Media Body Standards

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Social media, the home to popular websites like; Facebook, Instagram, and thousands more with millions of users around the world. Everyone around the world can share and upload their daily life for millions of people around the world. However, as a user of social media with the power to voice your opinions to millions, comes great responsibility. It’s true that all women, regardless of size and shape are equally beautiful, however social media favors only one type of body size and shape. The power of social media opinions shows, thin and sometimes extremely thin women in social media are liked more than any other shape. We see very thin female models on TV, magazines, and advertisements in the media with comments from people saying that; the …show more content…
Giving women who do not look like the model a feeling of disappointment. Daniel Clay, Vivian Vignoles, and Helga Dittmar from the Policy Research Bureau at the London University of Sussex from their research paper “Body Image and Self-Esteem among Adolescent Girls: Testing the Influence of Sociocultural Factors” explains that, girls have always been taught that their looks are an important tool for self-reflection and the opinions of others, which is why body image is so important for them (452). We are our biggest critic, so how do social media and its body standards effect women?
Social media has body standards, we all know this, but do females of all ages actually pay attention to these standards? In a study done by Fiona McNicholas (Department of Child Psychiatry), Alma Lydon (Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) , Ruth Lennon (Lucena Clinic Rathgar and University College Dublin, Ireland), and Barbara Dooley (University College Dublin, Dublin, UK); examined the media influences on eating disorders and teens. In the study, they tested about 4000 secondary school students and questioned …show more content…
Social media can affect women’s self-esteem regardless of age. Dr. Susie Orbach, a psychotherapist, and writer at Dove reports, that 60% of girls are concerned with their looks and will not attend events because of it (Orbach 1). Social media’s standards effect women to the point where many will not attend an important event because of their self-confidence with how they look. It is understandable, you don’t want to look like you’ve just woken up and go straight to an event; however it is not okay that girls are basing this on their facial features. McNicholas et al also discovered that, “adolescents who reported feeling affected by the media ‘a lot’ were more likely to perceive themselves as being ‘unpopular’ amongst their peers” (211). These teens start to compare themselves to the standards in social media, thus feel negative towards themselves and feel as if they do not belong to society. Cristen Monty a journalist at The Odyssey Online writes in her article “How Social Media Affects the Self-Esteem of SUNY Plattsburgh Students” explains in regards to likes on a post or photo on social media that “89% of respondents said that they feel better after receiving more than their desired number of likes, and 26.1% said they feel bad about themselves if they don’t receive their desired number” (1). Social media has made us rely on the attention we get from others, we feel sad and
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