Research Based Analysis Since the start of the modern era, obesity has been a hot topic in America. There have been many platforms such as Victoria Secret or Instagram that promote an ideal body image that has made people religiously focus on achieving this ideal body image. There have been many people with different professions that have examined this new focus and how it has affected America, specifically teenage girls. The article “Fat and Happy?” by Hillel Schwartz points out how society disavows fat people and exposes how poorly they are treated. Roberta Seid takes a slightly different approach in her article “Too ‘Close to the Bone’” and explores the idea that girls obsess over a perfect body and this obsession takes a large toll on …show more content…
Seid elaborates on how society has now become competitive in achieving these aesthetic standards, “[Women] strive to meet this unreasonable standard because it has become a moral imperative in our society, the quest for physical beauty remains deeply powerful” (173). Seid claims that becoming thin and having this idea body type has now become a competition between who looks the best because society has pushed teenage girls to this point. The competition relates to who looks the best and what extremes they’ll go through in order to be thin to impress society. These extremes may include developing an eating disorder, and spending hours in the gym to look muscular. She also implies that striving for this body type has now become so ingrained into teenage girls’ mindset to even where it’s a necessity for them to be thin. This necessity has come from a new study in 2016 found that ninety four percent of girls in America have been body shamed and sixty six percent of respondents are body negative about themselves (Gush). This connects back to Seid’s point of society expecting teenage girls to look a certain way, and if they don’t they will be degraded according to what Charlotte Gush, a feminist, …show more content…
This could also throw them into a deep pit of depression and those comments could nag at them to the point where that’s the only thing they can think of and would yield no productivity in their day. When teenage girls see other thin women, they become extremely jealous and self degrade themselves. These teenage girls can develop depression as a result of this jealousy and can take away their focus from their everyday activities because of their constant sadness and dissatisfaction of their body. They would constantly feel rejected by society and could even develop anxiety for not having an ideal body type. CNN found even more potential harm of body shaming in a new study, “Overweight women who believe negative messages about their bodies are at greater risk for heart disease and diabetes” (MacMillian). This new study strongly suggests women’s overall health is in harm’s way if they decide to accept what other people say about their bodies. If a teenage girl listens to what body shamers have to say about their bodies, they are at risk later in their life of their health