women aren’t interested in actually changing themselves at all or bettering themselves in any sense. They demand that authority figures provide them with body types that reflect how they see themselves. Media realizes this and simply advertises: “Hey, we don’t airbrush! We embrace body diversity! We challenge gender!” This draws in a demographic that neither has the ability nor desire to change. Seeing women go from obese or chubby to fit and attractive is supremely psychologically disturbing. It knocks out the “impossible” assertion from the typical beauty standard rant and means that, if they so chose, they could meet the standard.
It is one massive movement to resist true, personal change. Personal change is difficult. To a chubby woman who has never cared for her body with respects to exercise and nutrition, it can be a challenge. The social forces that seductively lure her into the lair of personal denial and ignorance of reality are the same ones that preach “body diversity” and “fat acceptance.”
Pretending that plus-sized women strutting up and down the catwalk is good will only hurt women long term. The temporary high — like any other addiction — will fade quickly and will only become more fleeting the more it’s indulged. Their cries won’t be about plus-size models, but plus-size women in TV shows, fat women in lead roles of movies, etc. The cries will get more insistent and impassioned as the they near the inevitable consequence of all this teeth-gnashing: confronting the self.
Like any narcissistic society, we spend most of our time wishing things were true. This is true for the “body diversity” movements. They don’t believe that society truly has these oppressive body standards, but only that they wish that it were. They know, deep down, that they have a better shot at changing the whole world around them than themselves. They know that forcing others to conform is more likely to succeed than getting themselves to change without any outside pressure. They know the media isn’t the problem. Beauty isn’t completely socially constructed, but informed greatly by biology. The wishes of social construction are little more than lamentations over personal lethargy and a lack of a stable self.
Media trains women to simultaneously be highly insecure of their physical appearance while then offering the short-term salve of narcissism to shore up their insecurities. The world of wanting to want things leads women to wanting to be attractive. Yet, they do not have the self-esteem or moral fortitude to actually change the self, so the self isn’t the problem, but the world surrounding the self. Society has devolved to the point where many women will not even strive to meet standards they consider artificial.
When the standard is yourself and you spend your time valuing yourself against other people, that can only lead to misery. When media tells women, “You are beautiful just the way you are!” they are telling them to start with themselves and then consider other women’s beauty. It is one thing to have women emulate beauty from other women. It is another to tell women beauty starts within the self, but then know that that self is based out of perceptions of other women.
Tell them skinny models are worthy of emulation, and you’ll have some women who better themselves and some who don’t. Tell them to admire fat women and you’ll have a deepening national crisis of obesity.
So are beauty standards of women in media hurting women?
“Mirror, mirror on the wall? Who is the fairest of them all?”
It all depends on what a woman sees in the mirror.
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