Persuasive speech - Essay Example

Teacher’s Mad Standards of Beauty I want to live to see the day that people can live freely without discrimination based on size. I want to see women of all sizes equally treated by the society. Most importantly, I want to see women, no matter how small or big they are, to be able to embrace their own image confidently and without fear. Self-identity and self-image has perhaps always been a big issue for women, but it is only in the past decade that women have completely succumbed to the world’s idea of what is beautiful and sexy.

The pressure to be size twos with incredibly small waistlines are not just weakening the low self-esteem of young girls and women all over the world, but are destroying their very lives. They are made to think that they have to look a certain way and fit in a certain mold to be considered a real woman. (Wolf 89) Is this the kind of treatment that we really want? What will become of our society if we continue to feed such insecurities and impossible standards of beauty? Women should not be subject to any form of standard or expectation, because not only does it ruin their confidence in their own bodies, it also creates in them the idea that they are less human if they do not have thigh gaps.

It is incredibly unfair to put these kinds of criteria on them, because it limits them from feeling beautiful just the way they are. It also creates in the female race a sort of discriminative separation between the thin and fat. What makes it worse is that the benchmarks of aesthetics never really lasts a long time. If these standards change, women must again adjust and change to fit the society’s new idea of beauty. A long time ago, there was a time when the plump women were considered the most beautiful girls.

However, as hundreds of years have passed, we have seen a great shift in the perception of beauty. Now, stick-thin girls are being looked up to as models for aesthetic perfection – girls with twenty-inch waistlines, projecting collarbones, and apparent thigh gaps. (Blood, 11) As we have witnessed in the recent years, more and more young teenage girls have battled with multiple eating disorders, and mental or psychological problems because of the issue on self-image. There is an increasing number of girls today that are suffering from disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

Many have also resolved to cutting and even suicide because they can’t handle the bullying that happens in school and the pressure to look like what they see in these magazines, billboards and movies. (Goebels 5) Some girls have even lost their lives with the battle of their self-image and self-confidence. And this madness has to come to an end. Girls who have gone through hell do not deserve this physical and emotional beating. Instead, they deserve to be looked at as equal human beings, just like everyone else.

They dont deserve to be marked like objects that have to fit certain ideals in order to be accepted as a human being as they are. We must all realize therefore that the end of these unfair standards that are being put on women must come. There must soon come a day when we flip a magazine, and we see women of all sizes, and not just skinny models, flaunting the cover pages. (Kirsh, 25) We must one day be able to see women of all sizes being able to confidently wear a bikini on the beach without being gawked upon like a wild animal on the loose.

We must also actresses of all sizes to play the part of the lead in romantic movies and not just tanned and toned women with abs and no body fat, because not all women really look like this. We must see all women feel the happiness they deserve. Works CitedBlood, Sylvia. Body Work: The Social Construction of Women’s Body Image. East Sussex: Rutledge, 2005. Goebels, Dennis Alexander. The Depiction of Beauty Ideals and Beauty Standards in Robert Escove’s “She’s All That.” Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag, 2006.

Kirsh, Steven. Media and Youth: A Developmental Perspective. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010.Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Print.