Essay Sample on The Enormous Impact of Body Image Standards on Society Today

In this day and age, being fashionable is crucial, which includes the clothing you wear, your style, the cosmetics you use, the technology you use, the texture of your skin, and the form of your body. When it comes to comparing ourselves to one another, all of these opulent items listed above are some of the things that most of us think about. The things that we have mentioned are all pointing at body image. Body image is a collection of your thoughts and feelings about your body; it can range from positive to negative experiences, and one person may feel positive or negative at different times. It can also be influenced by a combination of internal and external factors, and it has four aspects: perceptual body image (how you perceive yourself), affective body image (it is the way you feel about your body), cognitive body image (the way you think about your body), and behavioural body image (how your body image affect your behaviour) (NEDC, 2022). 

Body image is important in shaping our personalities since, for most people, it is the defining component of a person's hierarchical rank and the factor that determines whether or not they are respected, and people who place an excessive amount of value on their appearance and are dissatisfied with their physical qualities may eventually consume them. According to Grilo (2013), overvaluation is consistently connected with increased severity of eating-related psychopathology and psychological distress and has consistently demonstrated poor prognostic relevance, thus this shows that body image overvaluing most probably affect the overall well-being of an individual. At this point, we may wonder if it is still acceptable for us to be conscious of our body image or if our body image conforms to the standards of our society.

In our society, there are beauty standards that we must force ourselves to meet to appear attractive in the eyes of others. We always dwell in toxic body image positivity, which creates an unavoidable pressure that forces people to take unimaginable measures to conform their bodies to society's standards. Body image-related social pressure plays a crucial role in the development of bad body image, low self-esteem, and serious mental issues; this inconceivable strain imposed by our society's norms impacts everyone, even children and teenagers. According to a study about appearance-related pressure in middle school students, peer teasing and exclusion, as well as parental pressure to manage weight and shape, had a stronger influence on boys and girls with a higher BMI (Helfert & Warschburger, 2013). This data shows the immense effect of body image standards especially for the children and teenager who is starting to grow thus this pressure led poor body image because the peer pressure caused by standardizing body image only gives issues thus it hinders the growth of the person that is exposed to that kind of pressure. 

People who are on adolescent stage are the most susceptible on the effects of these standards because this peer pressure works like fuel on fire which serves as a source of motivation for them to look thin and pretty, teenage girls starving themselves for them to meet the standards made by the society. According to Mackey (2013), approximately 5% of adolescent males and girls have eating disorders, leading to bulimia, anorexia, and obesity. Furthermore, due to our country's fast food culture and poor eating habits, 16 percent of American teenagers are overweight, making binge eating or consuming comfort food as a stress reliever frequent among these children. As a result, most of our teens today are either anorexic or obese, which separates our society by forcing individuals to embrace our standards and dictating that they comply to the standards that we developed, and shunning them if the societal standards are not fulfilled.

Our rapid technological advancements make it easy for us to compare ourselves to one another, particularly while utilizing social media. We utilize social media to socialize and become more sociable individuals. Social media has made it a lot easier, more comfortable, and faster for people to communicate with each other. Therefore, it has had a significant effect on the people who are using social media. Most people post everything that is happening in their lives on social media. Particularly now that we are confined to our houses, where no one can interact face to face due to the presence of a fatal virus that may infect us, the form of our communication is through social media. We communicate with other people on social media to see what they are doing, where they are going, and even how they look right now, so comparing our circumstances to theirs is unavoidable, and most people who use social media are simply feeding their insecurities in every post that they share, creating a false body image of us that confuses who we are. According to Sklarov (2018) because so many celebrities/influencers share photographs of bodies that aren't humanly feasible, they create a false body image on social media, individuals are willing to lose themselves in order to be an ideal human who is based on body image standards. We are focusing on things that make our life more accepted by society rather than things that make us happy, since we rely on Social media in our today’s society it is considered as the one of the platforms that creates body image standards loneliness, jealousy, anxiety, melancholy, narcissism, and diminished social skills have all have been connected to social media (Silva, 2017). According to a poll performed by the Huffington Post, 60% of people who use social media believe it has hurt their self-esteem. We can conclude that body image standards have had a huge impact on our society, causing people to be unable to function. As a result, the character development of each of us has been greatly influenced, to the point where we are unable to recognize who we really are.