We have all read the catchy cliché sayings in the glossy pages of magazines telling us to “love yourself" and “make peace with your body." But that is easier said than done, especially when you turn the page and see a five-foot-ten glamazon whose few existing flaws were airbrushed and photoshopped to become all but nonexistent. Envy and unrealistic goals are definitely a step in the wrong direction on the road to “body peace."
While millions of women of all ages and walks of life are subjected to this hypocrisy, usually it is the high school and college girls who are hit the hardest. The thing that no one tells you in sophomore-year health class is that your body changes, a lot. They don't tell you that squeezing into your bat mitzvah dress at the age of eighteen will be all but impossible and that your thighs will not always look like popsicle sticks, unless you have Gisele Bundchen's supernatural powers.
The real question is: why is body image such a big problem now? There have always been women who are the image of perfection and the source of envy, but why is it now having such a strong effect on young women and even driving them to extremes, all to reach a nearly unattainable goal? In reality, women's bodies haven't changed; the change is social media.
Magazines that preach about “making peace with your body" don't stand a chance against the countless Instagram accounts that flaunt waifish models prancing around on tropical beaches in scanty designer bikinis. As if normal people can pull that off. Not to mention the fully advertised model friend-cults, in which you have to be a select breed of perfection to become friends with other perfect and wildly famous young models.
Instead of listening to pop culture telling us to “love ourselves" and “make peace with our bodies," we should tune it all out and make peace with reality. In reality, women do not look like Barbie dolls and fashion sketches. Despite everything that television, magazines, Facebook, and Instagram would suggest, looking like that is not the norm.
