the dangers to self-esteem

The filters of apps like Instagram blur reality: wrinkles, spots, skin color …
cottonbro

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The female beauty canon it is the implantation of an impossible for all women, because it is “the set of characteristics that society considers beautiful.” The perfection.

By definition, unattainable, because it starts from the idealization of a stereotype imposed on Western culture. Pure neurosis.

“Instagram is not real life”, is the maxim and the biography of the profile of Amparo Angoso (@amparoangoso), which has 31,600 followers. The problem with the beauty canon is that it is unattainable. “It’s never enough”. Amparo was compared to women who have “the ideal body” and automatically touched their abdomen and pushed it in.

“Then I thought, what nonsense.” Later, he explains, the true certainty arrived: “I know that it is something that I have to work on continuously and not allow it to hurt me “. She repeats it to herself. Vulnerability and insecurity are intrinsic to the human being, but social networks have become the ideal tool of the capitalist system to amortize them as a weapon of pressure against women and in favor of the maximum commercial benefit of brands.

Before it was pointed out to television, but this maxim of beauty has always existed. Botticelli represented the beauty of women in tempera on canvas. Later, the incipient bourgeoisie founds capitalism and beauty came to belong to the upper class. The strokes of the oil on canvas remain intact to this day. The unanimity of the social researchers is astonishing: “The Beauty criteria respond more to mercantilist criteria than to models related to health and wellness”.

Instagram represents women on the 5.7 inches of a mobile screen. Painting no longer depends on a more or less realistic hand. Now, the brushes are the effects of the social network itself: skin without pores, high cheekbones, freckles, cat eyes with long lashes, a small nose, voluminous and marked lips.

One filter is capable of achieving a mirage that responds, in seconds, to the beauty canons that appear on the internet. One face “closer to fiction than reality”, says the family psychotherapist Gema García.

The difference between the impossible of now with that of ‘El Nacimento de Venus’ is, says María José Gámez, PhD in Philosophy and Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Jaume I University (UJI), in the impact and dissemination they have since “Social networks have made no one safe from utopia.” They become, Gámez points out, a “huge screen in which the reality of each one’s body is subjected to continuous scrutiny.”

“Normal life seems abnormal to us: we do not tolerate mistakes, wrinkles, scars, stretch marks, body hair, cellulite. Nor do we accept the color of our skin, or the size of our nose or our eyes … there is always a filter that covers, erases or changes what you do not want to show. However, continues the psychologist Gema García, “that is turning your back on life, life is imperfect. And therein lies its value, in the exceptionality of individuality, in the beauty of diversity, in the acceptance of what we don’t like it as part of who we are ”.

“Drink a celery juice and become Bella Hadid “

Claudia Fernández, (@claufernandezm) has a clear image of her past: looking at herself in the mirror with her friends, comparing herself with them or with other girls, and “sadly, saying: how disgusting to be fat”. A few months ago she began to “understand all the slop behind the thoughts that they instill in us since we were little” and she understands herself vulnerable but shows the fiction of “things that diet culture makes us believe” to her 20,900 followers, with the phrase that heads so many publications: “Drink a celery juice and become Bella Hadid.”

The fever of healthy food and sports on a daily basis is another constant in the social network. The line that separates health from danger, Gema García points out, is to “begin to overturn obsessively, not allowing exceptions, limiting social life and having intense feelings of guilt when self-imposed norms are not met” since “a diet healthy is what we should aspire to, but a healthy diet must also be flexible ”, explains the psychotherapist.

The law that prohibits ‘influencers’ from retouching their photos, a patch

The psychological damage and low self-esteem that social networks can cause in women is nothing new. Popular campaigns and movements on the web have not stopped adding up. A few weeks ago the Norwegian Ministry of Children and Equality approved a law that prohibits ‘influencers’ and advertisers from publishing retouched images without their followers being notified in the same publication.

Positive reactions were not long in coming. However, for the PhD in Philosophy and Professor in Audiovisual Communication “it is a positive initiative but it is not the solution to anything.” Gámez believes that “’educommunication’ should be mainstreamed at all levels with a gender perspective”, which trains citizens with the necessary tools “to interpret the misogynistic ‘filters’ of any audiovisual product or communication initiative”.

It cannot be lost sight of the fact that we are all victims of the system. There is no place outside of it, we can “even if it victimizes us, play with its codes” affirms Maria José. Thus, Claudia Fernández, in one of her latest videos, recalls reality outside of delirium, stating that “when you die people will remember you for who and how you were, not for your parrots or cellulite.”

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