Essay by Yoojin Jo
A fashion trend can be toxic. When Kendall Jenner snaps a photo of herself wearing low-rise jeans flaunting her size 00 waist on Instagram, every girl who looks at it is rarely satisfied with herself. That induces unhealthy workouts to build abs to look like hers and girls skipping lunch so they can pull off the same trendy look. It doesn’t help matters that relatives and friends offer unsolicited advice about our physique—so we continue to struggle with negative body image as the celebrities and female influencers we desire to become set unrealistic standards while we live on water diets. The biggest challenge facing women and girls in the U.S. today is body image.
Demi Lovato alternated between binge-eating and purging since she was nine; Lady Gaga had anorexia and bulimia at the start of her career. Studies show that 20 million American females live with an eating disorder, and 53% of American girls are unsatisfied with their body image (which increases to 78% for 17 year old girls). In a single car-ride home, I could count probably a dozen billboards featuring gorgeous, skinny, tanned models. These images reinforce the harmful standard of what attractiveness should be and cause young girls to become self-conscious about their own physiques to develop unhealthy relationships with food.
My friends stifle their hunger by chewing on ice for the rest of the day after passing their 1-meal-per-day limit. By society’s standards, my sister was “overweight” in high school so everyone teased her about it. She came home from college one year having lost 40 pounds—skinny, yes, but unhealthy. Then, we had the audacity to tell her to eat more and gain weight. I used to be skinny when I was younger, but I’m at least 40 pounds heavier now; I only now understand what my sister had once endured. This fixation with having the perfect body and endless dissatisfaction with one's own body hampers girls and women not only from living our best lives, but it is also destructive in more ways than we can count: socially and personally, emotionally and psychologically, and of course, physically.
The images that we buy into, that surround us, and bombard us wherever we turn—on billboards to our phones—need to be reimagined and recreated. Corporations to influencers who deliberately project what a desirable body should be need to be met with resistance. If everywhere we turn, we see the same kinds of messages, we can’t visualize new possibilities— we need to learn, unlearn, and relearn what can be a body shape for which to strive, whatever this may be to us. Initiating campaigns in schools across the nation, in the form of a “National Body Image Week” would introduce and reinforce new paradigms of beauty in the very spaces that can most impact youth. Hosting a speaker series in this event that features stories of people’s own journey through suffering and recovery with body image issues could help youth learn about the consequences of causing damage to oneself. Providing counselors on campuses across schools who are trained to deal with this issue could give students the help they need more immediately.
More than 95 million photos are shared daily on Instagram; 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual; and, over 50% of 12 year olds now use social media. Thus knowing the impact of image-based platforms on young girls, if models in fashion magazines and celebrities on Instagram changed the way they promoted their sponsored clothing brands or their body figure, and if influencers stopped using photoshop to alter an already distorted visual presentation of themselves, then maybe we can lower the exponentially increasing number of females with negative body image in our country.