Did you know that only 4% of women consider themselves beautiful? Did you also know that every year 1,000 kids in the U.S. kill themselves because they are fat? 850 people die a day from fat related diseases. According to The Detroit Free Press, Michigan is the 5th fattest state America. Twelve percent of Michigan high school students are fat, and 14.6 million plastic surgeries are performed each year. The dolls shown in the pictures are ones that we are all familiar with, and they are the ones that define what our kids should look like. Our society has been telling young girls, as well as boys, what they should look like since the beginning of time. We have all felt that pressure to fit in with the rest of the crowd. We all strive to be perfect no matter what we may think or say to convince ourselves otherwise. Peer pressure and media effects all of us, in one way or another. I will be talking about those effects as well as how other countries view body image in a more realistic way.

Now, we all know how it feels to be the odd one out. If you were to ask your great great great great grandparents if they ever felt out of place somewhere at sometime I am sure they would say yes. It is the same for a fat person in a gym class. You might laugh, but for a fat kid it is not a laughable matter. To be the last person to finish the one mile run and everyone is sitting there waiting for you to finish is the most humiliating thing to go through, but if being fat is such a big epidemic that people should be worried about it then why are we laughing instead of genuinely being concerned about them. I say ‘them’ like they are a whole other category less than human, and I am one of ‘their’ members. A study by Ann Hardin in CNN showed that kids who are “fat” are 64% more likely to be bullied than the average weight person. Sixty four percent!. Young girls and boys are gorging themselves until they throw up or not eating at all just because someone decided that being fat meant you were ugly. When did beauty move from the eye of the beholder to the eye of television? Out of those 64%, 40% resort to eating disorders such as Anorexia or Bulimia with eating disorders having the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. According to American Journal of Psychiatry 13% of people with eating disorders die. Over 10 Million kids suffer from eating disorders every day. All of this just because some idiot decided they could decide what is beautiful and what is not.

In some countries, they see fat as a sign of wealth and beauty. In Nigeria, they believe in ‘the bigger, the better.’ They send their girls to what they call fat houses just so their daughter can do nothing but eat. Our society used to be like that. For our ancestors that lived in England, it too was a sign of wealth. If you were fat, it meant you could provide for yourself. Kings and Queens are portrayed as fat. Weather they were or not. Over the centuries this idea of fat being as a good thing changed for the worse. Fat people are now being discriminated against. They now have started calling us “obese.” Because thunder thighs just seemed to hurt the feelings of those who were “pigs,” I wonder why?! You know it’s bad when people have to find an alternative word because the old one had become too offensive.

Our society does not help at all either. Media has been telling us what we should look like for years. Magazines advertise the perfect model through photoshop. TV shows portray fat as something to shun and the only way is a thin way. Disney, the thing we all know and some of us love, does the same thing. All of their princesses are shown as thin, and when Jewel Moore petitioned for a fuller figured princess she was shot down by society because it would tell kids it’s ok to be fat, but telling them they should stop eating because they're not thin enough is perfectly okay. Telling girls that being thin is the only way to be happy even if they have to starve themselves to achieve that is perfectly fine. I have personally heard some toothpig, that’s right toothpig (someone who is skinnier, as well as mean towards those who are fat), say that there should not be a fat princess because it would give young girls the wrong idea about what they should look like. I had to bite my tongue at this. It was obvious she wasn’t thinking about those chubby young girls watching it and seeing that they could be a princess too. It was obvious she didn’t know what it was like to be looked down upon because you are fat. There has only been one Disney show to ever show girls that you could survive in the world and be fat at the same time, That’s So Raven. The reason it wasn’t so popular was because she was a fat girl trying to make her way in the fashion industry. She wanted to send a message to girls saying that big girls could look beautiful too.

Because there was not more shows like this, girls now are becoming afraid of being fat. The Love Your Body Campaign said that 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat. The average age for girls to lose their self-esteem is eight. The age where people start to look at magazines and television and realize they don’t look like that. What Media does not tell them is the fact that some, if not most, of those people aren't real. Their fake. Photoshopped. They have been technologically alter in one way or another. In one week the average person see 5,000 photoshopped images. Five thousand misleading interpretations of beauty. We are telling girls and boys that they have to look like those on the front page of a magazine or an actor on TV when it is impossible to look like that. Most have at some time in our lives played with Barbies or other similar dolls. If you were to take one of those dolls and make it into a real person, that person would not be able to survive. They would die because their body was not able to hold itself the way it was made to. In fact, according to Onereed.com Barbie was modeled after a hooker, so when we give girls these fake dolls what we are really telling them is that they should look like a hooker. Now I am not saying that girls should not play with Barbie, I loved my Barbies, What I am saying is that we should teach them the difference between real beauty and fake beauty.

We should also remember to teach the boys, for it is not just girls that deal with this problem either. According to The Atlantic, 18% of boys surveyed were worried about what they looked like as well. Sixteen percent of high-school boys have an eating disorder. Boys are told they have to look buff and all muscle. They have a reputation to hold up. They must act like nothing can tear them down. WWE dolls, GI-Joes, the whole works. Even when they grow up, they still get bantered by society. Men on shows are often portrayed as fat, lazy and dumb.

When did character no longer become important? When did the person no longer matter? Fat is not ugly. Why is it so bad to be bigger than average? Michigan is one of the fattest states of America, yet people are getting ridiculed because they’re bigger than the average person. A depressing “4% of the women around the world think they are beautiful”. Ask yourself these questions, “Why is it okay to be Anorexic or Bulimic, but not okay to be bigger than average? Why must we make people feel bad because they don’t look like some model on a magazine, fake?” We need to teach our kids that it does not matter what a person looks like. We need our kids to know that they are beautiful no matter what anyone tells them. We as a society must say enough is enough, and fix the problem at hand by taking what the outside may look like and cover it with what is on the inside.

Sources

“Body Image: What Society Tells Girls They Should Look Like.” Happy Families:

Inspired parenting blog. 12 April 2011. Web. 28 April 2014.

Diaz, Jonny. “More Beautifull You.” Elyrics.net. 2000-2014. Musixmatch: World’s

Largest Lyrics Catalog. Web. 3 March 2014.

Makkai, Katie. “Pretty” PoemHunter.com. 9 September 2010. Web. 5 May 2014

“Real Beauty Sketches” Dove: Real Beauty Sketches. 2013. Dove. Wbe. 6 May 2014.

“Societal Views on Obesity” Living Life Passionately: Life, Blogged. 26 April 2013.

Web. 1 May 2014.