| Designer babies |
Why do so many very young girls feel so pressured to be beautiful these days?
I'm a Yahoo Answers user, and if you check out the Beauty and Style section it's full of 12 and 13 year olds asking 'can I be a model?', 'am I ugly?' and 'I'm 5'4", is 90lbs too fat?'. When I was that age, I still had uncombed waist-length blonde hair and wore scruffy trainers and fleeces. I didn't care about what I ate so long as I wasn't hungry. Fashion was something in the magazines, but didn't come into real life. Now, young children are obsessed with looking like the perfect plastic figurines they see plastered all over the pages of Bliss and Shout. They're too young; they're practically still in nappies and all they care about is lipgloss, boyfriends and diets.
Miley Cyrus helps us explain why this might be. At 16 years old, she cakes her face in layer upon layer of perfectly applied makeup, highlights her hair and has platinum white veneers on her previously average teeth. Was she pressured to do this by her record label, or by her lifestyle? Surely she would sell as many records with crooked teeth, but she might not get on the covers of as many magazines. That leads me to believe that she is just like the other young teenagers who just want to live up to the ridiculous expectations set by the media today. The media needs to stop treating children like miniature adults and let them have a decent childhood free from the pressures of being aesthetically wonderful and full of the pleasures of just being young. No wonder the rate of teenage pregnancies has gone through the roof; children are being more sexualised in the media than ever before. To go back to Miley Cyrus, at 15 she was posing topless on magazine covers, albeit covered by a blanket. Did they not want young men would drool over that image? The intention was to portray her as an attractive young woman, not an innocent teenager. If teenagers' access to these sexualised images of children - that's what a 15 year old is - is stopped, then maybe they will stop feeling such pressure to grow up and become sexually active themselves.
I am 5'0" tall and weigh roughly 95lbs. This gives me a BMI of 18.6 - healthy, although a little on the low side. In an experiment, I asked users of Yahoo! Answers whether they considered that to be overweight. Four people said that they thought that it was ridiculously low, and one person said I should lose 10lbs. If an impressionable person were told that they should lose 10lbs, the risk is that they will decide to do just that. If I were to take that person's advice on board, I'd become unhealthy. It's people like this that pressure us ordinary people to become perfect-looking, Barbie clones, and if we stand for it, we risk our health and our society, as hyperbolic as that sounds.
The media blames children for their own downfall because it cannot bear to admit that it is its fault in the end.Labels: fashion, rant, sanity |
|
|
|
| Ugh |
Really don't feel great today. Constant nausea, splitting headaches (sinuses playing up again) and very tired. I'll get over it.
No point in this post, but I had to update after 8 days...Labels: me, owch |
|
|
|
| The glorious world of books. |
The Daily Mail is up in arms. For once, it's not screaming about how we're being overrun by homosexual Asian teenage mothers, but about the amount children these days read. Or, rather, what they read. According to its statistics, 1 in 5 children only read blogs or internet articles. So, if you're reading this, go and read a book. Geeze. Illiterate fools you must be. Ironically, I read this statistic on the Daily Mail's website*. How awful of me. I should have popped down to my local Spar and forked out for a copy of the newspaper instead. That's much more environmentally friendly and certainly more beneficial in terms of time management. But I digress.
Seriously, Daily Mail, why do you make out that children these days are all illegitimate, illiterate and allergic to learning? It's just not true. I'm not illegitimate. My parents weren't 14 when they copulated behind some bike sheds and conceived me. I learnt to read before I was 3, and was reading adult literature by 13. I'm not stupid. Sure, I'm not a genius, but I can read, and surely I have the right to choose what I read. If I find it more convenient to switch on the computer and read an article about craniofacial duplication, as opposed to ordering a copy of Craniomaxillofacial Surgery Weekly, then I'll jolly well do so. Children learn just as much from reading internet articles and blogs. Blogs are just the humble opinions of an ordinary person (usually). What's travel writing? The same thing. Just because one is found on a screen and one is found on paper, doesn't mean they don't have the same educational value. Of course, some blogs are durge, and just 'talkk abowt wot i fink of de wrld bcz i av lived such a gd lyf lolll', but then so do many books (Twilight, anyone?).
In a nutshell, Daily Mail, if you want non-fascist readers such as myself to take what you print seriously, please stop printing stories about how gay people are stealing** and raping*** all our children, how all Asians blow themselves up on public transport and steal white peoples' money****, and how my generation is beyond saving*****.
* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1167284/Books-left-shelf-A-fifth-pupils-read-blogs-magazines.html
**http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1024956/Catholic-adoption-agency-defy-gay-rights-law.html
***http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1126918/Gay-paedophile-lovers-abused-boys-flat-allowed-share-human-rights-legislation.html
****http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1004282/At-truth-immigration.html
*****http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-559725/The-generation-doomed-life-poverty-crime-tender-age-three.htmlLabels: fascist shit, rant |
|
|
|
| 'Individuality', that well-known A Level French topic. |
I've been racking my brain a lot lately to try and find out what people mean when they say 'individuality'. It's as hard to define as it is to touch-type, and everyone has a different idea of what it is exactly. Are those chavvy little twonks who creep out of lessons every day for a sneaky fag 'individual' because they do something that not a lot of students do, albeit because the other stupids have a higher level of intelligence? Or are they just slaves to the media, rebelling because the media tells us that it's cool to do things that you shouldn't?
