Hi friends! Welcome back to another post in the body positivity series. This time, I'm taking on the stigma that men are less effected by insecurities and have less issues with body confidence. Men are often overlooked in a number of contexts, including mental health and body positivity. These things tend to be associated with the female mind, when in fact, these issues occur in all genders. Expectations to look a certain way, not acting 'manly' enough, expressing how you feel and having insecure moments are not things commonly associated with being a man, when in fact they are all-inclusive problems. We should be complimenting the men in our lives and boosting their self confidence just as much as we do for the women.
So, I'm actually not a dude, but I do have some experience dealing with insecure men in my life. Plus, I decided to do a little research and found it so much harder to find articles about male body positivity! I even had a lot fewer choices when it came to choosing a picture for the title, which is kind of ridiculous. This is 2019 and we need to accept that we are not restricted to our gender stereotypes. We are all human, and all feel human emotions. Which means, contrary to popular belief, that men also have self-confidence issues. An article in the Guardian indicated that four in five men (or 80.7%) talk negativity about their own appearance. The article suggested that men were conscious of their stomachs, their chest size, their hair line and their weight. According to a Health Line article, 90% of teenage boys exercise at least once a week in order to 'bulk up'. The article attributes this Superman Effect to a celebrity culture and the glorification of hunky Hollywood stars. The reality is that these results are so unrealistic that the majority are left feeling inferior. Men are exposed to unrealistic bodies in films and through the media thanks to the rise of Instagram models. The suppositions men face are often overlooked when we assume that women are more insecure, which isn't always the case. Both genders seem to have equal amounts of expectations to live up to. Male body positivity is about more than just accepting the shapes of their bodies, it's also learning to deal with other factors such as their height, penis size and the definition of their muscles. Although you may think these are just physical insecurities, research has found that men feel emasculated by being shorter, having a smaller penis or having fewer muscles on display. Physical insecurities carry a lot more connotations, and men in particular can feel as though they identify less with how they feel society requires them to be. A survey found that 64% of students drew a political leader to be taller than average, and around 3 inches of height can separate an income by more than £4,000 a year. The implication that a persons height makes them more or less capable is just absurd to me. The reality is that male stereotypes have been constructed by society and the media and, honestly, are a load of crap. First of all, our physical attributes don't make us any less of a man or a woman or anything else we identify as. It's all about how we feel about ourselves and deciding that stereotypes are a load of rubbish anyway. I think the issue with male body positivity is that it isn't talked about as widely. It's important to be open about your insecurities, but also to acknowledge that bodies in the media are often unrealistic and/or photoshopped. These people are literally paid to work out, eat kale and utilise the best lighting for their modelling careers. The majority of us just don't have the time for that. Developing positive habits, like trying to be active when you can and treating your body well is the key to maintaining a positive relationship with yourself. Let's get more people talking about male body positivity in order to normalise the fact that everyone can feel insecure and that we should all be working towards appreciating our bodies, regardless of our gender. For my next post, I wanted to address the issues surrounding a different demographic. Ageism is a fast growing problem in society, with the rise of plastic surgery and a new anti-wrinkle cream on the market every five minutes. In that post, I'll be talking about the struggles of coming to terms with the changes your body goes through as you get older and learning to accept appearances across all ages. Until then, beauties!
