Real-Time Commentary About A Real Time Problem

Everybody talks about how, despite the recent economic issues we have been dealing with and the growing political uncertainties in the Middle East and with Russia and the Ukraine, we are living in one of the greatest eras of humanity, thanks to the advances that social media offers us. This is certainly true for many reasons, but the fact is that not everything that it offers us is advantageous. Thanks to the anonymity that the internet offers us, there have numerous occasions cited where interactive discussions and <a href="http://www.tawkers.com">real-time commentary</a> have turned ugly. Bullying has gone from the oversized kid pushing you down in the playground and stealing your money to voices chiming in from around the world commenting on how fat you look in a picture you just posted on your social media app. It is this very judgmental nature that puts pressure on girls and young women to mistreat their bodies in an effort to attain an unrealistic physicality. By focusi
ng so much on their appearance, they diminish their own self-esteem, they devalue other aspects of their personality and they ultimately drive themselves into depression.

Thankfully many women are taking back the streets, as it were, by creating online discussions where women discuss Barbie doll body image in a safe environment. These open forums serve as a place where they can talk openly about why they feel the need to look a certain way and get the support to help them feel better about who they are as a person. Just as importantly, it helps to open up the discussion as to why so many women feel this way in the first place. Is this something that is created very early on in life by playing with an idealized doll that has unrealistic proportions and told that is what it means to be beautiful? Or does it come as girls get older and are introduced to fashion magazines that promote stick thin models, advertisements that focus on beauty product after beauty product, and movies and television shows where the beautiful girl gets the good looking guy and her less attractive best friend supposedly is happy for them? The truth is probably somewhere
in the middle, but it will be discovered sooner rather than later, now that social media and interactive discussions are finally around to help foster the conversation.

Now the girl that feels like an outcast doesn't have to feel like she is alone, because now she can be connected with a million girls around the world who feel just like she does. She can learn to recognize she is beautiful not because of how she looks but because of who she is, and in turn she can go to open forums and be the voice that someone else was to her. She can use <a href="http://www.tawkers.com">social media</a> to mentor another girl who feels lost in the world, and slowly we can truly make this the greatest era of humanity.