What do you think the general reaction would be if I posted on Facebook a really nice selfie I took with the caption “wow I look really pretty today”? Well, I did that yesterday and within the hour I had messages telling me that I was cocky and my confidence was misplaced. Today, I went back and posted “I’m feeling so ugly today, OMG” and I received a flood of messages telling me how pretty I am and how I shouldn’t feel that way. Weird right?

In our culture today, body image has become a very hot issue. The popularity of stick thin models came about in the 90’s and so did the prevalence of eating disorders, and reports of lack of satisfaction in body image, particularly in women. To combat this many magazines and agencies have tried their best to include healthy girls in their advertisements. The only problem was that they called these average size girls “plus size”, thus making the normal seem large and the unhealthily skinny seem average.

Now, there is a movement across America for girls to love themselves. I can’t get an issue of Seventeen Magazine without having something written on the cover about loving yourself and body positivity. I can’t scroll though Tumblr without seeing users posting about fat shaming and skinny shaming and telling people that they have no right to tell them what their bodies should or shouldn’t look like. The problem with this? There is a HUGE double standard. Think about the question I posed at the beginning. I think it speaks to a major problem that goes generally unnoticed in our society: if anyone who isn’t Meghan Trainor, Yonce, or Michelle Obama shows an ounce of confidence or respect for themselves, they are automatically considered way too confident or stuck up. We all claim to have this outlook of wanting everyone to be very happy with themselves, but we can’t actually put it into practice.

This leads me to the topic of, to me, one of the nastiest words in existence: slut. A word that is used often enough that most can say it without batting an eye, but really shouldn’t be used at all. I would like to preface what you’re about to read with the dictionary definition of slut. It is “a woman who has many casual sexual partners”, yet what is the number one reason a girl gets called a slut? Most of the time it’s the way she dresses. Which brings me back around to my point made above: if a girl is comfortable enough with her body to show it off in an outfit that someone else doesn’t find conservative, she has apparently automatically had a lot of intimate partners. YOU SEE HOW THIS MAKES NO SENSE RIGHT? Obviously, no one can tell how many people a girl has been with based on her choice of outfit. But, it is perfectly acceptable for Kylie Jenner to walk out of the house with her under boob hanging out and no one calls her a slut. It is this kind of double standard that makes it really hard to have a good body image in 2016.

I am very happy with the way I look, and it took me a long time to get here. I think everyone deserves to be happy with how they look and they also should be able to show it off without having to worry about what others will think. There is an awful lot of talk about how we need to change as a society and be more accepting. Unless that talk turns into actions and support, it will remain very difficult for anyone to have confidence, or show it off