internet, we are only inducing these feelings of dissatisfaction into a younger and younger audience.
The media has a real impact on how prospective partners look at you and how you look at yourself. An image is a creation of a persona that we cannot realistically expect women to achieve. Everyday, we see the media oversaturated with women portrayed in an overtly sexual way and men portrayed in an overtly masculine way. While we may not notice it all of the time, it does have an effect on us. It creates a dose of pressure that we each feel everyday and creates a need for validation that can affect us all negatively.
So, in order to take back some control over our own self-perception and really build a strong, positive body image, we need to do a few things. We should all build an understanding that healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes with all different physical appearances and that those characteristics don’t define us. Getting to this stage is a very individualized process. But, we should all help each other instead of looking at our friends and self-insulting like “I wish I had your legs” or “I hate my arms, yours are so much better.” We have to focus on the new wave of social media that highlights real women with real bodies without the filter.
While women today can probably really win in today’s society, we knock ourselves down instead of building each other up because we focus so much on our own appearances. So, to really win in today’s society, we should all focus on building a healthy, positive body image and create more individual, realistic ideals for each woman to live up to her best self. Then, we can really say that our self-perceptions are truly our own.