Social Media and Body Image

The speaker, Lexi McMahon, discusses the topic of body image and its portrayal on social media. She highlights the pressure felt by college students to maintain a certain image and keep up with trends. The speaker mentions the influence of influencers and the use of filters to enhance appearance. She also mentions the negative effects of social media on body image and self-esteem. The speaker emphasizes the need to continue discussing and researching the impact of social media on body image. Hey y'all, my name is Lexi McMahon and tonight we are back with another episode. I'm really excited for tonight's topic, you know, all semester long we've been covering a wide range of different topics from race to gender identification to disabilities and abilities. So tonight we're really going to focus on the topic of body, specifically on body image and how that is being portrayed currently on social media platforms. I thought this was such a current topic to really discuss and that's kind of why it really interests me because we spend so much of our time scrolling through social media, you know, if we're getting our information it's coming from social media, our advertisements are coming from social media, so it's such a current topic and I feel like most even recently we've seen kind of a boom in body image specifically on social media, so that's really why this topic is kind of hitting home tonight and something I wanted to dive into further. And this conversation really kind of started, I work with college students, I specifically work with college students at the University of Alabama and most of them are a part of high achieving leadership organizations, right, so they're in multiple honor societies. They are leaders of their sorority on executive teams in high achieving leadership orgs. So talking with them, I was really able to see there's this battle, right, to stay up to, you know, the consensus of everyone else and to kind of keep up that image and to be a part of this and to achieve this in your leadership group. And you know, we've all kind of seen the Bama Rush talk kind of play out even and so we kind of even segued into talking about that and how there is this pressure to keep up an image not only as a college student but also on social media and then we got even further of narrowing that down to specifically a student's body image and how that is the pressure to kind of stay up to date with that. We see that played out in TikToks now on, you know, there are full, you know, podcasts and links on get ready with me. This is how I get ready and this is what I wear, this is what I put on my face. Recently, I don't know if y'all have seen the drunk elephant, it's a beauty product that all of these doctors and dermatologists are coming out and saying, please, if you are under the age of 25, you do not need to be using drunk elephant products. But we're seeing young adolescents feel the need to purchase these products and apply these products and they're using them in their get ready with me, we're seeing that kind of take off. And then there's also highly watched and rated like what I eat in a day on TikTok and being covered, you know, specifically in Instagram photos. So we're seeing influencers really target and doing certain brand deals with like Bloom, like they're mixing together these green shakes and everyone is eating them. You know, this is what I eat in a day, I eat five of these Bloom shakes and then I eat, you know, my other protein shakes. So it's a very, it's a trend that we're seeing and then the pressure of that to keep up that image I think is being seen with college students. Also kind of reviewing products and certain beauty products. Lately my feed has really been a lot of different kind of Christmas lists of these young middle school to high school girls giving their parents Christmas lists with, you know, Lululemon and, you know, the Drunk Elephant products and all of those things to kind of keep up this outside image that they're trying to portray on social media. And then, you know, big influencers specifically like Alex Earl is one, has really kind of highlighted her journey with acne and her plastic surgery journey. So even those kind of focuses on self-image and how do you cover up acne on your face? How do you, you know, here's the process of getting a boob job and what that looks like and how to plan for that. So it's this acceptance of we need to change our bodies, conform our bodies and what that needs to look like to the outside audiences. And there's just a lot of research and sources being, you know, kind of done on what body image and that kind of what that does to self-esteem, you know, the constant comparison on social media of what, you know, that person looks like to what I look like. And it's really kind of even taking off since the pandemic when we were so focused on social media during that time. So we really have been able to kind of see that trend and we're just seeing a more of a lower satisfaction with bodies and kind of everyone's outward appearance. But then, you know, using a filter is like that has kind of been a huge trend as well of using these filters that will like completely change, you know, and buff out your face so your skin looks just beautiful. And we're seeing trends of influencers starting to like, I'm taking off the filter. This is, you know, my natural beauty. Or the side of celebrities starting to edit and change their photos and their images and their videos so that it's a picture perfect-esque way. And this is really kind of targeting, I would say, more the younger generation. But when I was talking to my current students and, you know, these college students that are a part of social media and have really grown up in social media, they really have bought into this and they really put a lot of stock into the images that they're putting out, their brand of themselves that they are putting out. So I think that this is just something that I think we need to continue talking about. We need to continue doing research on and kind of the effects that social media has on our body image and the way we are putting our bodies out there. You know, I think social media can be a double-edged sword so we can see, like, the benefits of social media and the awareness, but we can also see the detrimental effects that social media can have on our current students today. Thank you all for listening. Next week we'll be back. We're going to tackle some more topics. I would love to dive even deeper into this. So have a great night. Thank you.