THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON FEMALE BODY IMAGE

A surprisingly large niche of young people today consider thinspiration to be a new way of life, or at least a huge part of their lives. Thinspiration photos are typically “selfies” of young, emaciated girls – skin and bones. Instead of being negative and frightening, images to show the reality of the destruction that comes from an eating disorder, these pictures are meant to be positive, motivational, and, just as the word says, inspirational.

It is not uncommon to see phrases such as “hunger hurts…but starving works,” or “food is the drug we must all quit,” superimposed on bodies of skeletal young women as one form of thinspiration.

The images glorify thin bodies and highly promote the “thigh-gap” that apparently all females should have – and if they don’t, they should do whatever they can to shrink their quadriceps and attempt to attain the unattainable – thighs that do not touch, not even close, when their standing up, feet together.

Images like the one on the following page litter the Internet. They are extreme examples of the lengths to which girls these days are going in order to achieve the thin ideal that they see in the media.

The photo above is an extreme example of the current thinspiration fad, but demonstrates the types of figures that young women today are striving to achieve.

While thinspiration images can also feature thin women who look healthy and fit, the message is the same: you must look a certain way otherwise you are taking a risk to be discriminated.

To conclude, the feminist image of a women is completely transformed on social media. Added to retouched women in avertissement, the society tend to make women wish having a body that would never exist for real, making them feel less self-confident, but also feeling bad in their own body.

- EVA