Body Image

By Kat

It's a sad thing that today's society is focussed so heavily on outward appearance. 

Every day, children look at themselves in the mirror and believe that they are less than the role models they strive to be.

I will be discussing how children are influenced at a young age to consider themselves less than what they are, how the media affects this, and what beauty really is.

As young children, girls are exposed to false body image even in the toys they play with.

Barbie dolls, for example, have twenty to thirty percent less body fat than the standard healthy body weight. A variation of Barbie was even sold with a handbook on beauty advice, with one of its primary points being “don’t eat”.

Our obsession with outward appearance roots back children aged as young as three finding themselves on stages across the globe competing for a title in a beauty pageant that they believe to represent what beauty is, thus leading to eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia.

The example children follow today is so heavily influenced by the media’s depiction of what beauty is, and what the majority of healthy people will never be. The society of today has to stop believing that to be beautiful, they must look like those advertised on buses and magazines, television and websites, because that is not what beauty is.

There is something beautiful about each and every one of us despite what we see and hear, despite all those who tell us that the image of ‘desirable’ are thin-waisted girls on magazine covers, unblemished and toned men, airbrushed girls under years of plastic surgery and a special kind of beauty treatment…Photoshop.

Beauty is not something founded on the exterior values, the rosy lips, the striking figure or the size of waists. It is not something that can be measured, nor something that can be defined by stereotypes or wildly unjust perceptions. 

And all exterior beauty is and ever will be is a perception.

There is something beautiful about each and every one of us, and that beauty lies in who we are and what we are to be. It lies in the eyes with which we see ourselves and develops as those eyes find the little things we never noticed that makes you unique. Markus Zusak once said, “Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are.”