A couple of days ago I was scrolling through TikTok and a video popped up of a girl talking about her body shape in a negative way, which motivated her to purchase shapewear to make her hips look dramatically larger.
When I watched the video, I thought to myself “there was absolutely nothing wrong with how her body looked before she put on the shapewear”. The more I thought about it, I was seriously questioning why we keep putting so many unrealistic expectations on what a woman’s body should look like.
It feels like one moment we tell women that they need to be super thin but the next minute society is telling us we need to have a big butt and big hips. It feels like no matter what we look like, it is never enough for society.
This makes women feel like they need to change themselves to achieve whatever the beauty standard is, even if they hurt themselves both physically and mentally in the process.
Society has made having a large butt the trend for the last decade and there have been a drastic amount of plastic surgeries done to achieve this look. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, nearly $16.7 billion was spent on cosmetic procedures in the U.S. in 2020.
BBL’s or Brazilian butt lifts are a very dangerous procedure that involves removing fat from one area of the body and transferring it to the buttocks. A study done by the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation in 2017 showed 1-2 people out of every 6,000 who had a BBL died as a result of the procedure. In the ’90s and early 2000s women were pressured to be as thin as possible by society. This created issues such as women developing eating disorders to obtain this body type.
Women have struggled with body image issues and loving themselves throughout history. But it seems like it has only gotten worse with the rise of social media and photo editing.
Women should never feel the need to compare themselves to other women, but society always seems to find a way to pit us against one another.
The reality is that the body shape of a woman has a lot to do with genetics and it is wrong to make women feel bad for how their body naturally looks. Some people are naturally thin and some people are naturally curvy; but neither one of those body shapes is better than the other.
Society needs to stop uplifting one particular body shape and shaming all of the women who aren’t shaped like that.
There is a huge difference between encouraging women to be healthy and encouraging women to have a particular body shape. Health truly looks different on every woman.
I personally have struggled with body image and feeling like no matter what my body looks like it is never good enough. But what I have realized is that the only opinion about my body that matters is my own.
That is why I strive to be healthy, instead of trying to look like whatever society is saying the new body trend is.
Let us know what you think of how society makes body types into trends by tagging us @HerCampusSJSU