By Karolina Rodriguez '25
You should smile more. Take care of your body. Love yourself.
These are all common phrases I'm sure any girl has heard before. Whether it's a stranger, family member, friend, or an advertisement, there are expectations for us. From youth, there are different standards for girls and boys in terms of attitude. Along with the beauty standards in Hollywood that are always evolving over time.“A man does something; it’s strategic. A woman does the same thing; it’s calculated. A man is allowed to react. A woman can only overreact.”—Taylor Swift.
For the past 50 years, regardless of film genre, when we've looked at our screens, we see young, pretty people. In our cartoons, commercials, rom-coms, and even survival films, the pressures of being young are always there. No matter how vague or direct, they're there in one form or another.
"Beauty and age dictate worth" As women get older in Hollywood, they become "less appealing", the popular idea that sex sells. "Everything relies on the balance of physical appearance.”
These normalizations are spreading throughout all our forms of media and have been internalized over time, affecting our beauty standards, and as they change and evolve through time, that same insecurity and validation simply shift. They affect our shows, books, and movies- when it comes to character designs, even from youth, we are ingrained in the idea that a hero is beautiful, always fitting the beauty standard. The idea that a person's good nature inside matches their exterior on the outside. Likewise, a villain doesn't fit these traditional standards.
With constant pieces of media that depict the same messages and stories, the lines of sense in morality are blurred. Simply erased with toxic messages and ideals of what "should be" desired, and in turn, there is a desensitization of children's sexualizations. Similarly, the effects on youth being shown to be much older than they are, affect the youth in the long run by normalizing predatory, abusive, and psychologically diminishing remarks. Not to mention creating unrealistic standards. Although we may believe that things are progressing in a better manner now, there are still issues with the horrible fetishizing of youth in relationships. Although the typical prey is thought to be young girls, it can happen to anyone, although boys are very often dismissed.
Forms of media include movies like Priscilla, Scott Pilgrim v.s. The World, Pretty Little Liars, Euphoria, etc. These are all popular pieces of pop culture that depict unhealthy relationships, with power indifferences over the young in the past 15 years. Pieces like this normalize praying on the naivety & the inexperience of teenagers. Crossing unethical lines that can be looked up to by those watching. Regardless of whether or not they are a legal "adult", it doesn't mean it's morally right.
A large part of why I believe audiences eat up these relationships, has to do with how beauty is perceived, and what we associate it with. How we are picked apart by our flaws that fester into insecurity, built upon our fears of societal messages on aging, toxic body positivity, skincare pressures, etc. Over time all this does to us is make us feel like we'll never be enough. We are all on a limited timeline of being considered worthy, even when one tries to change those "flaws, " those people will always be criticized. Either "they should have remained natural” "they still need more work" or "She looks like a monster now.”
With all this being said, the pedestal and obsession with beauty affect a spiral of problems in affecting our perceptions of worth, insecurity, healthy relationships, ageism, abuse, fetishes, etc. It finds its way to inject itself into more aspects of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Our subconscious perceptions of one another and how far it can take us, It gets to the point where we think, will we ever be enough?
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