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Well hello again! Welcome to another instalment in the body positivity week. Today I wanted to address a few issues concerning the Beauty Industry, including the influence it has on us, the expectations it creates, but also the liberation of allowing us to create. This topic is a little ambiguous for me. On the one hand, my initial relationship with cosmetics was pretty toxic. From a young age, we're programmed to believe that we must look a certain way in order to be beautiful. Flawless skin. Zero pores. Bright eyes. Plump lips. Makeup and beauty trends obviously change over the years, but the message is loud and clear: you need cosmetic products to be beautiful. Which is obviously a load of bollocks. Growing up, I was suffocatingly insecure, as a lot of kids are, about my features. The pressure to look a certain way is overwhelming. And so I turned to fashion magazines and the internet for help. I discovered eyeliner and would rim my eyes inches thick with black kohl in the hope of making my eyes appear wider. Over the years, makeup became a mask to me, a way to hide my insecurities. Eventually, it got to the point that I wouldn't leave the house without it. Even on a summer holiday, I would sweat underneath a thick layer of makeup for the sake of preserving my insecurities. I hated my freckles, and would spend hours layering foundation and concealor on my skin to hide them. When puberty hit, I used makeup to to try to hide my breakouts, which in most cases only made them worse. I used makeup for all the wrong reasons, to try to turn myself into someone I wasn't and I was ashamed to be seen as anything other than this mask. Brands sell you the dream. Buy this and you'll look like them. Use this and change your face. 24 hour wear (even though wearing makeup for such a long time is SO bad for your skin). The reality is that mentality is incredibly unhealthy, and so I decided to try to change my perspective on cosmetics. I've always loved cosmetics, the pretty colours, the shimmering effects and the beautiful packaging, and I knew that giving up makeup altogether would just make me miserable, so I had to change the way I looked at it. Instead of using products to cover and disguise, I used them to highlight my features or to create a work of art. Through this, I discovered that beauty products are innovative. If used for the right reasons, you can create masterpieces, express yourself with colour, or a lack of. Paint pictures, add sparkle, or don't. Who cares! The point is that at the end of the day, the picture you've created all comes off. The fact is that you don't need it to be beautiful, but you can use it to create if you don't take it too seriously. The damaging thing about the beauty industry is that young women especially are targeted by brands to boost sales, but it's at the expense of their self confidence. If products were marketed in a different way, in a way that shows people that makeup is temporary, that we should also be embracing our natural skin, then perhaps there would be less insecurity going around. Interestingly enough, society seems to have the opposite perspective about men in makeup, which is absolutely ridiculous. A girl wearing a colourful smokey eye is attractive, but a boy wearing eyeliner and a colourful lip isn't? I think it's a load of crap. Cosmetics isn't just limited to one gender or one sexuality. We should be more accepting and appreciative of how people decide to portray themselves, regardless of who they are. The beauty industry is still something I struggle with to this day. For me, my bare face is the hardest thing to embrace as it's what people see the most, what people notice the most, and in the back of my mind, I still have these voices telling me that I look better with makeup, which isn't the case. I gradually started to use less and less makeup until eventually I was comfortable enough to brave the bare face. It's only been a recent revelation for me to actually leave the house without a stitch of makeup on, and you know what I found? No one treated me any differently. No one asked if I was tired or under the weather. No one looked at me like I was an alien, which was how I was made to feel without makeup. The fact is my day went by exactly as it would have if I'd have been wearing an entire face of my most perfectly crafted makeup. Shock horror. I think the important thing about cosmetics is to enjoy them and enjoy the time you spend applying them and creating. If you find yourself thinking 'I can't be arsed putting makeup on today, but I feel ugly without it' then you know you're using it for the wrong reasons. What helped me the most was to spend a day without makeup, even if it was somewhere I wasn't likely to see people I knew, and I found that no one recoiled in horror at my face. I also found that treating my skin better boosted my face positivity. Drinking water, actually removing my makeup properly at the end of the day and trying to limit the hours spent wearing a full face gave me the confidence to go bare faced. I took selfies without makeup on and eventually, got myself used to the image of my naked face. I'd almost become so accustomed to my face covered in makeup that I didn't recognise myself without it, so familiarising yourself with your features and learning to love them with and without makeup has improved my relationship with cosmetics as well as my own self confidence. I've touched a little bit today on male body confidence and the expectations bestowed on them by society, and so my next post will be dedicated to discussing male stereotypes. The media portrays this image of how an attractive man should look, when in fact, an attractive person comes in all shapes, sizes, colours, lengths and so on. Until next time beauties! According to a Glamour survey, 97% of us admitted to having an "I Hate My Body" moment, with young women in particular recording an average of 13 negative thoughts about their bodies each day. With that in mind, I decided to start a new series, promoting body positivity in all ages, genders, shapes and sizes. During this series, I aim to tackle a number of issues, including The Beauty Industry and Celebrity Culture, Ageism, Inferiority and the importance of self-love in all genders. In this first instalment, I wanted to address the fact that we are not alone. The majority of us have negative feelings about some aspect of our appearance every day, including myself. It has almost become the norm to hate on our own features and discuss physical features of other people in a derogatory manner. Promoting this self-hate only leads to further insecurity and mental health issues, as I'll be discovering during the series.
