Last week was what almost every girl in America raves about and talks about for months after, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Don’t get me wrong, I love their bras and underwear, I just hate how it makes girls feel about themselves.
I sat on Twitter and Snapchat the night of the fashion show, and it was just a whole bunch of my friends tweeting “I wish I was as skinny as them” or “wow #bodygoals." This is what I hate about this show. It makes girls feel like they have to be as “perfect” as them, and it makes them lose self-confidence.
Well newsflash, not everybody is supposed to be as skinny as them. They’re “models,” and that’s what they are supposed to look like, not us. They're given personal trainers to have a body like that. If I had a personal trainer, I'd probably be smaller than what I am now.
They aren’t the model for the perfect body or the perfect hair, they’re a model for the clothes or in this case, the lingerie that the company is trying to sell you. If they put that sparkly bra and cheeky lingerie on me, a slightly overweight college student, nobody would buy it. They are paid to look like this on camera. Real life Candice Swanepoel probably doesn’t look the same as how Victoria’s Secret Angel Candice Swanepoel looks when she's strutting down that runway.
When men are scarfing down pizza and wings during the Superbowl, do you think that they are sitting on their couch feeling awful about themselves? Thinking “I wish I was as athletic as Cam Newton” or "I wish I looked like Eric Decker." I mean the thought probably runs through their heads, but they don’t go out and do anything about it. They don't live tweet or snapchat these things or worry about it.
As I’ve gotten older, I realize that my body will never be that way. For one, I enjoy pizza, ice cream and cookies too much and hate exercising to be that tiny.
Second of all, I don’t have the body type to be a stick, and I’m perfectly OK with that. I love my body the way it is. Yeah there are aspects of it that I want to change, but none of those things are ever going to make me a VS Angel.
Your friends and family don’t hate you because you don’t have the body of an Angel, so why should you sit in front of the TV and wish to be someone you’re not? I get that we’re all human and are going to be very critical of ourselves, but you can’t forget that we’re all beautiful no matter what we look like. We all have flaws, and we just have to embrace them. Self-love is the most important thing.
