Hot Girl Health

This is a very nuanced and layered question. A lot of factors contribute to the answer such as where you live, family dynamics, race, innate personality, upbringing etc., but I’m going to focus on the media indoctrination and the normalization of low self esteem and why it’s a narrative that’s been willfully adapted and empowered.

Society doesn’t teach high self esteem to girls because it’s not valuable or profitable to how they want the world to function.  Some of the earliest examples I can recall of low self esteem marketing is diet culture.  It’s always been normal for women to be on a “diet” or mention needing to go on a diet, especially in older movies and TV shows (and by older I mean 2000s and up), usually played off as a gag joke. The reason this is bad is because it normalizes being unhappy with yourself. Now replace dieting with any beauty standard, what does this do over time and over generations? It trains everyone to believe that’s how girls should be and how we should think, or suffer being an undesirable in the cultural consciousness. “That’s just how things are.”

With successful indoctrination, the “standard” becomes perpetuated and upheld not only by society but by the very people that it was marketed to hurt to begin with. And this is the case for every thing girls are nitpicked over, it always becomes internalized through repetition, brainwashing, and reinforcement in all media forms spilled out into real life. Now a days, it’s pushed through the algorithm, they don’t even have to write male gaze and misogyny through movie scripts anymore to get the point across, we indoctrinate ourselves through chasing fake pictures, quick trends, or impossible to replicate genetics put on a pedestal.

Money is the biggest reason.  If an industry wants us to buy something the first thing they will try to do is make the “impossible”, the norm.  Having a small nose, glass skin, full hair, and being slim thick yet waif skinny is the reality for some people, but just a small percentage.  They know that. (Also those were just examples, even the most minute NATURAL things can be insecurities in today’s world, like hip dips or a large trapezius, things you never would have dreamed of or noticed before the digital age.)  So through smoke and mirrors (ads, doctored photos, propaganda in TV shows/movies, and any form of cultural zeitgeist you can think of) they will push those things onto us until it’s what we see as “normal” and by extension “desirable.”  And that makes the majority without said traits want to have or get those things, or suffer ridicule for existing otherwise. This is where the beauty and fitness industries step in to push products and save the day while still using media, especially the imaginary exclusivity of celebrities, to perpetuate the standards and keep the want going, reaping the rewards in the end.

Control is the second thing.  If you hate yourself, it’s easier to keep you in line (this applies to many circumstances outside the scope of this article).  When you don’t feel good about yourself it keeps you more willing to buy, more willing to chase.  All industries want consumers. It’s never just one beauty product or procedure you need, there’s always something that can be done or fixed.  Our looks have become commodified as a trend and trends always go in cycles.  Just like fashion, our faces and bodies have been reduced to 10 year rotations on what’s desirable or not.  And although it’s hard to tell while you’re living in it, know that if you do choose to change yourself, there’s no one body or look that will be perfect or “in” forever.  It’s a constantly moving goalpost.

The more you recognize the bias, the more you can practice resistance towards it.  You don’t have to change yourself to fit a mold, because it’s all made up anyway. I preach a lot about knowing yourself, because this is always going to be the key in not letting anything else define you.  You have to fight the influence, wade through the brain rot, and come out loving yourself on the other side.  But you can do it Hot Girls, there are few things more rewarding than knowing who you are is always enough.

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