SOCIETY VS SELF IMAGE Marta Nieborak

~ More than 90% of girls – 15 to 17 years – want to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance, with body weight ranking the highest. ~ 80% of children who are 10 years old are afraid of being fat. ~ Nearly a quarter of girls aged would consider undergoing plastic surgery. ~ 13% of girls aged acknowledge having an eating disorder. ~ 80% of 10 year old girls have dieted. 90% of high school and senior women diet regularly. ~ Young girls are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of nuclear war, cancer or losing their parents.

This is all because society tells girls that they need to be skinny to be accepted. A fair amount of this unhappiness and pressure results from media– which presents images that tend to portray a narrow standard of beauty. Everywhere girls look models are shown as perfect- meaning they have flat stomachs, thigh gaps, no cellulite and not one inch of fat anywhere on their bodies. But in reality every one of those models' pictures undergo Photoshop, and even in films and shows there is digital enhancements that can change appearance of a moving object i.e. a human. Therefore they are not as perfect as you may think. You are not a real natural human being if you don’t have a single imperfection.

Do these women look healthy to you?

Thanks to the media, we have become accustomed to extremely rigid and uniform standards of beauty. When girls don’t fit into those standards they begin to think people won't like them or they won't do good in life. If a healthy 15 year old girl looks at the models in magazines and thinks she needs to look like them she could develop eating disorders or become depressed due to the industry telling women that they need to be stick thin.

In the modelling industry, the ideal model needs to be quite slim in proportion to their height in order to fit into the types of clothing that designers want them to wear. Which in reality mean that only those models will fit into those clothes. In the industry about 5 or 15 kg less than recommended weight for your height is what needs to be achieved. However, none of these people are realistic. Society needs to stop turning beautiful women into drawings and passing them off as real. A decade ago, plus-size models averaged between size 16 and size 22. Today, the majority of plus-size models are between size 10 and size 16. Now if the average woman is a size , is it fair that the media and the fashion industry causes them to interpret themselves as plus- size?

To achieve the media's beauty standards, girls and women join a gym and go a few times a week but are unhappy with the slow progress and even the effort it takes. So they take a look at their diet to see if there's anything they can do. Changing your diet to get results means eating healthier and dividing up your meals throughout the day. But these women want results ASAP so they eat hardly anything which results in developing an eating disorder. If society didn’t tell them that they need to be as thin as possible these issues wouldn’t happen. A healthy BMI is between 18 and 25, meanwhile the average model has a BMI of Those models had to go to great lengths and developed unhealthy habits to achieve this.

Agnes Hedengård is a Swedish model who was told by the modelling industry that her enviable skinny 5ft 11 frame was "too big" and told her to "get in shape". Of course when women heard of this they shamed the industry, but does that mean they'll stop listening to their idea of ‘perfect’?

Girls see images that they recognize as unrealistic, unattainable, and often not even real, but they still aspire to meet those standards. Then they suffer when they can’t help but fail to do so. Many women and teenagers are happy with their healthy weight and body, and when they see these people being called perfect their self- esteem is put down and they are no longer happy with how they look. I'm not saying that every single girl thinks like this because some women are happy with how they look and take no notice as to what the media has to say. Which is the way we should all think.

If you were a dog or a cat or a horse you wouldn't realize that an image was a reflection of you. Most animals in this situation think that they are face to face with another member of their species. We are the only species apart from the Apes that recognize ourselves. Because we can recognize ourselves we notice our flaws. This attributes the whole motion of ‘perfect’.

Truth is, nobody is perfect and although we can look at someone and think they are absolutely ideal, not everybody will think so. We need to accept ourselves for how we were made and realize that some things cannot be changed, but with a positive attitude, a strong mind and belief of self-worth you can change your view of yourself. With a beautiful heart and mind looks won't matter. Be confident and that will make you perfect without changing any physical aspect of yourself. There is no point living your life trying to achieve these ridiculous standards when in 50 years they will most likely change and new standards will develop. We can only hope that they will be supporting our real feminine beauty.