Social media is like a drug to younger girls. You can find yourself scrolling for hours and hours on end while letting the world past besides you without noticing a thing. Hours go by as you enjoy someone else’s life but then the comparison comes.
As a young girl, you’re probably faced with ads that should feel empowering, but they don’t. You probably see videos about body positivity but they’re never positive about your body type and subtly feel as if you should lose weight. Most girls who are over 50kg often experience this since being 120IB seems to be the standard. Anything over that is considered a wakeup call and dieting is immediately pushed as a solution.
But dieting could quickly turn extreme and toxic leading to eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. About 17.9% of young women aged 12-20 experience either disordered thoughts and/or eating and the main result is social media.
Young girls and women are being trained to be desensitized, disordered and have sick bodies with a BMI under 18 and see that as goals but anything over 18 as fat and undesirable. Which is why the body positivity movement should be more in our faces to represent all body types so no one is feel like they should restrict their calorie intake.
Even with media that’s targeted towards younger females seem to be feeding into the narrative of extreme thinness. Take K-pop for example, most young girls ages between 10-25 seem to be into K-pop, a thing you’ll notice is that weight is a huge topic for these idols.
Someone like Hanni Pham is considered plus size while someone like Kim Chaewon is average. This harmful rhetoric going around is why idols chose to diet, aside from how dangerous their methods are, the real problem lies in them promoting their eating disorders to their young teenaged audience.
It’s not often that the idol (regardless of gender) will talk about their weight or dieting but when they do you’ll feel a certain way about your body and question if you’re really even skinny enough to begin with.
K-pop aside, we can talk about how clothing brands will always chose the skinniest girl they can feel that’s not too thin yet not too average with weight. When Victoria Secret did a runway show with Angel Reese, girls who’s been a fan of these runway shows commented on how Angel Reese shouldn’t been there. That her body is too average to be walking the runway and the angels need to have “unachievable bodies that not regular people have.”
These clothing brands will spread a harmful agenda to young girls that their body types doesn’t belong on TV because if it isn’t a body that’s hard to maintain then you’re just average and not anything important.
This is why representation everywhere down to skin color to your body very much matter. Even if your weight can be changed, why should you have to change that instead of just accepting who are you?
Whether thin, average, or plus size: all bodies should be seen and not one that’ll get you more money. Anorexia and other various eating disorders are disorders for a reason. It isn’t just something you can turn on and off when you want to reach a certain weight, it’ll live for you forever.
Even recovery from these disorders are hard, it’s damaging to the brain and many people who experience these eating disorders die from it. Representing all body types in the media won’t exactly cure anorexia but it’ll help reduce it and save a bunch of lives of young girls.