Now, I don't think that I'm exactly the same as everyone else. I don't make a point of being different, by which I mean that I don't go to school in a dress made out of recycled McDonalds' packaging with 7-inch platform boots, but I don't make a point of following the latest trends either. Ugg boots will not be seen in my wardrobe nor on my feet unless someone's threatened to let their dog off the lead in my presence if I don't wear them. Which, let's face it, isn't likely. My favourite dress is my brown one with cats on, my favourite shoes are blue ankle boots and I'm quite partial to a bright cardie now and then. There are hundreds of people who dress like me. And yet they're not me.
Individuality comes down to so many things - looks, likes and dislikes, background and experiences - so with so many factors, how can you truly define it? Just because all the emos in the world look like they were born in a petri dish in a cloning factory doesn't mean that they're all the same. Emo 1 might like wearing pink bows in her hair. Emo 2 might only wear green. And emo 3 - God help him - might not cut himself. Emo 4 might have parents who are divorced, and emo 5 might live in a huge house in a little cul-de-sac with her parents and pet chihuahua. They're different. But they try to be the same. Why? Since when has it been cool to fit into a mould? We're not jelly. We're individuals. We should try to be individual.
And now for the brain-boggler. Someone once told me that if we have to try to be individual, we're not really individual. This is reinforced in one of my old school friends who suddenly decided one day that she wanted to be a 'rocker', so she got a bad dye-job on her hair and purchased a range of 'emo' clothes from Debenhams, of all places. We all nagged her, as teenage girls do, to be herself. We'd like her more if we felt that we still knew her. But no, to her being cool was just more important than we were, and eventually we all just stopped talking. I saw her recently. She's got bright red hair and has gone for the 'indie' look, and I feel like slapping her and saying 'Christ, woman, just be yourself. Avril Lavigne might be a talentless Canadian twit who wants to be American and seriously needs to stop dressing like a pre-teen harlot, but she had the right idea in that awfully catchy song of hers'.
You know that things are bad when Avril Lavigne becomes a philosopher.
So, when I'm asked in my next French lesson what I think of individuality and fashion, I shall shrug and say 'je ne sais pas, parce que, a mon avi, ca n'existe pas!', then demand cake and sit there looking like a smug git in my cat-dress and ankle boots, with poorly applied eyeliner and pitifully messy hair.Labels: fashion, me |
|
|
|
| 10 worst things about being a midget. |
1. Everyone thinks you're about 12... you can kiss goodbye to ever being asked out by a boy your own age. Also, if you're blonde and petite like me, you do get a fair few 11 year old boys gawping. Which makes me feel like a paedophile.
2. You see eye-to-chin with people. The other day, someone actually asked me 'do you see eye-to-eye with me on this subject? No, of course not, you see eye-to-nipple with me!' I did hit them across the face.
3. Going up stairs behind people. I feel like a total pervert because I have to look at their arse or their stairs. If I were just a few inches taller, I'd be able to look at their backs, but as it is, I have a view of their posterior. Oh, great. I'm a peeping tom.
4. You get things thrown at you in the street. A couple of months ago, in Cwmbran (shitty little town which pretends to be all modern because it has a shopping centre, but really is stuck in the middle ages) a group of morons thought it would be funny to throw Haribo sweets at me. Oh, hilarious. Spend 50p on insulting the titch. If you want to throw something at me, you might want to make it something that you didn't have to pay for, otherwise you're just wasting money on something that really doesn't offend me. So used to it now.
5. You get disrespected! Now, I'm no chav, so I don't go off on one when someone 'disrespects' me, but I would like some respect. I even got spat on in the street last year by an 11 year old. That wasn't too fun. Didn't help that the school didn't help either. If it were legal, I'd name and shame the poncey Catholic school behind my house that couldn't give a shit if a girl gets spat on by one of their poorly-educated religious nut pupils and can't be arsed to even telephone me or get any help for me, or even be grateful that I didn't get the police on them (which I could have, seeing as it's technically assault...)
6. People think that your opinions don't matter. I'm opinionated. I'm open minded. I will usually have something to say on a topic, and I will fight my corner. But because I look young, people think that I have the brain of a 10 year old, and thus my words mean nothing. Sigh.
7. Buying clothes is a NIGHTMARE. Well, not really, I don't wake up in the middle of the night screaming 'the clothes! The clothes! They don't fit!' but it is rather irritating. All my jeans are hemmed. It doesn't help that I'm also a size 6-8 (UK!) and the average size here is a 14. Go figure.
8. People think you're 'cute'. People actually go 'awww' to me and pat me on the head. I am not a dog. I do not bark. But I will bite the next person who calls me 'adorable'.
9. When I wear high heels, I look like a 12 year old prostitute.
10. Getting through corridors in school is impossible. You'd think it would be easy, but when you're invisible, people just shove you until you feel a bit like a ragdoll or a Guy on a bonfire.
There, there's my complaining for the day. My friend told me that I should give up being grouchy for Lent, as apparently I've been cheerful for the past 3 weeks. Score.Labels: list, me, rant |
|
|
|
|
Name: AnwenKya
Home: Cardiff
About Me: I am a 5ft blonde teenager with an overactive imagination, bad temper and terrifying sense of humour. Hear me roar!
See my profile...
|
|
|
|
|
|
background by tayler
|
|
posted by AnwenKya at 