Two days ago, Lena Dunham woke up like this.
Do you think Beyoncé Knowles wakes up like this? Who knows, she’s Queen Bee so she most likely wakes up with makeup done, Louboutins securely on her feet and wedding ring shining to perfection. Or at least that’s what her song “Flawless” leads us to believe when she says “My rock, flawless/I woke up like this/We flawless, ladies tell ’em.” And if you go to Instagram to view the Queen in her natural habitat, you’ll realize just how perfectly those lyrics match her depiction of herself.
Well I don’t know about you, but based on those standards, I personally have nothing to “tell ‘em”.
And apparently, “online profiles perfectly accommodate females’ need for self-display, by offering the opportunity to consciously create, adapt, and edit one’s self presentation” (96). The point of this quote, taken from a 2012 article published in The Journal of Cyber Psychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, is that social media provides the perfect outlet for anyone* to create their own, idealized image of themselves. And if you think about it, your presence on social media is the only version of “you” that the masses have access to (technically), because the number of people who actually know you is only a fraction of the people you “know” digitally. So it is easy to see how a false or misleading persona on Instagram or Facebook can translate into a very real perception in actual life.
Example: have you ever found yourself looking at Instagram photos of a girl’s zero fat dinner and immediately assumed that she’s healthy? Or assumed that someone is “boring” because they don’t post photos of them at wild parties? Well what you don’t see is that mountain of ice cream the “healthy” person ate after dinner, and that wild bender the “boring” person went on last weekend.
Last point: your assumptions about people based what you glean from social media is probably only part of the story. Whether the agenda is to seem professional and straight edged, beautiful, single, skinny, curvy, whatever, remember that person’s Instagram only contains what they want the world to see. This may even be their ideal image of themselves, who knows, but it’s rarely ever an accurate representation of their full and true selves. So don’t compare yourself, don’t make judgments or assumptions, just take it all with a grain of salt and know that EVERYONE looks weird when they wake up.
*I would argue that men do this too, while the study does not say that their need for “self display” is comparable to that of women