Stereotypes: The Perfect Body

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The “Perfect” Body
Stereotypes are not a new concept, and they change almost every day. They range from ideas of what a person should look like all the way to who they should be. In today’s society, women are under a significant amount of pressure to look and act a certain way. Many feel that if they are not skinny enough, sporty enough, or physically fit enough, then they are not pretty and therefore are undesirable to others. This stereotype has been around for a long time and has only seemed to heighten with the rise of social media. However, it is possible that this idea of “the perfect woman” is starting to lose momentum. Women do not have to be skinny in order to be pretty and desirable.
There have always been ideals placed on women
For some girls, they only feel a little bit of body shame when they look in the mirror. For others, they diet and exercise religiously just to keep up with society’s ideals. Sadly though, this is not the most extreme that it can be. From the pressures of wanting to be skinny, eating disorders have become more common, especially in teens and young adults. The two most common are anorexia and bulimia. Anorexia is when a person starves themselves, while bulimia is when a person eats then forces themselves to throw it right back up, all done to stay skinny and lose weight. As these mental illnesses have become more common, so has awareness and the ways to help people recover from them. Many affected by these eating disorders go through rehab and come out on the other side even stronger. In high school, I had a friend who suffered from anorexia. She went to a rehab facility, and is now doing better than ever before. People like her continue to prove that even though a person may struggle with something like this, they can recover from it. They are starting to defy the norm and change the stereotypes that women face every
A girl cannot scroll through her Instagram feed without seeing a picture of someone showing off their body. The media also worsens things with its tiny models and the way it portrays celebrities. Photoshop is a popular and common practice in the media as well, causing people to have desires of unrealistic bodies. Many celebrities have been body shamed for not having a small enough physique or for gaining weight. Selena Gomez is an example of this. Recently in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Gomez talked about how she had gained some weight, and was called fat because of a picture taken by paparazzi of her in a swimsuit. Even though the comments got to her a bit, Gomez took to Instagram to fight it and show that she is not ashamed of her body (“Selena Gomez Talks Lupus, Body Shaming, Boyfriends & Taylor Swift With The Ellen DeGeneres Show [HD]”). Gomez, along with other celebrities, have inspired other girls to take a stand and be proud of their bodies. There have been multiple songs, articles, and social posts written about this issue, all in an attempt to fight and weaken the argument that a girl must be skinny to be

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