This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on 7th February, 2023.
More than ever, the world today faces a troubling ideal of beauty which stands at the detriment of everybody’s comfort. Men and women, boys and girls face the struggle to match who they truly are to the images of ideal beauty to get the conviction of them being handsome, beautiful, and attractive.
Society is pinned down by its inventions, and as such the idealistic beauty rules and demands compliance, or else we look at each other as not attractive enough.
We cannot downplay beauty as a societal construct, especially because it sits at the core of societal thought, philosophy, and understanding of aesthetics, art, and even morals.
Depictions of what is beautiful could pass for what is good too; its theoretical base thus influences the worldview of the people in question. This discourse is worthwhile because natural beauty is a reflection of one’s overall well-being.
The target is not to go to the extremes of rejecting the modern and embracing the traditional, but it is to challenge the standards which are practically unfit for identifying beauty through all world cultures.
The differences in nutrition, environment, weather, etc. influence how people’s bodies are made up, how strong or frail they become, and equally how big or slim.
The problem of low self-esteem, body image anxiety, and self-dissatisfaction is real, and it is no less a struggle. No wonder when you tell someone ‘You are so beautiful!’ you often get a surprised look from them because they don’t believe their beauty can be anything to amaze anyone.
This low self-esteem makes people work towards the unattainable, with lengths of hours in the gyms and a lot more hours of fasting, consumption of medications, or even getting medical procedures done on them.
Beauty pageants, for instance, are rooted in certain cultures, and the understanding of beauty in those cultures tends to dominate and rule what is globally understood as ‘beautiful’ and ‘attractive’ today. The evolution of what is globally prominent as beauty standards go as far back as 2500 B.C. among the ancient Greeks and Romans.
These standards or beliefs of what is beautiful (in the physical sense) are widespread in ancient literature and artistic works: among others, body features such as fair skin, tall, slender, big breasts, light hair and full hips for women are evident; while for the men an athletic figure with well-developed muscles, a broad chest, and long legs was widely taken as the standard of ‘handsomeness.’
The popularity of these ideals has massively increased in the modern days, and has managed to become an issue of interest to many people who are connected with the social information systems powered through the internet: what we call social media.
Social media influences the way people think of their looks, in comparison to the way other people look. While the process and purpose of appearances may not be ascertained, a lot of people are pushed to judge themselves against the most ‘liked’ models on social media, something which is likely to result in anxiety and dissatisfaction with who they are naturally.
Just for the looks one can get angry with his or her body, feeling they have the weight they or shouldn’t have, even though it may be within the healthy weight brackets. The more one sees thin people being liked the most on social media, and being used in adverts, movies, and TV programmes, the deeper one sinks into idealizing and working towards getting thinner than they are.
This, according to research affects mostly people below the age of 45. The problem of not accepting the body getting old according to age is a different one altogether.
We ought to come to terms with the fact that life is not lived for the looks and need not invest our lives for the same. Among social media users, mostly women, it is common to use filters and to enhance photos before sharing.
In the year 2021, the Gender and Sexualities Research Centre at the City University of London published a study report titled: ‘Changing the perfect picture: Smartphones, Social Media, and Appearance Pressures’ led by Prof. Rosalind Gill.
The UK- based study established that 90% of young women and non-binary people involved, reported using filters or editing their photos to appear as if they had whiter teeth, weighed less, had a different nose, or other physical changes.
Bringing it home, amongst Africans, standards of beauty from the west may not work so well. This is because cultures have different ways of understanding beauty. A thinker whose name I cannot recall said beauty is a matter of consensus, and as such, to determine it, it has to be in line with the socially-accepted criteria for beauty.
It is a positive thing to teach children from when they are young what beauty is in their cultural setting before they learn different things from the streets of the internet. This way we will help to minimize the harm caused by unattainable impressions of beauty.
