When I was little I would beg my mom to let me get a Barbie and her answer was always no. She believed the unattainable dimensions of the doll would have a negative effect on my body image and even though I have never played with one and had a mom who tried to shelter me, Barbie’s ridiculously thin waist and curvy structure have found a new way of influencing how I see myself by taking over my Instagram feed. And if Cameron Diaz can't compete with Barbie then no one can. Instagram & Body ImageA window into my experience -- When I first started using Instagram it was just a way for me to share photos with my friends and see what everyone was up to. My fifteen-year-old-self didn’t follow celebrities, or Instagram models or Fitspo accounts. Now, five years later I don’ t find myself spending most of my time on Instagram looking at people I know, but instead obsessively scrolling though Fitspos like Kayla Itsines and looking at Instagram models like Alexis Ren. Some Intsta Stats -- There is no denying that social media has a negative effect on the way us girls view ourselves. A Common Sense survey found that 35 percent of girls are worried about being tagged in an unattractive post on social media because being “attractive” is so deeply ingrained in our standards of what is expected of girls. With #thinspiration, #thinspo and #ana (hashtags promoting eating disorders in order to obtain an extreme thinness) creeping into the Instagram feeds of young girls it's no wonder that 20 million women suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their life. In an interview with PBS an 18-year-old from Philadelphia explained that “on social media, you have to look like this, your body has to be shaped with way, you have to have this skin color, you have to have this smile to be acceptable to society”. This constant comparison and notion that you must fit into a very specific box of standardized beauty make scrolling through Instagram affect our perceptions of ourselves negatively. Insider found a study that looked at a group of 276 women and determined that scrolling through Instagram for as little as 30 minutes makes us objectify ourselves and UK’s Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram was the most damaging social network for mental health, affecting anxiety levels and body satisfaction. "too fat" — An obsession with thinnessOn Instagram we have a tendency to glorify “thin” girls who are ridiculously attractive — Just take a look at this list of the top 10 most followed Instagram models. What do they all have in common? A tiny waist and a stunning face. These girls have become the glorified answer to the question “what is beautiful” and who we find ourselves stalking on Instagram at 3 am feeling bad about ourselves after binge eating the whole Dominos Pizza. According to an article on the impact of social media on body image and distorted eating, the ‘ideal’ body shape that has taken over the TV shows we watch, the magazines we read and the accounts that we follow promote an unattainable beauty standard of often photo-shopped women who are young, tall, big-breasted and extremely thin. These “models” of what women should look like don’t represent the average size 14 women and neither do the size 8 so-called “plus sized” models who are still substantially smaller than the average American girl. The fact that we call women who are SIX sizes smaller than the average dress size “plus size” proves that our society is majorly obsessed with thinness and completely delusional to what is actually “normal”. |
HELlOI'm Sydney, a 20 year old from Boston figuring out how to "adult" and not freeze out here in the real world. Archives
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