You’ve probably all seen this aesthetic before. You know- the “picture perfect” girl who has abs, a killer job, and a regularly scheduled 5am wake up time for pilates and a green smoothie. On the surface, this seems great. Why not glamorize being healthy? Until you realize that she’s avoiding carbs completely and cancelling plans so she doesn’t miss her workouts- oh, and that she doesn’t exist.
In 2020, eating disorder rates skyrocketed. This makes sense, since our lives were entirely disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and lots of people struggled with isolation and mental health issues. For kids in schools, this meant a lot more time on phones, and a lot more time comparing their lives to other people’s highlight reels. An influencer named Chloe Ting, whose HIIT workouts promised to make you skinny and confident, also gained popularity during this time. For teens with nothing but time on their hands, many people devoted themselves to her described lifestyle and ones like it.
This mindset of chasing “perfection” is so detrimental to so many young girls. These ideas are forced into our heads so that companies can sell us things to “improve” ourselves, even Chloe Ting, with her line of exercise equipment. The marketing world profits off of self-hatred, especially for women. They promise that if you buy their products, you’ll be loved by others, which will therefore make you love yourself.
And because women don’t already hate enough things about themselves, companies have even invented new insecurities. One recent one is the negative concept of “hip dips,” which is literally just how skin folds over top of the female pelvic structure and musculature. There’s no way to “fix” it because there’s nothing to fix. Yet companies still advertise workouts to “FIX HIP DIPS IN 7 DAYS” and “GET AN HOURGLASS FIGURE” with their paid nutrition advice. Another one of these misconceptions is that cellulite is unnatural and something to “get rid of,” when more than 80% of women have it. I recently learned in biology that this is because collagen fibers are crisscrossed in men and more vertical in women. They’re trying to get us to hate ourselves down to the structure of our cells.
These ideas were put in place to make us weak, so we can’t fight back. If you look back through history, the “ideal” figure for women changes alongside political movements. This is happening as we speak- as the US government swings to be more conservative, we’re watching models and influences begin to look sicker. When all we can think about is our next meal, we are unable to focus on the more important things, say, getting a political science degree in order to take down a potential dictator.
In conclusion, resist. Resist by participating in protests and staying informed, but also resist every day by taking care of yourself. Give yourself the fuel you need to have the life you want. You can’t control the state of the world, but you can control how you move through it.