Before I moved from Colorado to California, Instagram meant pictures of snowboards and hiking trails and the occasional throwback to a summer concert at Red Rocks. However, after I traded my Ugg boots for a pair of flip flops, my social media feed radically changed. Now, I scroll past acai bowls and Torrey Pines and girls in swimsuits. So. Many. Swimsuits. The beach and San Diego are inseparably linked: all seasons are swimsuit season. The pressure to look good pervades our entire society, yet it seems particularly prevalent in southern California.
Walking around campus, one of the most common phrases heard is “I need to get my beach body ready!” (Un)fortunately, living in San Diego means that the so-called beach body must exist all year round. Thus, the natural human desire to appear attractive is continually heightened because you must be prepared to flaunt what you got at all times.
The concept of the swimsuit body is nothing more than a societal myth constructed to tear away at self-esteem. In a culture that profits from our insecurities, the bikini body traps consumers into believing they must change something about themselves in order to be deemed socially acceptable. Although striving to be healthy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, health is not the end goal in the “bikini body challenge.” Our obsession with looking “beach ready” just shows how normalized objectification and self-hatred is: we merely accept this fear of looking fat on the beach as something completely normal, when in reality it is doing nothing exacerbating the cultural idea that “thin is better.” While this is typically associated with women, men struggle with this same issue: all genders are impacted by low self-esteem when it comes to body image (particularly relating to swimsuits). In a recent poll I conducted on Twitter, 63% of respondents said they had avoided going somewhere in public due to self-consciousness regarding their body in a swimsuit (the demographics of this poll were primarily college and high school students).
So how can we fix it? We can start by abandoning the idea of the “swimsuit body.” We, as a society, must be more accepting and loving of not only others, but ourselves as well. We must look for happiness and satisfaction within ourselves as opposed to attempting to find happiness by emulating the girl on the cover of Sports Illustrated (yes, she is beautiful, but so are you and everyone else, in a unique and radiant way). Remember, there are only two steps to getting the perfect swimsuit body: buy an awesome swimsuit and put it on YOUR body, just as it is.
