Body Image

Body Image Imagine a teenage girl sitting in one of her high school classes. Her attention is veered away from the lecture when she glances to her left to find her slim classmate using a compact to admire her new $5,000 nose. The girl runs her finger down her average-sized nose while simultaneously pinching the fat on her equally average-sized stomach. She sighs as numerous shameful thoughts race through her mind: “I shouldn’t have eaten lunch today. Why can’t my parents afford cosmetic surgery? No boy wants me.” Although this particular example is pertaining to a younger girl trying to make it through high school, it would not be uncommon for a similar situation to occur involving a business-driven woman at an office or a man trying to bulk up at the gym. The pressure to improve our appearances is prominent in modern society, and is often blamed on the substantial amount of media and the entertainment world, but the fact of the matter is that this strive for perfection has been pushed upon mankind long before mass media and Hollywood. Anorexic and Bulimia are one of the most prominent eating disorders in young American across the country. Young woman feel the need to be gaunt looking in today’s society. Therefore, I believe that media has a lot to do with how young girls view their looks but we cannot put a scapegoat on all of the media. There is several other factors, for example it is the people that we surround ourselves with; family, peers, and even strangers, which have the greatest and most negative influence on our self-esteem.
For every time and culture, there is consistently some form of procedure people, mainly women, put themselves through for this approval. Regarding today’s issues involving self-image, we cannot predominantly blame institutions such as the media, because there has always, and will always, be biological reasoning behind why we let the pressures of others affect us. Women want to impress men with the objective to get married or simply for attention, and just as often women want to impress each other for the sake of acceptance and status. Adolescence has always been a tough time for young men and women, trying to learn how to manage a balanced lifestyle consisting of both schoolwork and a social life, but now there is the added pressure to undergo extreme dieting. Negative and positive self-esteem can begin as early as kindergarten and this self-fulfilling prophecy can stick with the child for a lifetime. Children will deem themselves as the “ugly kid” of the class and feel poorly about themselves up until high school or college. Teens do not only feel the pressure at school from their peers and at work from their employers, but a lot of the time their biggest critics are their parents. Without realizing it, parents subtly place a lot of emphasis on the importance of being beautiful and thin. Living in a world where there is pressure coming from all directions, and hundreds of ways to improve our appearances, it is hard be content with who we are, and resist the temptation to change ourselves.
In order for one to feel better about oneself physically, one must first improve their mental state of well being. Many of the things individuals do to become more beautiful are dangerous, silly, and at times costly, it is important to take a step back and understand that societal pressures should not dictate our personal attitudes and perceptions of beauty. In fact, there is no universal definition of beauty. Thus, there is no logical reason for an individual to feel that they don't live up to certain beauty standards because every culture has its own view of what makes a person beautiful. In order to change our mind set individuals need to find self-comfort in their every day lives. In other words, people who are self-conscious should put forth the effort to find specific activities that they enjoy doing. Whether it be intense play such as football or tennis, or a subtle morning walk through the park, taking care of our bodies is a crucial step on the long road to self-acceptance. More importantly, respect is absolutely necessary in the development of self-acceptance. Society as a whole should show respect for one another regardless of what majority-based advertisements claim is the “norm.” At home, parents should not only treat their children equally, but encourage their children's uniqueness and difference from others. In the workplace, the quality of an employees work should be judged objectively, and not be based on an individual’s physical appearance or pleasantness. Ultimately, our society needs to improve as a whole before we can bring an end to self-consciousness and self-hatred. If we do not appreciate others’ insistence to change who we are, we need to stop pushing that same pressure on other people. Since we all give into social norms at times through name-calling, teasing, or even subtly implying a need for improvement, it is important to realize that change cannot occur without the collective effort of all society. To call for an entire societal make-over may seem like far-fetched idea, but the concept is one that is fitting for our current situation. If we are all hurting each other, the only way for everyone to accept himself or herself is to completely change a way of thinking that has been engraved into our minds since a young age. We need to wake up and compliment ourselves; we need to look in a mirror and find something we like about our bodies; we need to learn to do what we love and love ourselves, and then we need to show the same respect to others.
If we can learn to accept others, we can learn to accept ourselves. I believe that it is not us, as individuals, that need to improve, but society as a whole. The truth of the matter is that everyone in our lives effect the way we feel about ourselves, and the pressure to improve our appearances is commonly pushed upon us by the people we surround ourselves with. The teenage girl sitting in her high school class needs to be able to look to her left and not feel judged, but also look to her right and not judge others.