As a girl, I constantly feel that I must comply to social standards. These standards are practically unreachable yet we still expect every girl to meet them. There is a constant need and pressure to get everything right. To get the perfect grades because they determine the rest of your life and your whole future. The belief that every move you make right now will either make or break your future. There are so many conceptions of what you’re supposed to be even though we know we will never reach them, we still strive and put those standards above all else. We’re taught that we are only as good as what we can do and that we must control everything. We must control our weight, our grade, and even our appearance.

Research shows that 82% of women are openly unhappy with their weight, and the average teenage girl spends 65 minutes changing her appearance every day. These unreachable beauty standards and the need to be perfect are the reason that 95% of the 24 million suicides are of ages 12-25, and that suicide is the 2^nd leading cause of deaths in ages 10-24 with over 5,000 attempts a day in solely the United States.

There’s the fact that women’s bodies are sexualized and used to sell things such as hamburgers, which is demonstrated in the ads I inserted into this post, yet breast feeding in public is still seen as taboo and looked down upon. In 2013, over 700 bills that regulate a woman’s body were proposed as compared to the zero for a man. Magazines and advertisements are photo shopped to show a sexualized image that is impractical and unreachable.

We were made to believe our identity is solely a number on a scale, but our value cannot be defined by a picture, but for one second imagine what our world would be like if these societal messages weren’t projected to women. What would happen if our image wasn’t based on what’s on the outside but instead our intrinsic value. What would happen if we could rise above the status quo and not be defined as who we are on the outside. If we could live our lives without so much judgement and comparison that makes us believe we need to pretend to be someone that we are not just because we do not fit a certain standard of beauty. I hope we can live in a world where we can look in the mirror and not see everything we are not, but everything we are and everything we can be. A world where we don’t compare ourselves to each other and how we need to be better than someone else and instead focus on being better than who you were yesterday.

megan xx