Facebook and Its Effect on Body Image: The Cons

Facebook and Its Effect on Body Image

Facebook is everyone’s favorite location to hang out these days and speak to family and friends.  It has become the new in way to keep in contact with each other and it is a way that everyone can be expected to keep using for many years to come.  It is an easy platform, and a great way to be able to catch up and follow what is going on with friends and family.  In addition to that everyone constantly posts photos of themselves and a part of that is the fact that we are seeing our lives in real time.  As that happens however, there are many people who are posting photos which are not them.

Many people have created fake profiles with fake photos to show that they are beautiful and stunning in photos.  People are afraid to post photos of who they are and what they look like in real life.  What that really means is that many are ashamed of who they are and also of what they look like.  The sad thing about that is that there are many people who are carrying on relationships with those that they have met online and have no idea who they are truly speaking with.  Sadly this has become so much of a phenomena recently that there is an entire show on MTV dedicated to this specific issue.  That is that people are not aware of who they are seeing and they are falling in love with the virtual personas of others.

Now more so than ever, in the constant world of photos we are seeing the younger generation begin to post photos of themselves which are scantily clad or inappropriate for others to see.  Many younger girls since the age of the selfie have begun to have surgery at a younger and younger age, they are in fact starting at the age of 16 and many are doing it with parental approval.  How is it even possible that many teens think that they need to alter themselves at such an age?

All you have to do to know that this is an issue is to open Facebook and look at any of the celebrity photos which are there and you will see that they are holding our youth to a very impossible standard.  Each celebrity may have been airbrushed, in addition to that they also have probably had quite a bit of plastic surgery.  It is impossible for normal people, unless they have a huge slush fund for plastic surgery, to keep up with the Kardashians of the world.  When you stop and think about it however, it is very clear that those same stars are paid to look the way that they do.  It is a business for promotion, branding, placement, and other items.  That means that they would not look that way if they did not have to.  Many magazines have done exposes on the celebrities to see what they would look like without the aid of surgery and constant maintenance, to say the least they would all look like normal people.

When you log into Facebook and you see an impossible bikini photo or something else like that, remember, you may actually have bumped into someone who has stolen someone else’s photos.  As the saying goes, beauty is only skin deep and it fades.  If you value what is on the inside, you will keep it for life.