A few weeks ago, the Greek women of Carnegie Mellon had the amazing opportunity to listen to Stacy Nadeau speak about her experience with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and her current dedication to helping women everywhere embrace real beauty. In 2005, Nadeau and five other women with “real bodies” and “real curves” were chosen for Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty to be featured on billboards, bus stops, and magazines in their underwear to debunk the stereotype that thin is beautiful. Women everywhere were inspired by the campaign, and a new awareness for beauty issues and self-esteem echoed across the world.
One of the issues that Nadeau discussed was the “rise of the selfie generation” in current teenage women. Most of us are guilty of taking selfies, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Ellen DeGeneres’s selfie from the 2014 Academy Awards (pictured) is probably one of the best selfies taken to date, and our very own President Barack Obama is famed for his casual selfies on the job. However, it isn’t these kinds of selfies that are an issue of the selfie generation. It’s the selfies on Instagram and Facebook that take half an hour to post because we need the perfect angle, perfect lighting, perfect makeup, and perfect smile to get the most amount of “likes” and positive comments from other people. It’s the constant need for external praise to boost self-esteem that is affecting this generation’s view on their body image and what is defined as beautiful.
Based on a study by Dove’s campaign, an overwhelming 98% of women do not consider themselves beautiful. The media has created a stereotype of the ideal woman as the tall, thin figures that walk the runway, and we constantly compare ourselves to the “perfect ideal” because we’re surrounded by their “perfect” images everywhere we go. The teenage years are the years we feel the most insecure about our body as we grow from our youthful selves into our adult bodies, and the selfie generation is growing up with the world telling them what they should look like. From eating disorders to unhealthy gym habits, there has been a huge rise of health issues in women because what we eat and how many calories we burn determines how thin we are, and consequently, how beautiful. But even through these unhealthy measures, 98% of us still do not feel beautiful. All we think to ourselves is “I’m not good enough”, and selfies are becoming a way to raise self-esteem because we need other people to tell us “Yes, you are.”
We all need to find that happy medium between mental health and physical health, and the rise of the selfie generation is only making this medium harder to find. Women will always be concerned about body image, but we have to draw the line when the pressure to be “perfect” interferes with our health. There’s nothing wrong with taking selfies when they’re being used in a healthy way. It only becomes a problem when we need them for our self-esteem. And at the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves that as Stacy Nadeau put it, “Sorry to burst your bubble but you can’t walk around looking airbrushed. It’s impossible.”