Growing up my mom taught me how to “act like a lady” and present myself in a mannerly fashion as I got older, but social media showed me how to be a so called “sexy, confident” woman. On social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat, the females who got the most likes, comments and followers, were the women who strongly presented their petite waists, and large butts and boobs in their pictures or posts. Most of these women also had their beautiful faces perfected with makeup and their hair finished in a “natural fashion”.
Their pages were full of pictures of themselves, whether they were taken by themselves, or by others, their bodies always looked like perfect hourglasses and their faces like dolls. Women like Alexis Ren, Sommer Ray, and Tammy Hembrow were known for being examples of beautiful, sexy women, the way women were supposed to look. Their likes, comments and followers were not only from men, but also from other females who were interested in their pictures.
Because of this, I am sure I was not the only young girl who social media skewed into believing this is how I needed to look to be a beautiful woman. I thought that as a woman, I needed to be sexy. Nobody paid attention to if you were “acting like a lady” on Instagram like my mom had taught me, they only paid attention to you if you looked like one(if you had the boobs and the butt). This of course skewed my own body image, and I convinced myself that I did not look anything like what a woman should look like. When you are fourteen, obviously you shouldn’t look like this, but that is almost impossible to realize when it is what is presented as the “most liked”. Though these women are beautiful, they are not the expectation for all women like Instagram taught me. As more and more younger generations join social media, we all still need reminders that we are all people, and our bodies are not the only thing that will get the attention of others. Though that is how social media has presented it, that is not the only thing that will make us “sexy”, no matter our gender.
Literature & the Internet 