Content Warning: Discussion of beauty standards, forced sterilization, dieting, and transphobia.
In a world where it is more than double the cost to receive life-saving heart surgery as it is to replace every feature of your face, it’s clear what our civilization values and deems important enough to be accessible. The current cosmetics market is like a dystopian version of fast fashion; only instead of constantly buying and discarding new clothes, consumers are buying new noses, lips, eyes, skin — and it’s never enough. No matter who you are, you are taught in one way or another that being yourself will never be good enough.
Undoubtedly, the population most targeted by this commercialized self-hatred and objectification is young women — including anyone who presents as female or was raised as such — because the expectations for women and men in Western society are drastically different. A study conducted in 2017 by the Pew Research Center found that the American general public most value morality and success in men while valuing physical attractiveness in women, with only 7% of people most valuing competence and ability in women.
Throughout time, girls have been taught from a young age that their value comes from the approval of others, especially regarding their appearance. The patriarchy and the web of social and economic barriers that, despite all societal advancements, have remained firmly in place benefit from insecurity; they profit off of the products they’ve convinced people that they need in order to “fix themselves.” Eurocentric and fatphobic beauty standards continue to be pushed, forcing everyone to fit themselves into one constricting mold if they want to be accepted.
It has been so normalized to hate oneself that insecurities are effectively encouraged and entirely overlooked. It’s become a mere trait of girlhood to see a stranger cover her stomach with her arms or a pillow when she sits down, to hear your friend listing off all the things she hates about herself, to watch everyone around you body-checking in any available mirror. Internalized body-shaming is everywhere, making it easy for impressionable young girls to accept and engage in these behaviors.
One fascinating shift in our systemic perpetuation of beauty standards is their translation to social media. The internet provides unlimited access to body transformation videos; ads for Ozempic, a popularized weight loss drug; and enough edited content to make it seem like the mere act of having pores is dirty. Micro-insecurities spread like wildfire; one person makes a video complaining about a normal characteristic, and suddenly young girls become worried about hip dips and thigh gaps, facial harmony and double lip lines.
Margaret Garringer, a sophomore at Franklin, expressed how the specific and extreme beauty standards on social media have caused them to “see this and compare [themself] to this standard.” Garringer explained the consequences of this, stating, “Social media has given me new insecurities and changed the way I think for the worse.”
Garringer is not alone in this, though, as the perpetuation of insecurities often stems from the words and actions of other women. One would hope that, in a world where patriarchal systems have told women exactly who they should be, women would come together in solidarity and reclaim their individuality. Instead, self-hatred has become so ingrained that often women feed into the beauty standards, turn on each other, and display these standards themselves.
On social media, female influencers and celebrities often mask their perpetuation of toxic beauty standards as honest advice, promoting their followers to gain self-confidence and embrace their sexuality.
The shaming and hatred shared among women online distract us from the real problems brought by beauty standards. Pointing out that you think another girl shouldn’t wear a specific outfit because it doesn’t suit her figure isn’t helpful, it’s hurtful. Pointing out to an impressionable audience that the rolls you get when you sit down make you feel “disgusting” isn’t just venting, it’s using your platform to encourage self-hatred. Female influencers can profit immensely from promoting products such as skincare, botox, makeup, and Ozempic. Corporations profit when influencers fuel insecurities to sell products, often by using the idea that “if you use this one product, you can look just like them.”
Young, impressionable people are influenced by this advertising, even though the videos are generally heavily edited and filtered. We need to begin to accept everyone as they are, and stop pushing these systemic and internalized problems onto future generations. Other people’s bodies are none of your business. In actuality, a body is merely a vessel for the genuine person inside of it, and it’s time we started treating our bodies with care and respect.
To be clear, not all content from female influencers is harmful; there are many who aim to uplift their audience. Some influencers can illustrate how to be confident in your body without implying that it is better than other bodies, or that it fits some perfect standard. It is important to be able to differentiate between healthy and harmful content, and one way to determine what you’re consuming is by paying attention to how it makes you feel after you engage with it. Do you feel inspired, or do you feel like you’ll never be enough? Truly positive content should authentically work towards the good of the audience, help the viewer feel motivated, and promote originality.
Yet, for every positive video, people are flooding the comments with hateful criticism. Nuala McNamara, a student at Franklin, aptly observed, “I see women shaming other women on social media a lot. I think maybe because they have been conditioned to see other women as competition.”
This competition is at the root of the problem; when women are conditioned to believe that their worth comes from the approval of men, others trying to gain that same approval automatically become the enemy. As one of Franklin’s AP Psychology teachers, Anna York, put it, “In our culture, there seems to be a focus on the male gaze and what men need or want to see, and many women feel like they have to portray themselves in that way.” York added, “It kind of makes a scarcity mindset, like you need to be on top, you can’t just be supportive of other women, and it takes a real shift to be happy with yourself, but also realize that it doesn’t hurt you to help support others.”
Society pits women against each other, which feeds this toxic cycle of unrealistic standards. McNamara emphasized, “It’s really weird how the world is literally dying and people are still thinking about how others should look.” Instead of fixing worldwide issues, we’re wasting energy on beauty standards and trying out the ketogenic diet because someone told us it’ll make us look like the girls on TV.
Throughout history, this commercialized idea of femininity has been intrinsically entwined with race and class. Molly Benitez, an assistant professor of social activism and gender studies at Portland State University, emphasized that throughout the history of societal expectations for women, the fight has always looked different for people of lower social class and racial minorities. “Black and brown women in the ‘60s were not fighting to work ‘outside’ the home. They were already working outside their home; they had been since enslavement. Black and brown women were not fighting for access to abortion; they were fighting to keep their kids and stop forced sterilization.”
Benitez argued, “There isn’t one way body shapes and feminism [movements] have changed. They have varied based on race, class, ideology, etc, and when we talk generally, … [we’re] talking about a white Western concept of [a] woman.” Many other cultures didn’t strictly define gender, such as Hawaiian and Native American people, both of whom embraced the idea of gender ambiguity and fluidity. White colonizers enforced rigid gender roles in the communities they came into contact with. This is reflected in Western beauty standards which often revolve around traits typically associated with whiteness, such as being thin and pale and having light hair and eyes. As Benitez eloquently put it, “White supremacy slowly kills everyone, even white people. So even if women feel like they’re living up to the ‘ideal’ they will never actually reach it. This is even more so for women of color — and poor women, disabled women, etc.”
The open and honest discussion of these harmful systems is especially relevant after Meta — the company that owns numerous popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — officially decided to get rid of all fact-checkers on their platforms. Owner of Meta Mark Zuckerberg openly admitted in a video addressing the decision that this will lead to an increase in harmful content on these apps.
CNN reported that, in addition to this shift away from using fact-checkers, “The company also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, adding new types of content users can post on the platform.” Such changes include the removal of guidelines preventing users from referring to women as property or accusing someone of a mental illness purely because of their gender or sexual orientation. Social media has always been a space where shaming of women has run rampant, but lowered guidelines around what people post online poses the potential for increases in hate speech and harmful rhetoric being shared for anyone to interact with.
The fight against the deeply ingrained cycle of women perpetuating the very systems that harm them is far from over, but I urge you to be conscious of how the media you consume and the people you surround yourself with affects your body image. Weaponizing and perpetuating physical insecurities harms everyone in some way. By focusing solely on appearance, it creates competition and self-hatred, taking away from the joys of life. The only people who benefit from this system are the few who profit from its exploitation, and we can’t let them win. Your body is yours alone — own it.
