Improperly Redefining “Beautiful”: Social Media’s Profound Effect on Body Image

Magazines have been constantly blamed for portraying an unrealistic expectation of what a women’s body should look like. Now with technology and the creation of Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube many people are finding it difficult to have a healthy mentality of themselves. Social media can affect the relationship a person has with themselves compared to others. Examples of this are the creation of unrealistic body image expectations, setting a high bar on goals and a portrayal of extravagant unrealistic lifestyles.

Due to the increase in popularity of social media, today’s generation is bombarded with unrealistic standards when it comes to beauty. When young people today first turn on their cellphones, more often than not, they refer to a social media site. Whether it’s the ever-popular Instagram, where people can post pictures and followers can “like” to show their approval or post comments. Or, whether it’s Twitter, where people can post witty or inspiring or informational things for their followers to see and can be retweeted or favourited. Or they could click on the little blue Facebook icon, where all of the above can happen. These are some of the most popular social media outlets today because young people are

Along with the unrealistic body images on social media it drags along obsession with dieting, food, and appearance in young adolescents creating eating disorders. “Adolescents diagnosed with serious eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia often report that their symptoms can be linked to the bullying they received from their age peers as well as the unrealistic media images presented as an ideal for them to follow.”(www.phycologytoday.com) The unrealistic body ideal that they feel they need to follow has a big impact on the way teens look at what they are eating, and their weight and shape which can lead to serious eating disorders. “Adolescent females who are unable to conform to the ideal being put forward by movie, television find themselves taking extreme measures to be more like their role models.” (www.phycologytoday.com) Teens feel that it is important to become like their role models that they see on social media and go to extreme measures to become the ideal weight and shape

Poet Allen Ginsberg once said that “whoever controls the media-the images-controls the culture”, and nothing could be truer than this. Media plays a larger role in society within this generation more than many of us are aware of. It can easily impact people’s lives through aspects such as sports, fashion, movies or hobbies, but unfortunately, one of these impacts is how we view our body. Media constantly posts images and messages promoting a nearly unachievable and unrealistic image of what beauty looks like and it almost always has negative fallout when we struggle to meet this. This is known as an eating disorder. An eating disorder is a psychological sickness that results in dangerous eating habits and both short and long term affects on the body. People with eating disorders generally have a negative perception of their self will try to control their weight through unnecessary dieting, exercising or purging. But how does this illness begin? Social media sites, advertising, celebrities and other forms of media through society are all social pressures that are influencing people to be “perfect” and causing this expanding matter.

Social media creates an ideal body image in an adolescent’s mind that affects them in various ways. Having an ideal body image can lower self-esteem in some adolescents’ creating eating disorders, and this idea of getting plastic surgery as they get older. Social media is steadily increasing and has heavily influenced adolescent’s to be more aware of their body figure. As a result, many adolescent’s have developed low self-esteem due to the fact that social media continues promoting fit women and creating the idea that women need to be thin to be loved or accepted by society; this can cause harm to adolescent’s because they feel the need to fit in to society.

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) offers infinite connections and the ability to express oneself to the world. But are these connections and images of self-based upon fact or fiction? Through selective self-presentation, people often present the “ideal self” instead of the “actual self” in the online environment to achieve the feeling of positive self-esteem. In “The Way We Live Now: I Tweet, Therefore I Am”, Peggy Orenstein writes of how her Twitter posts reflected an idealized version of her life. Two studies support the hypothesis that such editing can have a positive effect on personal self-esteem. “Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem” by Amy Gonzales presents a study demonstrating

Body image has become a topic of conversation, with girls as young as five years old. Their conversations consist of their freckled complexion, the color of their hair, and even worse, their weight compared to others. The fact that at such a young age they are already finding concern and dissatisfaction with looks, can be alarming. With images of unattainably thin and flawless bodies scattered all over the media, there is no wonder that our younger generation is questioning their beauty and image. These images appear all around; on bill boards, in magazines, on television

Finally, social media has become a way individuals negatively judge themselves as inferior to others. Americans have taken extreme actions to live up to the impractical social expectations. This is connected to self-esteem and to the individual’s emotions. People change their image for society acceptance, and personal acceptance, because many want to fit the image social media says is right. An article published by CNN states that “the more time adolescent spent on Facebook, the more likely they were to develop a negative body image and eating disorders” (Mary). A person’s body changes from day to day, a lot of people think they are overweight, ugly, etc. which in reality they almost certainly aren’t. They are used to what society says one

