Lately the buzz seems to be everywhere, everywhere I look. Social networking sites, magazines, conversations between girls at my school including my own friends.
It's the same old thing, girls wanting perfection. Speaking as a teenage girl myself I can understand why girls would want to be perfect. To me it's all through pressure, pressure from boys, pressure from other 'skinnier', more 'perfect' girls, pressure from images in the media.
If you were to pick a group of people in the history of the human race to have the most malleable minds, it would be the teenage girls of my generation.
To be perfectly honest, I hate my generation. I hate the fact that girls feel so pushed to be perfect, at the end of the day this post becomes a rant about media. Being a media student and a teenage girl, I am greatly aware of how much media images can influence people.
The truth is, there is no 'perfection'. It is a word that should have permanent air quotations either side of it. My rule is that I eat when I'm hungry, that's the way it should be, if you have a decent diet and you know you are eating enough food to keep you healthy and energetic then do whatever the hell you want. Girls can't accept what they look like any more.
Walking through the corridors at school, I hear girls talking about diets and extra exercise plans to be able to get a 'thigh gap'. For those of you who don't know what this is it is creating a gap between each inner thigh, and it's totally unrealistic. Not only do girls feel the need to diet but do extra exercises to create these kind of 'perfect' body formations. What most girls don't realise is that what they are trying to achieve could be impossible, some girls simply do not have the body composition to create a gap.
One exercise that is said to make your bum look more toned is the '30 day squat challenge', it has been spread around social networking sites and the general Internet for months, it involves a 30 days long exercise plan purely made up of squats. Day 1 consists of 50 squats and by day 30 you are doing 250 squats. I get it if you want a nice arse, go for it, give it a try, but I personally have seen 12-16 year old girls discussing how their squat challenge is going and to be honest it kind of sickens me, I know exactly why girls this age want the perfect arse- BOYS. Realistically girls don't give a toss what their arses looks like, you can't see them half the time anyway, they care about what boys think of them. This is one of the far too many ways media images sexualise young girls.
I hear my own, very close friends talking about how they are getting fat and need to go on a diet and I know that they are perfect and their bodies are ideal for them and the activities they do, but telling them they are fine just the way they are is getting boring. They don't listen. What's worse is that they are in the prime of their lives and they don't even realise it. Being a teenager is about shoving your face full of food and then going outside for a run around with your friends
When I was 7 or 8 I wanted to grow up and be able to wear high heels and make-up and be perfect and tanned and skinny, just like how everyone else is. But if you look around at the 'real society' it's nothing at all like that.
When I started to be able to wear high heels and make-up you realise it's nothing like what it seems. High heels kill your feet and make-up gives you spots, it's just a big pain really. So when teenage girl gets bored and fed up with the make-up and clothes etc. they look for something else to play with, something much more fragile- their bodies.
I'm not trying to tell teenage girls to stop trying to be 'perfect', because I know they won't listen.
I'm just saying nobody is.
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