Kenneth Burke did a famous study on how people will likely miss the mark with mass medias marketing strategies and found that humanity was “Rotten with Perfection.” Cosmetics have gone as far as teenage girls wishing for plastic surgery for presents for high school graduation. A high amount teenage girls desire having a new nose, or breast implants before they even turn 18. With all the different surgery and commercial effort to redefine the human body, one can truly have the perfect body.
These surgeries are legal, but it still creates a controversy on how much modifications is too much. Some will argue many cases of plastic surgeries that should not have been legal. Society leads women to believe that money can buy their desired perfection, when it realistically causes them more health problems. The desperation to become perfect becomes a mindset, and motivates a lot of women to pay for such extreme procedures.
“A Hollywood star, male or female, who has had cosmetic surgery, is a cultural being, and that is what seduces us.”
Despite all the controversy and statistics about these hallow beauty products, most of the population chooses to ignore the facts and continue to feed the beauty industry. What is considered normal and expected by the average person is still arguably unrealistic. Every person would rather watch a skinny attractive female on TV, rather a natural average one. Society is blinded by all the fake standards and expectations that most of the time people don’t even realize just how high their standards are. Advertising companies love image, and will constantly educe the “perfect person” on every single product that they can. This would be considered a mental illness, because of just how blinded people are from natural beauty. It is almost more rare to see a natural looking woman in a popular magazine, rather an unhealthy starving model.
So society in general has a depicted mind about how people should look. Sometimes the mental state of needing to be “perfect” takes a bigger effect, and causes more severe outcomes. When these mental illnesses are broken down, the root of the problem is usually the person not feeling good enough. It is no surprise to anyone that society’s standards are incredibly unreachable, yet mental illnesses are still so common.
Females are so used to being judged and sexually objectified by society that it almost isn’t a surprise to see society so corrupt with perfection. Men also grow up to conditionally judge the real everyday woman, and not even realize it. Social Media is another infamous factor is the destruction of a persons body image. Instagram is a notoriously narcissistic, and people commonly are judging beauty and being rewarded for being sexually appealing. Social media is taking over, and it’s only making the obsession with looking perfect even more unattainable. It’s one thing to be constantly worrying about how to impress people in person, but now that the appearance of one’s online profile is so relevant it really is no surprise to see the desperation in young people. How to fit in and be accepted online or in person is so relevant in modern day society. Being the outcast was never accepted, and is constantly conceived as a negative trait. Movies and TV shows notoriously show the outcast as the unpopular character, and this negativity rubs off on the audience. Stereotypes are then made, and the idea of judging someone on how they look is again very present. Social media has really only made the issue worse, and revolves around constant objectifying to people. Merely every industry objectifies something, some more common than others yet the message that is constantly created usually involves a negative trait about a person.
It is hard to tell if the everyday woman will ever be good enough for today’s society. Just by looking at the past where being really skinny was once considered unappealing, and now it is the latest trend makes it very unclear if anyone will really ever achieve society’s “perfection.” The prolonged quest for American Beauty is very expensive. The media is prone to say that natural hair, body and skin just isn’t good enough. The beauty industry has so many different products to help upgrade your appearance in modern day. This includes products women use everyday like make-up to the extremes like fake eyelashes. Self-tanning and tanning machines impacted women greatly; despite its ability to give you skin cancer.
Being a teenage girl seems to be the saddest thing in the world. We can’t even say we are feeling sad without being called a drama queen or an attention seeker. Young girls are so comfortable expressing their true feelings through an anonymous poll- but are also so good at hiding it in everyday life. Sadness is hard to talk about, but statistics show that everyone feels it. Coping mechanisms seem to dwindle with fitting into the normality. No one wants to admit their illness because it defers them from everyone else. Nothing feels worse than being told that you and you’re problems are both not good enough. It’s bad enough young females struggle so much to be accepted physically, but psychologically teenage girls are forced to persevere through the darkest times- because the pain is so misunderstood.
I don’t live in a war embedded country, and I don’t live on the street but that doesn’t mean I don’t suffer. Pain shouldn’t be put on a podium. Living two lives is set up for mass destruction, and society is too advanced to allow people to suffer from something so curable so silently. We are all born differently, so it makes no sense to be expected to constantly feel the same. Those who are suffering DO NOT do not want to be told to get over it, nor do they want to be belittled. Telling someone with a mental illness to move on or stop being sad is so stupid it’s merely ironic.
The main reason our society can’t love and accept each other is because we don’t love and accept ourselves. We really don’t consider each other’s feelings, nor try to understand why it is a beautiful, smart; well dressed thirteen year old could be so depressed. People who truly suffer from depression will be the first to tell you how much of a battle it is. To imagine so many young girls secretly feeling so sad makes me cringe, because the fever only increases as you grow.
Comments are closed.