Quit the Beauty Standards

Why can’t people just accept people for the way they look or for the way they act? It is so hard for people to accept that women look different from each other and not look like a copy and paste. Throughout society there have been countless stories of people creating beauty standards in order to make a self title in order to feel better about themselves. Their reasoning is to simply make people feel less great about themselves and for the ones putting down others to feel superior from others which is a despicable act. A real question is why are women so under the pressure of beauty standards and why are men/women putting these standards into society. Is there a goal to put down womens beauty/body in order to make them feel as if they weren’t already beautiful enough. In society nowadays people will continuously put women down no matter what and this cycle needs to come to a complete stop.

Beauty standards have stemmed from many years of criticism and the pressure to look like an unrealistic image that men and women have pushed into society and will continue to make thesecritiques. The target audience that this should reach is mostly women who fall under the category of feeling pressured by beauty standards and why these beauty standards can hurt people very severely and decrease people’s self esteem. There are certain reasons why beauty standards should not exist any further due to the amount of articles found and how it will support this topic. One reason would be that beauty standards have caused a rift into women’s minds on how their bodies are supposed to look verus on how they actually look with their true selves. In a journal article the author Ninoska Debraganza has claimed that “The goal of this study was to examine whether ethnicity moderates the body dissatisfaction and mood of women exposed to media images portraying the ideal physique”. This was an experiment for women to look at supermodels bodies in magazines and social media but with that the woman would look at their bodies and start to feel dissatisfaction with their appearance wanting to appeal to the ‘“ideal” physique. This experiment can help show the idea of what beauty standards can be identified as with women feeling sort of a body dysmorphia within themselves after seeing other women with the “perfect” body. This is one of the reasons why beauty standards shouldn’t really exist to begin with due to how this type of thing would make women feel as if their bodies are not beautiful.

A second reasoning on why beauty standards should not exist is because it can also collectively affect a target race group meaning a black community, the black community can be destroyed by making others see that a certain shade of skin color is more favorable than the other causing a black woman’s self esteem to go down. In another journal article the author Mark Hill has claimed that “As predicted, results indicate that skin tone influences the attractiveness ratings assigned to black women in a compelling, monotonic manner”. It came to a conclusion that in the black community that skin tone really does influence what a black woman is defined as beautiful which is not a great idea to do that can cause many self esteem issues into black women. Whoever came up with the idea that a certain skin tone is the best way to identify beauty in a black woman should reevaluate their own insecurities and how they should start treating others the way they wanted to be treated. According to the same author Mark Hill claiming that “The association is significantly weaker for men. The gender-by-skin-tone interaction is consistent with the hypothesis that African Americans perceive fair skin tone as a feminine characteristic”. In shorter terms black that are more so light skinned are more in favor of beauty and more seen as femmine than black women that are brown and dark skinned due to others seeing those woman in that skin color as ugly and more masculine which is not true in my opinion because all black women skin is beautiful because your still black but with this type idea being pushed into society and others take it upon themselves to start criticizing is making matters worse. This is another reason why beauty standards should not exist any further because this type of idea is causing a community that I come to break apart and ruining the images of black women in order to appeal to men with their opinions and women that agree upon this idea need to be held accountable as well. Let’s break this cycle and try to build up women and not break them down any further. There is an acknowledgement that need to be discussed, while some of my audience would say it is not only woman that is going through the idea of beauty standards which is true because men do go through of a peer pressure to look like an ideal man with a great body and personality but in reality it is mostly women that go through the pressure of wanting to look perfect or look like the right body type due to how society has treated them so it’s not that men don’t go through a struggle but women tend to get more critique.

The last reason is, comes with an acknowledgment of that it may seem that only men has put these beauty standards onto woman which is highly true but it is not only men but woman tag along to critiques other woman that don’t look like them or when they do look like them it is a competition to them which is terrible because it is supposed to women supporting women but some seek male validation which cause the beauty standards to deepen. In a web article the author Sam Skolnick claims “People should be able to feel comfortable in their own skin, especially during high school, where self-esteem is extremely important”. These beauty standards and self-esteem stems from at a young age within high school where young women such as teenagers would start or find themselves and what they feel most comfortable with. This is where people should feel comfortable in their own skin but as you know society likes to push what looks great and what looks ugly that is why young teenage girls would try to look older than what they are in order to to appeal to the image nowadays which is very sad and losing their childhood. According to the same author Sam Skolnick claims “I think that beauty standards impact all people. It seems as though some submit to or ignore the toxic culture of beauty standards and social media simply to reap the benefits. It seems as though some accept that their bodies have become pawns in a never-ending competition of who looks best, as long as they receive the validation that follows, although the risk of developing mental health issues remains,”. People seem to submit or ignore toxic beauty standards because of social media but there indeed is  a never ending competition of what looks like the best and what looks like it use some improvement but all in all wanting validation from anybody which is not ok because you’re changing yourself for the wrong reasons and not for the benefit of yourself. All together with this topic beauty standards can cause a body dysmorphia with women looking at what “perfect”body is and hating themselves while their bodies are perfectly fine just the way they are. Beauty standards can burn down and create a rift in a community in which black people especially black woman will not feel like they’re not beautiful due to majority will favor light skin more than brown/dark skin which does not seem fair to those who possesses such beautiful skin because all together black is just beautiful no need to compete or compare. Lastly is that young girls through high school going through the criticism of what they should look like at an age of 13 is insane to think about and it needs to stop because young teenage girls need to be comfortable in their own skin discovering themselves and feel the pressure of society. Beauty standards are basically a weapon used against women to tear each other down and apart to approve to male gaze and validation but it has been taken to far with woman nowadays getting surgery called BBLs in order to alter their bodies to look like what society wants all women to look like but it really isn’t favoring anyone but the men and when this trend is over what happens we women would go to the next thing in order to fit into society and it’s just sad because I think women are beautiful just the way they are but that is my opinion.   

To conclude all this together beauty standards just really should not exist due to how it will make women react in such a terrible way and how they try to make themselves feel like this is how they are supposed to look but honestly shouldn’t do anything to appeal to any society or anybody. The question now is “so what”, well for starters people should really care about this topic because when every woman wants to look the same what will happen to ones that all naturally beautiful plus what will happen when the certain body type starts to get old , people will move on and that women that alter their face and bodies will try to fix their bodies to match society’s beauty standard. I may not know anymore of the beauty standards in every single state or country since I haven’t done further research to a certain extent. I need to understand more measurements of beauty standards and the studies on it in order to understand if people want or have more critiques of what beauty actually is. I will become more equipped with information and explanation in order to answer people’s questions quickly.    

Reference sheet MLA Citations 

DeBraganza, Ninoska, and Heather A. Hausenblas. “Media Exposure Ot the Ideal Physique on Women’s Body Dissatisfaction and Mood: The Moderating Effects of Ethnicity.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, Sage Publications, Inc., 2010, pp. 700–16, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40648536.

Hill, Mark E. “Skin Color and the Perception of Attractiveness among African Americans: Does Gender Make a Difference?” Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1, [Sage Publications, Inc., American Sociological Association], 2002, pp. 77–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/3090169.

Skolnick , Sam ” Modern Beauty Standards and Their Effects On Society” [theinkblocknews.com] 2020     

Modern beauty standards and their effects on society

Altman,Mara ” What Is Beauty Now?” [nytimes.com] 2020