How social networks help to accept themselves
Masha Vorslav
Social networks - not evil, consuming all our free time. It is just a new reality that imperceptibly changes our behavior, habits and etiquette. Masha Worslav, editor of the Beauty section, explains how Instagram and Twitter form a healthy idea of a woman’s appearance while we stick to celebrity or porn actress accounts.
Social networks take, to put it mildly, a lot of time (that is why such guides to increase productivity are written and are popular), it’s not a shame to look at the toggle switch if you have insomnia, while others take a selfie, although they collect likes, but they are annoying. Nevertheless, I like Instagram, my favorite account (OK, except for Volochkov) - Rihanna, where she does not hesitate to spread herself in her underpants, from the side, from above, behind and not always from the perfect angle. This social network, without any special efforts, put an annoying gloss attempt to show the “real” body and “live” people (plus-size models, Dove campaigns and all this) to the belt. And it's not even about retouching - it is explicable and organic, just such magazines are not about real bodies at all. But - and then thanks to the instagrams of the same Rihanna or Carla Deras - the more you see real bodies with all their beauty and flaws, the less utilitarian becomes the attitude to yourself, and then to others (or vice versa).
Instagram effortlessly tucked into the belt annoying gloss attempts to show the "real" body and "live" people
The Australian Emma probably also thought when she conceived the Large Labia Project and Our Breasts projects - both from the NSFW category (“should not be opened at work”), so we only show the second, and there is a link to the first one. The issue with appearance in porn is almost more acute than in gloss: actresses, with rare exceptions, are selected so that "there, below" everything is OK and beautiful, and retouch them everywhere no less than, sorry, Madonna forehead. We are beautiful, we do not complain, but the desire of industries for unnatural beauty has generated a huge wave of dislike for their bodies not only among adolescents, but also quite mature women, so these blogs turned out to be quite relevant and helped many to move away from the imposed standards body.
How social media influences our perception of death is an even more serious question. According to Lawrence Samuel, author of the best-selling Death, American Style: After the turmoil of the first half of the last century from wars to mass epidemics, death was perceived as a "little shameful secret." It "interferes" and contradicts the basic values of modern Western culture: youth, progress and ambitions (in the original - "achievement"). And this is despite the fact that death is the most natural thing in nature. Twitter (not to say unexpectedly) through organizations like #BCSM and random accounts of terminally ill people became the conductor that gradually returns to death the status of a natural, routine phenomenon. Denial is not a solution to the problem, and such projects (even if they are just separate microblogs) do not allow people to push thoughts of death into the depths of the skull and again force them to accept their body, more precisely, its vulnerability and weakness.
Social media and networks are valuable because they are cutting a window into the life of another person — be it a celebrity, the girl next door or dying of cancer. They do not have the obsessive idea of “love yourself as you are,” because there are no goals to preach either. But there is another: personal and real stories, from which sometimes it is possible to take out more than from the next manifest article.