Have you seen the latest Cosmopolitan cover for the December issue? It involves the famous country singer, Carrie Underwood, showing off her curves in a short, sexy black floral dress, in which we can see her perfect skin and smile. The way women have been portrayed in our society has changed through centuries.These portrayals create an expectation about how women are supposed to look, a false image of women appearance. However, young women specifically always have a high level of pressure put upon them. Although it is true that the world today is finally embracing women’s diverse bodies and beauties, there is still debate about what the ideal woman's body is and how they should be portrayed. From a young age, girls are taught to look a specific way, by factors such as peer pressure, social media, and in their own family. Family, friends and peers should teach young girls that there is no ideal way to look and there is no perfect body, they should accept themselves as they are.

Although it is unfortunate, girls all around the world face the struggle of matching their appearance to how models in magazines such as Seventeen, or Cosmopolitan are presented. These unrealistically skinny, tan bodies, accompanied by pearly perfect teeth influence young girls to change their bodies because they think their appearance is not acceptable. As a result, this ideal leads to serious body image problems and eating disorders like Bulimia or Anorexia due to feeling insecure about how their current appearance, but also how their community of peers views them. Also, social media plays a huge role in this issue because of how connected young girls are in today’s world. A fitness blog created in a popular website such as Tumblr attracts millions of young girls typically under the age of eighteen. I sometimes encounter these perfectly put together blogs, which portray a young girl showing off her slim and ripped stomach and skinny thighs as the profile picture. I consider following the blog just to gain some knowledge about fitness, but instead sometimes lay wondering in my bed how it would feel like to have a stomach like the one in the picture. I am not alone, so many girls feel as if they have to live up to the media's expectations, or as they scroll through these pages, they dislike what they see in the mirror everyday.

In addition to the issue of how young women are presented in social media, peer pressure is also a growing problem among teen girls. In a group of friends, one of the girls might make a comment, claiming that all of them need to lose weight in order to fit into their prom dresses. They all laugh. However, one of those girls is struggling with self image issues, or even worse, she develops a concern about her self image because of that comment. She tries to play it off, but deep down, she thinks, “Oh, no! I have to lose twenty pounds in the next six months in order to fit into that really cute tight dress I just bought!” It starts with just one comment, one glance, or even one laugh. Personally, when I was younger, as a preteen, I dreamed about being skinnier, and even a model. I wasn’t fat, but I wasn’t skinny either;truth is, I was a bit chubby. I would see my sister and older cousins wearing crop shirts in the summer and shorts, while I was self-conscious about showing my belly in public. In addition to feeling left out, I thought of my body negatively for years to come. Like me, many young girls are experiencing feelings of isolation and being an outsider, because they don’t look like the majority of their friends.

As if young girls didn’t feel enough pressure from friends and media, it is common for family members to question young girls specifically about their appearance. Although not every family is like this, some girls feel their parents take over their weight and control what they eat because they think it is their responsibility. This increases the girl's stress level and actually makes her feel more inclined to eating disorders. To take a case in point, one of my closest friends struggles with her weight and self image a whole lot. While we were together completing a program in Mexico, she would binge eat and enjoy every one of those tortillas we made every night, until she decided to stop out of guilt. She would tell me, “Dude, I've gained so much weight. My mom is definitely going to put me on a strict diet once I get home; salad and cleansing juices, that is all there is going to be”, I looked at her when she confessed this, and I would be amazed at how concerned her mother was about her weight, most likely, I thought, this happens to millions of girls daily. This is also the case of young men with their father figures, but it is proven that disorders such as the ones mentioned earlier are more common in women than in men.

Overall, in the world, our culture has been taught to judge others by the way they look and by their actions. Blatantly, girls believe they have a certain standard to follow. It is true that boys in fact don’t face the same amount of pressure from their actions as girls do about how they want to be shown to society. In other words, being a woman in a computerized world makes you more prominent to have self image issues as a result of people constantly seeing how you are portraying yourself, as well as pressures from peers and family members. All of these factors constitute part of the reason why girls face so many pressures, even more than men in relation to their actions. The consequences of a boy's actions is less significant than that of a girl that is faced by a wave of pressure not only from outside sources, but also her entire surroundings. With this said, as a nation, we have to figure out a solution to this growing problem. Many young women are affected daily, and it possibly affects someone close to us or that we know, we just might not be informed about it. As American citizens-- as humans, we have to come together, to raise global awareness about this issue our young women are facing in today’s generation, by either leading campaigns, using social media as a positive outlet to promote change, or face to face interaction, but something needs to be done-- urgently.