Society’s beauty standards for women can morph over a lifetime, but do they ever really leave us alone?
“Many may dismiss these concerns about appearance as superficial but, as women, often these things — our proximity to thinness, the currency of a desirable body and beautiful face — have a very real impact on how we move through the world.” Stock image
As someone who was born in 1985, I am blessed to have escaped social media during my teenage years. From the tradwives to the fitfluencers to the clean-girl aesthetic, at every hand’s turn there’s a reminder of how far short of expectations we women are falling. Of course, my generation’s analogue adolescence free from digital feeds wasn’t some utopia of female freedom and empowerment. I grew up in the dystopian age of heroin chic, up-skirt pap shots, beach-body analysis, and the routine and relentless bullying of famous women.
The rise of social media basically took all this and added a comments section in which a dispiritingly large amount of people chose to anonymously spew bile. On a slightly more positive side, lots of pioneering people braved being online in order to shift the culture towards diversity. These were influencers espousing body acceptance, influencers who were not the thin, cis, white ladies that saturate the cultural landscape, and influencers with different gender expression all sharing their lives. And for a while it felt optimistic. For a while.
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