A Rant About Modern Self-Image Issues

    Welcome! Last week I promised you all a hopefully-uplifting rant about modern body-image issues among ladies of my generation and the one before. If you are going to be offended if I think your demeaning beliefs about yourself are more harmful than they are helpful, then skip this post, okay? I don't want to cause emotional damage; I'm here to try and solve some of it.

    Ready?

    Here we go.

    To be entirely honest, I do not understand why some girls think their bodies are ugly. I personally do not struggle with body-image issues, and I never have, and as a result, I don't understand. Where does this belief come from? What the heck is it doing here?

    My hypothesis is that most girls spend far too much time on social media, watching TV, or paying attention to billboards for their own mental and emotional health--a hypothesis supported by a statistic I learned recently in my Lifespan Development class, saying that 30% of teenage girls in the United States have seriously considered suicide*. According to my professor's source, this epidemic of suicidal thoughts stems from too much social media influence.

    My gut reaction when I first heard that statistic was a combination of, 'Well, yeah, that makes sense,' and, 'What the **** is wrong with our society?!' (I'll let you fill in the cussword of your choice there; in real life I think the term that sprang to my mind was relatively tame. And yes, this is an admission that I'm an imperfect human being. 😁)

    I mean, come on! What does it matter what another girl looks like? What does it matter what other people say you have to do to be beautiful? When you find the guy you want to spend the rest of your life with, if he's actually a decent guy, he's not going to care! He'll love you for who you are, not for what the world says you ought to look like.

    So please, please, please ignore all those people who say you have to be so thin or so tall or so much endowed about the sternum. Their opinions are just that--opinions (though, by that argument, everything in this blog post is also an opinion--my opinion--and as such can be taken with about as much salt...). They are not Gospel truth, they are somebody's opinions, and the somebody making those opinions is a human being who can be, and probably is, incorrect. Gospel truth is truth, and it says that God doesn't care what you look like, only that your heart is in the right place.

    You don't have to starve yourself to be beautiful. You don't have to meet modern "beauty standards" to be beautiful. You don't have to fundamentally change your body, your appearance, your build, to fit the image the world wants to feed you. If you exercise three times a week, do it because it's good for you and makes your muscles and body happy, not because you have to lose X amount of pounds in so much time.

    I highly recommend looking up Bernadette Banner's corset and fashion videos on YouTube. I've linked one of her videos before, in my Herb Spotlight post about nettles. Bernadette is a total Victorian fashion geek, and an incredibly skilled seamstress, and she has done a ton of research into historical fashions. I've learned a lot from her, such as the following:

    Did you know that in the Victorian time period, women used padding to achieve the figure they wanted? Yes, they used corsets, somewhat, but that was mostly because the corset was their equivalent of a bra. Tight lacing for a slimmer waist was not common, though a corset could reduce one's waist size slightly. For the rest of their figure enhancement, they padded their hips and busts beneath their dresses so they could get the proper shape. Also, Victorian fashion was about shape, not size. If you could pull off a perfect hourglass with minor corset-tightening and some padding, you were solid. Back then, achieving the proper figure was as easy as that.

    Nowadays, we have it in our heads that we have to change ourselves to fit our clothes, and if our clothes are too small, then we're too fat and need to do something about it. That philosophy sucks. That philosophy says that only a minor percentage of the population is born good enough, and the rest of us have to change the builds our genetics gave us.

    I think God is much more a fan of how the Victorians thought. Clothing was tailored to the body that wore it. People didn't have to change themselves to look amazing, because their clothing fit you the way they were. A persons outfit was designed to make them look good, not the other way around.

    To bring this back to the modern day, I say that if your clothes don't fit you, please just go buy some that fit. Don't assume you're a bad person because you have to wear a medium or a large or a triple-extra-large. The letter on the tag is not a judgment about you; it's a way to standardize clothes so everyone can have something that fits them relatively well and looks good on them because it fits them. Having an XXXL on the tag of your shirt isn't a bad thing. I promise. It's not. Believe me, you'll look better in clothes that fit you than in clothes that are too small. Don't try and squish yourself into something that doesn't fit because 'XS' is a "better" tag label than 'M' or 'L'.

    Stop judging yourself! Stop disparaging your body! Stop badmouthing this gift God has given you (because your body is a gift)! Please be nice to yourself and accept yourself the way you are. You don't need to change yourself to be beautiful, because you already are!

    What God sees and what the world sees are two completely different things. One lifts you up, the other beats you down. Well, don't let the world beat you down! Stand tall! You are beautiful. You can be confident in who you are. Go out and be the Vixen of your town (see last week's blog post), sexy not because your body looks the way the world says it should (and Vixen's doesn't, by the way; she's technically a bit overweight), but because you know how beautiful you are.

    Which actually ties in to some research I did for Vixen's character when I entered this potentially dangerous Google search: what makes a woman sexy? The results I got were awesome, given out by men--real men, not fashion models or social media influencers with agendas for their own prosperity. Can you guess what the primary factor in a woman's sexiness was for these guys?

    Her confidence. Vixen is super hot not because her body fits all the beauty standards to the last check-box, but because she is confident. She knows who she is. She knows what she believes. And she believes that she is beautiful.

    You can, too.

    My advice? Get off the social media that's giving you 'instructions' on how to be more beautiful. All it wants to do is make you fear that you're not good enough so you'll come back again and again and give them lots of ad revenue. Get those feeds off your phone, break the cycle of this addiction--because believe it or not, if you have self-image issues, you may be addicted, however subtly, to the social media sites causing them--and get out into the real world. Learn to see the beauty in yourself. Learn to stop judging yourself.

    You are beautiful.

    Seriously.

    You. Are. Beautiful.

    P.S. If you're not ready to stop judging yourself just yet, but want a way to get a foot into that door, here's a pro tip: If you're really not satisfied with the way you look and think you look overweight in any way, try wearing a belt. However. Don't put it through the belt loops on your jeans, because that'll place the belt at your hips. Rather, put your belt on around your waist, which is the area just around your belly button. You don't need to cinch it tight; just keep it comfortable; but doing this will instantly make you look slimmer. 

    No need to change your body, except for what will make you a healthier person overall. Just adjust your clothes a little bit to augment your figure, in the spirit of Victorianism. I use this technique literally all the time, and while I'm not "plus sized" in any way, using a belt this way gives my figure a welcome boost for very little effort. If you want a second opinion, visit this video. You'll want to go to about six and a half minutes in.

    *Here's another social media stat I've heard recently. Apparently, in China, TikTok runs only educational content after a certain time--if I remember correctly, it was something like 10 o'clock at night. But in Utah, that doesn't happen; and worse, if a person in Utah spends even ten minutes on TikTok, they will at some point within that time have easy access to both a link to a pornography site and a link to an anti-Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-Day-Saints site.

    Think about that for a moment. Two different sources of darkness. In ten minutes. I don't know about you, but I find that absolutely terrifying. Unfortunately, I don't have a direct source for that statistic, since I heard it third-hand in a church meeting, but even if it's only halfway or a quarter right, that's still a massive problem. I think I'm really glad I don't spend a lot of time on the traditional social media sites.