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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 |
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The media are just one crazy circus - I can't begin to tell you. Well, I think you've said it all anyway.
Long, untamed hair, scruffy trainers and fleeces and not caring what you shove in your chops at twelve? Haha, that was me too! :]
You and I have always spurned make-up and straighteners (except for special occasions). Nor do we go in for dieting or religious pursuit of fashion, or fretting over bodily imperfections. We both prefer fair skin to tanned (I only wish I were naturally as pale as you). LOL
Now you could point out that we're not unfortunate in the figures we've inherited, so we don't have much reason to worry. But then it's the same with the vast majority of young girls who obsess about being ugly or fat.
I guess we've just got a different personality. That's how we're more resilient to all the pressure to conform to the ideals of 21st century beauty.
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That poor Miley Cyrus... If you told her what you thought of her to her face, gave her one of your long tongue-lashings, she'd burst into floods of tears and express a wish to kill herself! :P
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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...
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background by tayler
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posted by AnwenKya at 
The media are just one crazy circus - I can't begin to tell you. Well, I think you've said it all anyway.
Long, untamed hair, scruffy trainers and fleeces and not caring what you shove in your chops at twelve? Haha, that was me too! :]
You and I have always spurned make-up and straighteners (except for special occasions). Nor do we go in for dieting or religious pursuit of fashion, or fretting over bodily imperfections. We both prefer fair skin to tanned (I only wish I were naturally as pale as you). LOL
Now you could point out that we're not unfortunate in the figures we've inherited, so we don't have much reason to worry. But then it's the same with the vast majority of young girls who obsess about being ugly or fat.
I guess we've just got a different personality. That's how we're more resilient to all the pressure to conform to the ideals of 21st century beauty.