This blog entry is going to be a bit difficult for me, it's something that effected me in my own life when I was younger but I feel like that gives me more of a reason to write about it now.
I think it would be safe to say that I was not a confident child. I disliked many aspects of my appearance, in fact I think the word 'dislike' doesn't do justice to how I felt. I remember crying in front of my mirror, refusing to go out with my friends. When you see nothing but perfect women with perfect skin and perfect bodies all over the place what else was I suppose to think as a naive child? Cue the airbrushed images everywhere….I assumed we all have to look that way. Body confidence (or the lack of it) was not given enough publicity for it to be an issue and it wasn't acknowledged that this was going on in children of the age that I was at the time. I'm extremely grateful that it is given more thought nowadays and that we understand that there are many young girls feeling the same pressure to be what society considers as ‘perfect', but what is actually being done about it?
What angers me is the reason why there has been such a massive increase in the number of young girls, who feel like they have to look a certain way and act a certain way to be accepted by their peers. It's easy to go and blame specific people for the mess they've caused to the mental health of the younger generation, of not only this country but all over the world, such as Rihanna and Miley Cyrus. However it's not only due to the images these people are sending out, it's the lack of censorship towards them, and its only getting worse as the years go on. Since when did it become acceptable to show a young women swinging naked on a ball at 9 in the morning? I think Miley Cyrus is a good example to use when on the topic of how much were exposing our kids to. It seems like everything she does seems to become a headline for every newspaper and artical; from her smoking cannabis on stage to stripping off completely in her 'wrecking ball' video. What worries me the most is the message she's sending out to girls, in a recent interview with Radio 1's Newsbeat she claimed that she thinks she is "the world's biggest feminist" because she tells women "not to be scared of anything"...WHAT?!?!? If young girls are being told that THIS is what a feminist is then there really is no hope for the future. What happened to the real feminist like Susan Anthony who fought for women to be able to own their own properties? Or what happened to Elizabeth Blackwell? America’s first female doctor who went through years of discrimination for her gender.
If anything the only image that is being portrayed by the world biggest artists like the Mileys and the Rihannas, is that women are looked at as objects that should be sexualised for the pleasure and acceptance of others around us. Let's be honest here, if Rihanna actually wore clothes in her video, or if she wasn't shown humping anything she could get her hands on, would she really sell as many records? Would she be making as much money?...I'll leave you to think of the answer to that.
Instead of shoving these images down our children's throats, should we not be teaching them to love themselves for who they are and how they were made?
I feel so privileged to not be in that place of constantly trying to please others, I can finally say I love myself for who I am, but that's only due to educating myself on the fact that the only reason these unrealistic images are being sent out is for the artists to make money. Learning to accept myself opened so many doors for me, I never thought I would be where I am today, doing the things that I love and achieving my dreams, so why is acceptance not being taught to everyone? Do we not all deserve that same feeling of satisfaction with ourselves? Why are we having a 'eh-lets-just-brush-it-off' attitude towards young people's perception of body image? It was shown in a recent survey that 1 in 3 girls aged between 14 and 15 skip breakfast to stay slim and 1 in 5 skip Lunch too, the numbers doubling since the last survey conducted in 1982!
The sad truth is that young, venerable people are being taken advantage of to make a buck or two. Once we accept what the limescale of modern society has done to our youth, we’ll rise above it but we cannot keep ignoring this issue!!!
Right, you can't really blame them. They are doing what society wants them to be. They are successful and it is irrelevant how they achieve that, as long as they do. I think if we don't have to be successful anymore to live a good life, we'll solve many other problems too, as like this one.
ReplyDelete“The demand that we love our neighbor as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created.”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller