I was fortunate enough to grow up in the last generation that played outside when I was a child. I was never handed an iPad, and I didn’t get my first iPhone until eighth grade. Middle school is a tough time for everyone, but being in middle school and having social media made it a much more overwhelming time in my life.
Beauty standards have always been nearly impossible to achieve in any era. Social media and photo editing made it unattainable. Filters, angles, lighting, and distorting were (and still are) key elements to a “perfect” post. I always compared myself to these girls because I was unaware of the heavy editing.
The “Pro-Ana” or pro-anorexia movement was at an all-time high when I was in middle and high school. Instagram and Tumblr were filled with “thinspo” pictures of thigh gaps and crazy diets that involve severe calorie deficits.
I was slowly and unknowingly being consumed in this “culture.” It started off with posing to make it look like I had a thigh gap and then slowly starting the diets on my feeds. I’m blessed enough to say that this did not result in an eating disorder for me, but it did for many of my friends.
As I grew older and the insecurities reduced, my concern for younger girls increased. The editing has gotten better, and the current beauty standard is truly impossible to attain. A dramatic hourglass shape with curves and a tiny waist to the proportions shown on social media requires surgery.
The Kardashians are the perfect example of this. They are the queens of editing and hiding plastic surgery. Recently, an unedited photograph of Khloé Kardashian was leaked, and it received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for her natural and unedited body. The infamous picture of her “new face” got the opposite reaction.
I’m not quite sure if it’s because I’m more secure with myself or if I’m older and am surrounded by older like-minded people who don’t necessarily support heavily editing photos. From my current observations, body positivity has been slowly taking over social media. I see TikToks on my for you page of young women trying to break the impossible beauty standard.
My feeds are flooded with young women showing the poses that make a person’s body look like the beauty standard and then relaxing their stomach to show that bodies rarely look like that. Unedited photos of celebrities are being released to show people that famous people don’t look airbrushed and they have pores and blemishes.
I think this is so important for younger girls to see normal and unedited bodies, so they realize all bodies are beautiful.
