My beef of the day is with Pinterest. Now lets get one thing straight, I am sort of addicted to Pinterest. Like I like to check it multiple times a day to peruse fashion, cooking, travel, and various other pins that may tickle the fancy, but as I am scrolling through the endless pictures of beautiful women in perfect clothes, luxurious mansions, and dreamy wedding venues I am constantly plagued by a little thing called " self perception theory." I am a communication major and while everyone else prefers to think it is useless I on the other hand am using it right now so Ha! Anyways this theory says that we as humans have this idea of who we are and what we believe, or how we perceive ourself to be and when we do or say something that does not align with these preconceived ideals/visions of ourselves we becomes uncomfortable and seek to change our behavior. Such as if I see myself as a good student, but I get a bad grade on a test I am going to be uncomfortable with that, probably feel bad about myself and then seek to change it. The same is true for my Pinterest addiction.
As I have slowly begun to see, Pinterest is not a healthy website. It encourages greed, materialism, dissatisfaction with our appearances, envy and worst of all in my opinion perfectionism. Women are easily the highest users of Pinterest, but while the seemingly clever and even inspirational website appears to encourage women to cook better meals, dress more fashionably, lose more weight, redecorate their homes, "live to the fullest" a la Ralph Waldo Emerson, and eat healthier, could there be negative repercussions?
I am not talking about everyone here, because I know that lots of people quite honestly just want a dinner recipe or a fashion or interior design idea, but from looking at society and women as a whole, the website seems to promote dissastifaction.
When I go on I am immediately bombarded with pictures of how I "should" look, how I "should" dress, how I "Should" eat and instead of being motivated to change, which is the first problem, I feel inadequate. The website seems to imply under a slideshow of pretty pictures that women still aren't good enough. That we need to be prettier and thinner and cook better meals. You have no idea how many dinner pins I see with a caption something along the lines of "Made this for my husband last night and he asked me make it 4 times before we had finished!" As if to imply that women really have not progressed away from being housewives at all and that our main emphasis is still to please men. The whole site seems like a backslide from feminism. While I see nothing wrong inherently with cooking or fashion or even serving your husband a nice meal, the issue arrises from this overwhelming status-quo that appears to be dominating the site. A status quo that in order to be a good woman you need to dress, look, cook, work out and live a certain way. Like we are not good enough so we need to use this juice cleanse to get skinny, or this workout to get that illusive "thigh gap," or organize our closet like this, or put egg whites in our hair like that all because our lives aren't good enough the way they are. The truth is that none of us are going to look half as good in an outfit as Cara Delevinge or cook like Martha Stewart or have a home straight out of Better Homes and Gardens and it is ridiculous not to mention unhealthy to brood over such unattainable ideals.
Women are already dissatisfied with themselves in this culture, why emphasize and encourage it? More women are plagued by perfectionism than men, so why make it harder than it already is by showing them what they are not, yet should be. It seems like every "successful woman" has a fit board and a clothes board and that if you too want to be successful you need to get your ass to the gym so you can look like the starving models on Pinterest, and then when you get home you need to bake that 7 layer Oreo fudge cake, but not dare indulge in a bite because you saw that one infamous Kate Moss quote about "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." The whole site is a delusional oxymoron. It brings truth to the saying "you can't have your cake and eat it too."
But the issue goes deeper than just creating a female culture of materialism, perfection and envy, but drives a nature of self-loathing. I no longer follow any" fitspiration" or "thinspo" boards because no I do not prefer to start my day looking at anorexic models from the next down behind some motivational workout quote that is suppose to encourage me to go to the gym or not eat that cookie when in reality it makes me hate myself for not looking like those girl. If you ever have the displeasure of searching "thinspiration" in the search box be prepared to be horrified by the images and words you will see, also be prepared to lose all faith in humanity, society's beauty ideals, and any fictional progress we might have made for self-love and compassion. Here is a preview:
Are you vomiting yet? Because I am, maybe that is how you get skinny? This is our culture and this is what gets posted every single day and there is nothing true about any of it. Nobody fucking looks like that and you should not try to either. I was anorexic and still have food issues to this day and looking at images like this trigger bad thoughts and old habits, but it also makes me angry and want to fight this culture. Want to know the truth about the "thigh gap" and looking like these supposedly "perfect" girls. I was once 90 pounds, age 19, 5'3" and I still did not have the thigh gap. True story it is a physical myth. All bodies are different and it completely depends on how far apart your hips are spaced and absolutely nothing to do with working out or calories. You are welcome.
But it is not just these sorts of pictures that inspire eating disorders and body dissatisfaction, but also seemingly harmless images like these:
You get the idea. Look at all these leggy, bony fashionistas with their thigh gaps, and while they may be covered in clothing it still does not negate the prevalence and implicit importance of their thinness. We look at these images and think " I want to be able to look like she does in that outfit." This dissatisfaction that appears to be unrelated to the "thinspo" and workout memes up above, after all they are pinned to different boards, yet produce the same self-loathing, dissatisfied, perfectionist culture of women.
Even if the body does not get me dissatisfied then the clothes will and I sit here wondering why I am not a millionaire with a closet full of fabulous clothes in my perfect mansion full of pottery barn furniture? It makes me want to go out and buy shit that frankly I don't need!
So all that ranting said here is the truth about Pinterest:
1. You ain't gonna do that juice cleanse nor are you ever going to make kale chips and if you do you will probably just wash it down with that reeses, chocolate, oreo, ice cream, fudge monstrosity you pinned up above. Fatty. Jk you are beautiful, go eat the cake, all the skinny bitches on Pinterest will be so jealous because cake does taste better than skinny feels.
2. Let us be honest NOBODY HAS TIME FOR ALL THE CRAFTS. Yes let me just pencil in making a new headboard out of cardboard today between studying for finals, crying over my gpa, going to work, class, and all the better shit I have to do.
3. 1% of the world looks good in tribal leggings and crop tops, do not sweat it, also .000001% of the world can afford a Oscar de la Renta gown, do not be fooled.
4. You do not need to drop the equivalent of the national deficit in lululemon to workout, I know you do not believe me, but you will get the same workout in a pair of stained sweat and your mom's t-shirt. True story.
5. the thigh-gap is a myth. Like Hercules and Odysseus, it is mythology.
6. even if you really do have a fabulous wardrobe and a hot bod no one is going to take candid photos of you staring wistfully into the distance with a Henry David Thoreau quote over your head.
7. You are not being creative or unique if every single other girl you know gets married in a barn, wears TOMS to her wedding and holds picture frames with words in their save the date.
8. Anyone with a "Just Girly Things Board"needs to rethink their priorities. I actually have nothing snarky to say, they speak for themselves, just read:
you get the idea. Excuse me while I get a gender change.
9. I have read so many sappy, sentimental quote about change, being myself, I am better off without some un-named man, YOLO and fucking the haters that I might as well have read a cereal box. It means nothing.
10. Ryan Gosling and Harry Styles will never love you
and just as a last thought if you ever come across a One Direction "imagine" under no circumstance read it. It is the 13 year old girl's equivalent of porn.
Alright my need to rant has been satiated. Until tomorrow's anger and dissatisfaction with the world,
-Heather
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