It’s that time of year again when girls start to post their cute floral dresses, flawless spring makeup looks and perfect bikini bodies on social media. Invariably, underneath every one of these pictures will be a string of comments from the girl’s best friends (or just friends, or even random followers) saying things like “absolutely gorgeous,” “you’re so perfect” or “goals!” Sometimes, they transcend words and just use emojis, like the little flames, the sticking-out tongues or the tiny pink floating hearts.
Now, maybe you are older or just hopelessly out of touch, but for whatever reason, this kind of behavior confuses you. You can’t comprehend why it’s necessary for people to post pictures of themselves, especially when it seems like nothing but a solicitation for compliments. This might even make you angry; you wish these girls would stop wasting time online and spend time focusing on important things, like academics, instead of their appearances.
Well, take this alternate scenario: Every morning, you wake up and spend 30 minutes desperately digging through your clothes for the right outfit. As you try on one outfit after another, you keep staring at your reflection in the mirror. Everything looks so wrong. No matter how hard you try, you look fat, bloated, pasty, ashy, oily or just plain ugly. There is this immense pressure to look perfect, for reasons you can’t really describe; the most tangible reason is that the other girls at school always seem to look perfect, and they will judge you and make fun of you if you look goofy or ugly.
It might not seem like a big deal if you’ve never lived through it, but for girls in our school system, especially as young teens, it’s a big problem. It goes without saying that our society praises girls based on how they look. Take a look at any magazine cover with a photoshopped supermodel, any TV show with a drop-dead gorgeous trophy wife and an average-looking husband or any beauty pageant or any over-sexualized music video. When this is your reality as a young girl, it is crushing to feel like you do not measure up in physical attractiveness. This is especially difficult for girls with disabilities or other unique physical traits that make them feel too “different” to be pretty.
This is why compliment culture is so important. It might not be totally incorrect to state that when girls post pictures of themselves, they are fishing for compliments. However, I think it’s much more accurate to say that when a girl posts an awesome picture of herself, she is taking hold of that self-confidence that she had been denied for so long. She is saying, “I might not look like a supermodel, but I am gorgeous.”
And when her friends swarm her picture with likes, hearts and proclamations that she is literally "goals," it’s not as superficial as it seems. This is an action that is so left out of our culture — girls praising each other and lifting each other up, instead of tearing each other down. At the core of it, this is why I love compliment culture. Girls need to stick together and remind each other that we deserve to be confident in our own skin. And once girls are able to stop worrying about how society perceives their physical appearances, they will be better equipped to take charge of their own life with the things that really matter: family, friends, knowledge and personal growth.
