Body Image has had such a huge role in the world since photoshop became a thing. However, why is body image now thought of to be a bad thing? Maybe, because when a girl is young, she begins to be subjected to the thoughts of others that make her feel insufficient. For the most part this is due to the showing off of completely impossible body types that are placed in ads that we see everywhere we go.
Body image decides many things in society. It has, unfortunately, decided who gets the job, who gets the good seats, who gets the good men, and who gets the good friends. Everyone wants to be around a girl who has the perfect figure. People could care less about brains. They could also care less about how that girl ended up that skinny.
In the generation, people are so obsessed with the way that they look. Girls spend hundreds, and even thousands of dollars on the next best piece of makeup, while men spend a lot of the time in the gym trying to perfect their muscle structure. Yet no one really sees how superficial all of that really is.
Girls especially feel the pressure of life. In these makeup commercials, we see girls with perfect, poreless, blemish free skin that is perfectly contoured, and a body that can only be described as twig-like. When that image is all that people in society see, it is hard to think that any other body type would be acceptable. It is hard to think that the way you are, the way you were born, is the way people would want you to stay.
Many people don’t realize that these perfect bodies with flawless skin and chiseled stomachs are just things that experts in photoshop create. Sometimes, the woman that you see on television or in a magazine ad is actually eight girls compacted into one picture. They are like Frankenstein's creations, but instead, everyone wants to be the monster.
Those models who are real tend to be sent fashion works that are sized too small for them, like a size 0 or 00. This forces the model to either lose weight or feel guilty for losing a gig because they didn’t have the proper waistline. Then, some models are being fired for their size 2 waists being “too large for the modeling industry”. This is when a waistline becomes a waste-line, and they most likely don't work in the modeling industry again.
These, in addition to having girls exposed to these kinds of body ideals since they were born, are very large reasons why 10-15% of girls and women are diagnosed with severe eating disorders each year. They believe that, without eating, they can enjoy the luxury of a socially acceptable body image, and get it the fastest way possible.
They don't think that, however, when they are told that they have a large possibility of their kidney or heart giving out on them, without the proper heart nutrients, the heart can’t pump the blood readily through the bloodstream. The kidneys need nutrition as well, and when not nourished enough, it can cause kidney failure.
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” This quote is one that affects almost everyone in some way of another. Model Kate Moss had said that, and the media ate it up. However, when eating disorders are running rampant all over the world, how was saying that one sentence getting Kate Moss all of these new fans?
Because she understood what the people with eating disorders were feeling.
Today, the world keeps spinning, and the world of modeling keeps getting skinnier and skinnier. The body images of girls continues to shrink as they think that they keep growing. The saddest part is that the only thing that we can do is to teach our kids to love themselves and hope that it rights something in the future.
