Social Issues Essay Example: Unrealistic Beauty Standards, Animal Brutality and Poverty

Society is made up of people, groups, institutions, and systems that share common traditions and interests. Society is the context in which we embrace the family cultures, identities, values, ideas and knowledge of individuals, and communities around the world. Standard settings allow society to influence knowledge and ideas. Society is all around us, and it is built on a diverse set of people and social ties. We progress as a civilization, which leads to our own personal development. The aspects of society today that I would like to reform, improve or change are unrealistic beauty standards, animal brutality, and poverty.

Let’s start with unrealistic standards of beauty. This is a plague in our society, and it must be changed drastically. By unrealistic beauty standards I mean that many people have developed serious mental health problems, personality problems, and even body anomalies by trying to imitate beauty standards that are simply not real. In the article posted by https://www.catsupandmustard.com/, we can observe how real this problem is and how much it has affected young women and men: “Because of the pervading unrealistic beauty standards, women are at a higher risk of suffering from the most common low self-esteem to complex problems like eating disorders, depression, and other negative effects on their mental and physical well-being. This can also lead to more problems in other areas of their life. Understanding this relationship between the body image that popular media presents and its gap from realistic body images can help us adjust our perspective and deal with this problem holistically. If culture adversely affects the health of the public, there should be efforts in raising awareness about negative body image, how the stigma can be broken”.

Animal brutality, also called animal abuse, and animal neglect, is the infliction by omission by humans of suffering or harm upon any animal. Examples of animal brutality/cruelty are chemical testing, genetic manipulation, and dogs fighting. On this website we can appreciate how cruel this practices are and how it can affect them and sometimes lead them to death, https://www.pcrm.org/ethical-science/animal-testing-and-alternatives/chemical-testing-reform-frequently-asked-questions: “Currently, toxicity testing is usually performed on animals including rabbits, rats, mice, dogs, cats, primates, hamsters, guinea pigs, birds, and fish. Tests are performed by exposing animals to very high doses of chemicals—often at levels 100 to 1,000 times higher than humans would typically be exposed to. Some tests are required by government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency before a company can market a product. Toxicity testing can vary in duration from four hours to several days or months to animals’ entire life spans. The animals are observed for toxic effects, including vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, respiratory distress, appetite or weight loss, rashes, salivation, paralysis, lethargy, bleeding, organ abnormalities, tumors, and, ultimately, death. In some tests, animals are exposed to chemicals and then bred with other animals. These animals are then observed for harm to the reproductive system, or their offspring are observed for birth defects.”

On the other hand, many people think that this kind of animal testing/chemical practices are productive to protect human consumers, workers and the environment from the harmful effects of chemicals. In this website: https://www.animalresearch.info/en/designing-research/why-animals-are-used/, we can have a better look of why some people may actually agree to this point of view:  “The animal tests provide data on efficacy and safety. They not only identify potential safety concerns, but also determine the doses which will be given to volunteers and patients during the first human trials. Testing on animals also serves to protect consumers, workers, and the environment from the harmful effects of chemicals. All chemicals for commercial or personal use must be tested so that their effect on the people and animals exposed to them is understood. The chemicals that we use day-to-day can accumulate in the water, ground or air around us, and their potential impact on the environment must be researched thoroughly”.

More than 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day and an estimated 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty. Some other facts about poverty are:  Nearly 22,000 children die each day due to living in poverty, there are 2.2 billion children in the world, and 1 billion of them live in poverty, A third of all poor in developing countries are children aged zero to 12. My point is that everyone should be able to be fed, have somewhere to live and clothes on their back and an education so that they have the chance to get a job and create a career for themselves. In the following website: https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/poverty-in-the-world-today , we can look at some facts about how poverty nowadays affects children and people in general: “According to UNICEF, around 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. Hunger, lack of sanitation and access to clean water and lack of resources for proper health care are the main reasons. Back in 2011, 165 million children were stunted due to malnutrition. Around 1 billion people welcomed the 21st century not knowing how to read and write. Infectious diseases continue to cause the deaths of the poor people around the world. Diarrhea causes the death of 1.8 million children each year.”

After reading plenty of articles and absorbing different people’s ideas about how I would like to reform, improve, or change society, I still stand by the points made before. Unrealistic beauty standards, animal brutality, and poverty are some serious problems in today’s society that I think need to be faced and fixed immediately in order to have a safer and responsible living environment. The change starts with us.