American society has created unhealthy beauty standards that people want to live up to, but they ridicule those same standards when their goals can’t be achieved. Woman criticize how other women look but are offended when others do the same to them. There is “fat-shaming” and “skinny-shaming,” and now, no one's body seems to fit the “ideal” mold that Americans have crafted. It’s a hypocrisy of ideas. Body shaming is certainly not a new phenomenon, but social media outlets have caused it to spiral out of control. In today’s day and age, there are a variety of apps dedicated to looking at, evaluating, and commenting on other’s bodies. The growth of social media has caused widespread body shaming, leading women and men alike to cast their self-morals aside, and bully others for …show more content…
The answer is that the “perfect” body has changed over time all, all over the world, and as far as history can recall, there has always been a certain standard of beauty. While women are normally under scrutiny for looks, men too have faced such societal pressures. Dating back to Ancient Greece, it was men, not women who were expected to look a certain way, ideally like the heroic Hercules. In China, during the Han Dynasty, women were expected to have long black hair, pale skin, and small dainty feet. Jumping ahead two thousand years, into the Victorian Era, women still had a body type to model, the hourglass figure. The corset became the height of fashion, symbolizing a woman’s domestic. That hourglass ideology continues into the 1950’s, Marilyn Monroe who flaunted a small waist and wide hips. Fifty years later, curves are out of fashion, instead, men and women alike are expected flaunt a skinny and fit body, with a small hip-to-waist ratio. With so many different ideal body types, why do people all over the continent want to fit just one stereotype? Why do men and women are fixating on their flaws? The answers point to the