It keeps happening: Influencers blaming society for programming them to think they MUST have skinny arms or their life will be doomed.
Many influencers, some from highly privileged backgrounds, continue to claim that years of diet culture and pressure from “society” have brainwashed them into thinking that the requirement for life success is to have pipe cleaner arms.
I’m beginning to wonder if some of these influencers, who routinely flash thousands of dollars worth of accessories in their posts, are just making all of this up to win engagement — which means more followers — which means more $$$$.
Where IS all this “pressure”?
I don’t get it. I keep hearing about “all the pressure” to be thin that young females and women are subjected to.
Yet have you noticed (assuming you’re with me on all of this nonsense) that these young women conveniently leave out a more specific source of this pressure?
Before I go on, I must make a distinction. There are women who were, indeed, subjected to ongoing verbal abuse by their mother, father or both, regarding their excess body weight when growing up.
They were overweight since early in childhood, or, became noticeably heavy in adolescence.
Their parents were relentlessly on their case, making cruel remarks and teaching their daughter to feel awful about themselves. This then leads to lasting psychological damage.
However, this isn’t the demographic my post is about. My post centers specifically on that young woman whose parents NEVER subjected them to ongoing insults about their body.
In fact, so often, these influencers had never even been overweight to begin with.
So this is how you know that there’s no way their parents would’ve been haranguing them to get thin if they had already been slender or had a conventionally attractive body.
But these influencers repeatedly post about this thing called “societal pressure” and “programming to be stick thin,” and the like.
So tell me, who doles out this pressure? Just WHO is telling women to get skinny or else?
When my sister was in medical school I stayed with her over one of my college breaks.
I asked why there was hardly any food in the house. Her response: “Because I want to be thin.”
I was 19 and already knew that she was going about her goal the wrong way.
I said she could eat more and still be trim if she jogged and trained with weights, but she claimed she didn’t have time.
She was straight-size (not thin, not overweight), and wasn’t as interested in losing much weight as she was at staying where she was, though she would’ve welcomed being five or 10 pounds less.
The fact that her approach was non-sustainable and void of a workout component did not mean that it was fueled by feeling pressure from society or the media to be thin.
She simply wanted to be thin. Just like a woman of wealth might simply want a $10,000 handbag.
Can it not be as simple as that for many women?
She simply wanted to be thin because — brace yourself — she liked the way it looked. Why must we make something more out of this?
At no point did our mother or father EVER tell her she needed to be skinny in order to get accepted into medical school. Or anything, for that matter.
It’s like when a brunette wants to go blonde. She likes the look; has nothing to do with feeling pressure or being programmed. Blonde just looks good to some women!
I once wanted to be blonde. Had nothing to do with societal pressure or being told by hundreds of people while growing up that nobody would ever marry me unless I went blonde.
But Some Women DO Feel Pressure to Be Tiny
Though some adolescents and teens feel pressure from one or both parents to stay slim, what about the others who feel pressure but whose parents had nothing to do with it?
Who’s making them feel their regular-size arms are fat and ugly?
What godly force has brainwashed them into thinking that the only attractive upper arm is one that’s as thin as a straw?
Their school teachers? The school principal? The piano instructor? The volleyball coach? Their classmates? The neighbors? Their boss at Arby’s?
Or maybe they develop this wildly exaggerated level of self-consciousness about their arms or thighs because in their favorite TV show, all the women are thin.
Well, that still doesn’t cut it as a reasonable excuse for obsessing over already-nice-looking arms.
How does an intelligent, rational-minded teen or young woman decide to base her life layout on the women she sees inside that box in her living room?
How does an intelligent, rational-minded teen or young woman decide to base her life layout on the women she sees inside that box in her living room?
Are kids, teens and college students being told by their teachers that the only way to get a passing grade is to have a little body?
Again, WHERE is this so-called societal pressure coming from?
Despite all the TikTok and Instagram posts telling women to deprogram themselves from society pressure, it seems as though today’s young generation of women is as mixed up as ever — fixating on trite items that, if they were to be told tomorrow they had just six months to live — would go up in smoke in the blink of an eye.
It’s a safe bet that these influencers, along with their worshippers, won’t be future astronauts or pioneers in cancer cure research.
