Women's Beauty Standards

Working out until you can barely lift your arms. Being so weak you can hardly move due to the lack of food. Giving yourself a lecture on how fat, ugly, and disgusting you are. Every. Single. Morning. Those are some more severe signs of anorexia. “What is anorexia?”, you may ask. And how does it relate to this title? It’s an emotional disorder characterized by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. In other words, it is a disorder which causes you to eat very little, and obsess over your weight. Many women seem to have this problem, some without even realizing. Yes, men have this problem as well, but it’s a rare case in males. 90% of eating disorders are found in girls (according to the National Association for Self Esteem). The reason this seems to happen specifically in women and girls are because of the unattainable standards society has set for women. You have to be a certain weight, height, skin color, the list goes on. You may be thinking, how did this end up happening? How come only females are so deeply affected by these standards? Well, everywhere you look, you see evidence of the standards set for us. Any ad on beauty products always has thin, tall, fair skinned women with flawless skin advertising the product. America is trying to get more people of shapes, sizes, and colors in these ads, but if you think about it, the majority are people that I described above. All of them look so similar as well, leading our girls to think that is what they must become in order to be accepted in society. The average American female model is 5’11”, and weighs 117 pounds, which is severely underweight. Comparatively, the average American woman is 5’4” and weighs 140 pounds according to bodyprojectsupport.org. Girls shouldn’t be led to believe that this is considered beautiful, and trying to attain that weight (of a model) is a healthy thing, but it seems that they are when you look at the stats. More females than males suffer from anorexia according to the National Eating Disorders Association. This ideology of being unrealistically thin has been implemented into the brains of girls ever since they were children. Remember Barbie dolls? The dolls you would play with as kids and thought were so pretty. If the original Barbie doll was a real woman, her body would be too weak to support her, and she would be unable to lift her head due to the slender long neck and the oversized head they designed her with. In fact, she resembled the body type of an extremely anorexic individual. (Study done by National Rehabs Directory.) America isn’t the only one facing these issues.

Now let’s talk about the Eastern side of the world, since this is a worldwide problem. Korea whitewashes all their singers, actors, and actresses, by using extremely pale foundation to hide their skin color if the person in question happens to be a bit tanner. Not to mention they must go on extreme diets to achieve the “perfect” look. If you look up any Korean actresses weight and height correlation, you’ll see they are severely underweight. For example, Twice’s Jeongyeon is 5’6”but she weighs 108 pounds. Once again with the atrocious weight standards. Korean pop culture is becoming famous across the world, and it is also influencing countries around it to copy their unhealthy beauty standards. All the people that society generally looks up to make women feel as though they aren’t good enough, and this is something that needs to change.

How can we work to solve this? The first step is to inform people, because often this type of media influences us without us even realizing that we’re hating ourselves. Writing about these problems will spread awareness and more girls will realize that they are healthy, and the models they look up to are the ones that need to change their eating habits. Of course we can’t put blame on the models themselves. It starts with the companies and management. They need to allow a wider range of body types, and show a lot of body types in advertisements instead of the rare plus sized model you see in an ad once in a while. Barbie dolls have started adding more diverse dolls, but other companies should do the same, because when you go into the girls’ toys section in any store you see a lot of those slim “perfect” dolls. Those are big steps that need to be taken, but you may be as frustrated as I am and you may be yearning to do something. You can always start a blog writing about these issues, and find out how your friends feel about themselves. You might be surprised at how many feel as though they’re not pretty enough, or the right weight, or skin color. If you or a friend have symptoms of anorexia then you can go to nationaleatingdisorders.org. They have helpline chat hours as well as phone hours if you need help solving your problem. If you know someone with anorexia, give them all your support and explain to them that they are perfectly fine, and don’t need to change a thing about themselves. That might sound like a cliché thing that you hear all the time, but it’s true. We need to stop letting these standards drag us down, and be proud of our identities.

Logo designed by Prisha Agnihotri