Magazines, commercials, and social media are filled with unrealistic expectations for people everywhere. This makes people aim for the impossible and when they can’t accomplish what they see others have it can have great affects on their self-esteem. A lot of society perceives everything on the Internet to be true and pure when it is not. Photoshop conveys a perfect example. When people come across pictures of models and celebrities on media they often ask themselves, “why can’t I be as pretty as her,” or, “wow I wish my body looked like that,” without realizing how much goes into the photos to make them that way. The pictures you see have been taken multiple times in multiple angles, lightings, and anything else you can think of to portray them as what society views as ‘perfect.’ Another example is Instagram. There are hundreds of workout accounts that you can follow, but are you looking at it in a good way or bad way? Some look at these accounts and view them as motivation, finding new workouts or different kinds of tips and tricks. Others look at these accounts and become hard on themselves and wonder why they cannot live and look like these ‘Instagram models.’ The battle for likes is also a factor in poor self-image through the media. The concept that whoever gets the most likes somehow has more value than the other is nothing less than irrelevant. One of the worst ways poor self-image can occur through social media is bullying. Leaving rude comments on others pictures can directly affect the person in a negative way. Media can definitely impact a person’s self-image. The best way to deal with this is to always do your best to turn the negative into the positive, and remember that not everything on the Internet is how it is

Janine DeMichele who was a web designer and actress, featured magazine called “Psychology Today” magazine, was never satisfied with the way she looked. As she start stumbling upon through online photographs such as on a social media platform such as Instagram, and search “fitspiration” or “fitspo” included pictures of women with a slender and toned body, thinking it would help her mental push in need to run an extra mile, as a way to motivate herself to make the effort to get herself fit. She describes, “‘I would look at the accounts of women posting their perfect pictures and then stand in front of the mirror comparing myself”’(34), which also lead her to think that she would make a lot of progress with getting the “perfect” body that she wanted. Because social media has become a huge part of a young adults lives, many professional models will promote themselves through their fitness, giving other people motivation into working out more. Another genre of pictures called “thinspiration” which includes photos of women, showing off their extreme skinny bodies and could also lead to women to self-esteem and even causes them to eating disorders as an influence to think they are overweight or not skinny enough. At a young age from middle school to high school, I’ve also personally dealt with body image and feeling dissatisfied with the way I looked. At the age of 12, I

There is no denying that social media: Instagram and Tumblr, has a significant influence on all of us. The current effects of social media have increased dramatically among young women aged between 15 and 25. As stated in the study by (Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008) that the high exposure to social media portraying the thin-ideal body may be linked to body image disturbance in young women. They used a meta-analysis examined experimental and correlation studies testing the links between media exposure to young women's body dissatisfaction and the unconscious behavior towards having a thin ideal body. The results by (Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008) support the claim that high exposure to social media images depicting the thin-ideal body is related to

In today’s society, the public is exposed to technology at even younger ages than ever before. Everywhere you go these days you see kids even as little as three holding their parent’s phones or even their own, watching videos or playing games. But as said in the article Does Social media impact on body image by Philippa Roxby, as kids start becoming teenagers their technological uses advance and they start to rely on social media sites for new sources of communication, and their main channel to the outside world. Based on studies conducted by psychologists they have come up with a conclusion that social media has a direct relationship to body image concerns. I believe that in today’s society we should focus on promoting self-confidence as most of the adolescents have a very low assurance of their own bodies. Although a study conducted in the article The Upside of Selfies: Social media isn’t all bad for kids by Kelly Wallace says that a survey which resulted in 52% of the teens saying that social media positively influences them. Even though social media platforms have some beneficial aspects such as they make people want to go on diets, exercise, and eating healthy, the teenagers don’t really look/understand the negative aspects of it. The impacts that are carried with social media are mostly negative such as fancying teenagers to lose confidence in themselves and has become a toxic mirror to them. The visual platforms impact

“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.” -Sophia Loren, a beauty icon born in 1938. The beautiful, extremely thin models in advertisements, on social media, and in the beauty industry are causing many girls to develop eating disorders in the United States such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and the most abundant disorder, negative body image. Most girls that have these disorders are the audiences of the magazines, movies, videos, and social media posts of undernourished women who have “perfect” bodies. Thin-ideal media is the proposal that being terribly thin is a healthy and acceptable idea, even if the idea is to a level that can cause death or tremendous

Through the acts of having other people successfully appearing beauteous in society, others who have yet to do so have felt hesitant and insecure about the way they view themselves. Individuals are becoming insecure about the body they are in through the act of viewing beautiful people on social media. For example, take Kim Kardashian’s body into consideration. Kim Kardashian is famous for her physical appearance given that she has the qualities people are interested in. These qualities range from facial beauty to body figure. People are wanting to be viewed as highly as successful people in belief that they too may be rich and famous.

In order to understand the effect that social media has on self-esteem, we need to understand the construct of self-esteem. According to Coopersmith’s definition, self-esteem is “the evaluation which the individual makes and customarily maintains with regard to himself: it expresses an attitude of approval and indicates the extent to which an individual believes himself to be capable, significant, successful and worthy. In short, self-esteem is a personal judgment of the worthiness that is expressed in the attitudes the individual holds towards himself.” (p. 4–5) To put it more simply, self-esteem is the attitude that people have toward their own values.