Opinion 1: How The Media Has Hurt Our Body Image

When being asked about beauty, what would you answer? How does one really describe beauty? How does one decide something is more beautiful than the other? Is beauty limited by ones opinion? One thing we can agree about beauty is something that pleases us. If I was asked about the meaning of beauty, I would simply say beauty is more about how we feel, not how we look. By that, I mean, I would say beauty is to be felt within our inner soul, our mindset, and that inner thing would be projected to the outer world. Because can you really explain why you’re beautiful? I’m pretty sure when answering that, it’s more of our “feeling” explaining why we’re beautiful. I don’t know if it’s just me, but when I’m looking at myself in the mirror, I would look at myself and see what I feel. If I’m happy with the way I look at that time, I would say I’m beautiful. If I feel like my eyes, my nose, my mouth, and my face shape compliment each other, combining all their features and making me feel beautiful, then that’s it. It only takes your own feeling to be beautiful. But then, comes the external influence.

I wouldn’t lie when I say I’ve ever felt ugly, fat, disgusting, and insecure. See the way I describe ugly, fat, disgusting, and insecure? I used the word “felt”, not look. Because that feeling I felt was within me. It’s simply the outer world making me think and feel I’m not beautiful, and by the outer world I mean is the media. The media has decided that beauty standards are what the eyes are pleasantly seeing and decided that the opposite of that is not considered as beautiful. The effort of changing the mindset of beauty standards which has already been planted and spread in the society seems like an unending battle. Feeling beautiful seems like a dynamic cycle which is always being disrupted by the media. Many has felt ugly because the media decided “you don’t have these beauty standards, you are not counted as beautiful”.

However, one should start planting the mindset that beautiful is what we feel inside, rather than how we look outside. If we decide beauty is something to be felt, no judgements and opinions about how we look would destroy that feeling, because the beauty is inside, not outside. Also, don’t you feel cruel to hate your own body? The body you were born with? The body you live with? The body that make you do the things you do? If you want to change the way you look because it would make you feel better, I would say go ahead, but don’t ever hate on it because of the media tells you to. Because your body is you.