The first thing I wanted to address was my definition of the term 'body positive'. In the media, a lot of voices have expressed their doubts, branding the movement as a 'false' and unhealthy way to promote certain body types. I saw a lot of posts claiming that being body positive is a forced emotion that limits your acceptable emotions as you're essentially banishing your human instincts by telling yourself to ignore how you're feeling. And I agree. It is unhealthy to ignore your emotions, and it's totally normal to have negative thoughts and doubts about yourself, or to want to make some changes. However, for me, body positivity is a way to work through those emotions by acknowledging them, and then changing the way we see ourselves. A lot of people also found that the body positivity movement was exploited by companies to promote predominately curvy and/or plus size figures, when in fact I find it to be an inclusive movement that works towards normalising all body types in their varying conditions. It is not a way to promote an unhealthy lifestyle, it's a way to promote self love and encourage us to respect our bodies. As a teenage girl, I grew up with the mentality that I was 'out of proportion' because society had deemed me a 'pear shape'. Magazines recommended styles of clothing to compliment my figure. Shops sold me padded bras to balance me out. Peers advised me to wear slimming clothes to create an illusion. This was just part of the every day for me, and so I developed a form of body dysmorphia. When I looked in the mirror, I saw fat where I didn't want it and bone where I was told I shouldn't see it. The shape of my body seemed so severe. I felt like people were staring at me, laughing at me, noticing my imbalance. I compared myself to my friends, as is only in our nature, and I decided to diet. When my body changed again, people noticed the weight loss and made comments about it. My family were worried. We went to see a doctor and was told I was very underweight for my height. I had to bulk up. As the years went on, my body changed significantly. A combination of a diet change, an ageing metabolism and the introduction to alcohol resulted in me gaining weight, which people again noticed and commented on. I now had different body confidence issues, but issues all the same. I started to feel conscious of my thighs and my stomach, and even started researching techniques to lose weight from my face. I started seeing my friends less because I was embarrassed to go out and worried what they would think. In actual fact, I was still a pretty healthy size 10-12, but I felt bigger than that. Throughout my life, I have been 'too skinny', and I have been 'too fat', and everything else in between, but never have I been deemed 'just right'. So I've decided that a clothing size is just a number, so whether you are a size 0 or a size 24, you're not defined by that number. You just have to focus on being happy and healthy enough to live your best life. Throughout my body positivity process, I found it extremely helpful to find people I could relate to on Youtube and watch them try on clothes. I found Lucy Wood and Helen Anderson, who are similar shapes and sizes to me, and I watched them trying on clothes I would never have dared to try, and my first thought was, 'wow, she looks amazing in that'. Not for one second did I hone in on the parts of their bodies that they later described as their insecurities. I didn't even notice the things they pointed out on themselves. All I saw was an incredible outfit that I was really jealous of, and through that I rediscovered my love for clothes. I started shopping for things I liked instead of things that would 'compliment my shape'. These girls that I've never even met made me realise how in my own head I was, and that was a real wake up call to me, realising that the things I thought about myself really weren't that big of a deal. And I have since decided that if someone were to point out a flaw in a negative way, then that's their issue anyway, not mine. So welcome to my first instalment in my body positivity week! As Keith Lemon would say, 'so what's the message?' And I guess the message of this first post is to appreciate the body you've been given. It's got you through a lot and we owe it our respect. The main thing is to appreciate your own skin and be healthy. In my next post, I'm going to be talking about the Beauty Industry and the expectations we have to look a certain way, but also the positive aspects of the beauty industry and how we can use products for the right reasons, to create and express as opposed to hide and oppress. The pros and the cons, if you will. It's all about the mentality you choose to take. Until next time, beauties! |
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