What does society want from us? I look around and see a world where the number of people who are pressured to fit this society’s criteria, standards and morals nowadays is pretty high. This pressure to fit in has gone from getting judged because of the color of your skin, to the sexual identity preference, and now to what you look like. It’s safe to say that this generation is not like the past ones.
The rise of social media has turned normal concerns about how we look, into an obsession. Every period in history has had their own standards of what beauty is. In the 19th century beauty meant wearing a corset, causing breathing and digestive problems. Thanks to the media we have become accustomed to extremely rigid and uniform standards of beauty. Even very attractive people may not be looking in the mirror out of vanity, but out of insecurity. Today we try dieting and exercising ourselves into the fashionable shape, often with even more serious consequences such as different eating disorders. A Harvard University study showed that up to two thirds of underweight twelve year old girls consider themselves to be “too fat.” By age thirteen, at least fifty percent of girls are significantly unhappy about their appearance. Then by age fourteen, their thoughts about their appearance get intensified, particularly concerns with their hips and thighs. And by seventeen years of age, only three out of ten girls have not been on a diet, up to eight out of ten are unhappy with what they see in the mirror. This kind of research just proves what we already know, which is that people are so caught up focusing on how they look, they forget to value themselves. The translation of Beauty in Greek is Kalos, however Kalos may also be translated as “good” or “fine quality” which has a broader meaning than mere physical or material beauty. They say the eyes are the window to the soul. The way I see it is, you can have the good looks, but if you do not have a good personality, then looks don’t really matter. No one likes being around a person with an ugly attitude or personality, it’s not what people look for. It’s one thing to have a goofy mean personality it’s another thing to have an actual mean one. If you look at your surroundings, you’ll see, girls with curly hair straighten it, girls with straight hair curl it, white girls with spray tans, dark girls encouraged to look lighter, thick girls told to lose weight, and thin girls told to be thick. And I start to wonder if this society’s standard of beauty is be anything but you. |