Body Image Struggles Within Sports, Social Media, and Home
Body shaming has always been a major problem in society, mainly for females, especially teen girls. As a teen girl in society today, I can understand that these struggles of body shaming can start at a young age. A study showed that nearly 85 percent of adolescents reported seeing overweight classmates teased in gym class. Along with that study, Rebecca Puhl, the deputy director of the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and her colleagues asked bigger kids who was doing the bullying, and it turned out it was not just friends and classmates doing the bullying but also teachers and, for more than a third of the bullied, their parents.
There are many instances in sports where athletes who won a gold, bronze, or silver medal, or accomplishments in general, did not get any of the acknowledgement they deserve just because of their height and weight. It is still heard today that “to win or be worthy, we must be thin. Be perfect, be beautiful, be feminine. And don’t dare to bring up your period.” This being said to athletes, especially girls, can have serious consequences on the athlete, such as disordered eating. A study showed that 13-41 percent of adolescent female athletes exhibit disordered eating, which unleashes something known as RED-S, a web of metabolic, endocrine, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and other bodily complications. Dr. Stacy Sims, a fellow at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, said that understanding a female athlete’s hormone cycle and tailoring training accordingly can actually make training more effective. Girls usually face undue stress around puberty, when body size, hormones, and muscle strength change.
Men face the same challenges, minus having to worry about having a period every month. Men are judged and expected to lose weight until they get to the weight they are expected to meet, even if it means they have to starve themselves. It is not always about weight and size; many athletes can achieve the same athletic accomplishments if they are a little bigger. The typical goal for females is to get smaller and thinner but for men, it is typically a goal to have a bigger, more muscular upper body but ends up being taken too far to try to achieve an impossible image. Examples of things guys struggle with are being too heavy, too skinny, not tall enough, too tall, not enough muscle, and muscles not defined enough. These are especially major things when it comes to sports. What both males and females don’t realize is that we do not need to try to achieve an impossible body image or fitness achievements to be good at a sport we love, as long as we put in the work, we can achieve many things no matter body size.
Social media is one of the biggest places that body shaming and body image struggles happen and begin. Most people only think about the female perspective, but the same thing is very much happening for boys too. Examples of social media platforms, even videogames, that cause struggles for males are things such as hypermasculine video games they play, superheroes in movies, and fitness videos on TikTok, YouTube, and especially Instagram. There may be more public awareness that social media can harm teens, which shows that the company hid all the negative effects of Instagram, which has mostly been focused on girls. However, recent reports have found that the same online pressures can also cause teenage boys to feel bad about their bodies. We must remember that although female body image/shaming is more talked about, this problem is the same for men.
As it is known, females talk about body image issues on social media which is why it is more talked about than the body image struggles for males. Before social media, teens could avoid body negativity. Social media causes this so much that teens, specifically females, edit their pictures to make themselves unrealistically skinny. A recent study showed that 80 percent of females experience body negativity on social media. We need to acknowledge that the bodies seen on social media are unrealistic and unhealthy. Most teens don’t think that most pictures are edited to make them look like they are skinny, which is very unrealistic.
It may come as a surprise to some, but this is even a problem at home with some teens' own families. Sometimes the problem for people is that their own family is making them feel bad about themselves, even if it's unintentional. Even the smallest thing, such as your mom or dad telling you to not wear something that shows some of your stomach, can make a teen feel bad about themselves, especially because it is coming from their own parents. When their parents tell them not to show their stomach, it can make them feel like their own parents think that they are not skinny enough to wear that shirt and that they shouldn’t be showing any part of their body other than their neck and head and sometimes legs. This may be very unintentional on the parents' side, but from the teens’ perspective, it can cause problems for them, and they might start to try to lose unhealthy weight by starving themselves or excessively working out, the reason for this is the fact that they just want to please their parents and don’t want them to think they aren’t good enough. But it can also be intentional, such as the parent telling them they need to eat less or work out more or even saying directly to them that they are overweight or not skinny enough. This is even worse because they are saying exactly how they feel, and of course, as teens we believe them because they are our parents. Parents may not realize this but this is one of the biggest problems. Teens shouldn’t hear these kinds of things from their own family.
Body shaming and body image issues are major problems, especially in teens, that shouldn’t be a problem. This is a problem in sports, social media, school, and even home. We should be working on ways to change these problems.
