Beauty Demands

And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty? 1 S ummer is in full bloom. Our screens are filled with Love Island   and the World Cup. Tanned, toned and athletic bodies are ubiquitous, and as we aspire to achieve these ideals, magazine stands are full of titles that promise to help us achieve beach body fitness (e.g. Men's Health )  and beauty, through a variety of exercise or diet plans .  Emerging from the toxicity of popular media, are movements such as ' I weigh ',   which has shunned conventional societal beauty demands and aims to move away from physical appearance as being a valuable determinant of self-worth. Many ‘body positive’ movements, fitness plans and media sites nonetheless still have at their core a particular physical ideal to which to aspire.  Fitspo  and ‘Strong is the new skinny’ (Holland & Tiggemann, 2016)  strongly associate a specific narrowly defined physical ideal with good health,...

Almost all young adults aged 16 to 24 years in the UK (98%) access the internet on their mobile phones or smartphones (Office of National Statistics (ONS), 2018), and 91% of 16-24 year olds in the UK used social media in 2016 (ONS, 2017). When using social spaces such as Facebook and Instagram, women (and men) choose how to represent their bodies to others in the online world, and arguably the kinds of images they present tell us something about how they view their bodies.   Selfies: Problematic or empowering? Many scholars have focused on the role of selfies in how we present ourselves online (e.g. Lasén, 2015; Miguel, 2016), including the choices we make about which aspects of our bodies to reveal, and ways in which we might self-censor our bodies in selfies to protect against any potential backlash. Views of different researchers have been mixed in relation to impact of selfie posting on women’s body image; on the one hand, it has been argued that posting selfies encou...