Toxic Beauty Standards For Women

“There is always some standard of beauty you are not meeting...” -Taylor Swift

By Alison Stecker, Contributing Writer

TW: This article contains content surrounding body image and eating disorders

In today’s society, the media conveys unrealistic beauty expectations and sets unachievable standards. Women are heavily influenced by what they see mounted on a billboard, photographed in a magazine, or posed on screen. A recent study found that 1,000 Americans believe the “perfect” woman is 5’5'' and 128 lbs with a 26-inch waist, proportions that are nearly impossible to match (Bradley University 2021). These unrealistic beauty standards plague society and pressure women to make intense decisions in regard to their own bodies. Women should not have to change their appearance to fit a certain mold society wants them to fit. Beauty standards should embrace all women.

In her newly released documentary on Youtube, Dancing with the Devil, Demi Lovato explores how the toxic beauty standards of the music industry affected their own self-image and eventually led to their overdose. Since they were 8 years old, Lovato has struggled with bulimia and body image issues. “There's just so much pressure as a female in the industry to look a certain way and to dress a certain way and that s*** is the stuff that I used to look up to. That's just really triggering,” says Lovato (Dancing with the Devil 2021). Every year for their birthday, their management team would give them a birthday cake made out of watermelon to encourage them to lose weight and stay thin. Even if they put on a pound, Lovato would feel too uncomfortable in their costumes to perform. “Part of the problem is the sketches that they f***ing draw. Everything looks good on a sketch because it's a 10 foot 90 pound model with a 5-inch waist,” says the singer (Dancing with the Devil 2021).

As a child, Lovato would look up to other artists and see how skinny and beautiful they were. Once they became famous, Lovato began to feel the societal pressure to become that skinny and beautiful role model for fans. The development of social media has heightened the relationship between body image and eating concerns, especially in teenagers. The soap company, Dove, surveyed 1,027 women between the ages 16-64 about the influence of social media on body image. According to The Catalyst, 25% of the women claimed their conception of beauty was shaped by social media, and 78% felt that the portrayal of women on these platforms was unrealistic (Hahn 2019).

Taylor Swift also feels the same beauty pressures as Lovato. In her Netflix documentary, “Miss Americana,” Swift opens up about her struggles with an eating disorder. As a public figure, the hardest part for Swift was seeing herself in photos every single day. There had been times where she would stare at a photo for too long and feel like her tummy was too big so she would starve a little bit and stop eating (Wilman 2020). Although the photos in the tabloids are detrimental to body image, the headlines are just as harmful.

When Swift was 18, she was on the cover of a magazine for the first time. The headline said “Pregnant at 18?” because she wore something that did not make her lower stomach look flat. Swift was always criticized despite her efforts to satisfy more than one expectation of beauty. “There is always some standard of beauty you are not meeting because if you’re thin enough, then you don’t have that ass that everybody wants, but if you have enough weight on you to have an ass, then your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just fucking impossible,” says the singer (Renshaw 2020).

It’s difficult for women to find acceptance within their own bodies because of societal pressure to fit an ideal beauty standard. The growth of social media has escalated the intoxication of these beauty standards, telling women what they should and shouldn’t look like. These beauty expectations need to end. Everyone is beautiful in their own unique way and society needs to learn how to embrace everyone’s differences. All races, body shapes, weights, heights, hairstyles, eye colors, cup sizes and stretch marks should be socially acceptable. The toxic beauty standards are plaguing women and they need to come to an end.

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