Social Media & Body Positivity
Social media is really powerful when it come to body positivity - and of course everything else. Why? Well the media is the message and the messenger and increasingly a powerful one. People hear more from the media than any other single source of information.
That's why people need to see what the media really is and the role it plays when it comes to our body image and our confidence as a person.
*A lot of advertising is based on making people feel anxious and feeling insecure.
Which is why you keep seeing these same body types advertised over and over again, because those are the body types that generate the purchase of all these beauty products in this futile pursuit of this "idealized body".
The "ideal" image of beauty is more extreme and impossible than ever before. Which is why it's a hugely profitable pursuit for these media industries and for all the advertisers. U.S advertisers spent $235.6 billion on 2009.
Women end up spending more money on beauty and the pursuit of these ideals and these myths than on their own education.
U.S women spend about $12,000 to $15,000 a year on beauty products and salon services. The number of cosmetic surgical procedures performed on youth have more than tripled from 1997 to 2016. The average face lift cost about $11,429 - that's enough to pay 5 years at a community college or two years at state university.
That's why you often hear if women woke up everyday feeling confident and gave up these absurd beauty standards a lot of companies would go broke. It's also the reason why body positivity and encouraging women to stand together has become so hard to establish. This notion that women are natural enemies buying for the prize of being the most beautiful than the rest it's just crazy.
We as women need to stop this destructive behavior that we inflict upon each other and, ultimately onto ourselves. If women don't stand up for each other no one else will stand for women. Everyone has different body types and they are all worthy of love and appreciation.
Embrace body positivity and don't buy into all these social media beauty standards - that are just there to make us feel un-confident and never enough just to gain profit.
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