Want to get a bigger booty and slimmer waist?
At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a huge social media push to stay active while staying home. This is a great campaign however, the rise of TikTok somewhat exploited the messaging for profit and at the expense of young women’s self-esteem. The app encourages oversexualized content due to the ever-shortening audience’s attention span. This, combined with a health campaign, quickly changed the message from “how to stay healthy during quarantine” to “want to get a bigger booty and a slimmer waist this app will help!” The movement has been confused with beauty standards and encourages a toxic practice of comparing your health journey to others and even to ideals impossible to achieve naturally.
TikTok is full of young girls and women sexualizing themselves for views and while I fully support a confident gal, the combination of sexualized videos and work out culture can lead to a toxic mentality about your body image and staying healthy. Working out as a woman is already confusing enough at times between intimidating male-dominated weight rooms and trying to love your body at every stage you are at. Adding a sexualized message that I need to get a bigger butt and slimmer waist with the implication that that figure is ideal, only adds to the confusion and distracts from the initial goal to be healthy.
From my own experience, working out is amazing for confidence and general mental health all on its own without beauty standards imposed on top of it. It is completely inappropriate to make working out all about matching society’s ideal shape, especially with TikTok’s audience generally skewing to a younger demographic. For older generations, beauty standards were subliminally enforced through magazines and movie stars. Now we have tried to fix that through more diverse casting, models, and size ranges on clothing but we are failing to keep up with the times. Young girls and women are constantly being exposed to these kinds of videos where a TikTok influencer sexualizes her body and ties it to some kind of work out routine when most of the women advertizing the apps probably were just naturally curvy.
There are plenty of women who share their fitness routines in a way that encourages self-love and to focus on your journey rather than using someone else’s body as an end goal. I’m not asking the TikTok influencers to stop making sexual content. Our society is sex-obsessed and that is never going to change. The dream would just be that we as women could stop feeding into these toxic beauty standards and support each other on our journeys to healthier lives and self-love.