Being a woman in 2021 means confronting yourself with social media on a daily basis. Since Instagram debuted, we all tuned ourselves into models looking for the perfect light and the perfect angle, using our feeds as digital diaries in which to brag a little about our private life.
It’s such a powerful mean of communication, which can often be both really good or really bad, depending on too many different things. We have the power to frame ourselves through our IG stories as sexy. cute, hot, chaotic, funny or seductive. We can decide whether to hide all our little imperfections or to fiercely show them.
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We’re girls and women who grew up or got used to social media and iPhones, they’re virtual extensions of our lives, digital projections of the best version of ourselves. However, it’s still so hard to be a woman on social media. Because we’re constantly confronting ourselves with influencers, celebrities or even friends who always seem taller, thinner, more gorgeous and rich than us. And also because we’re always exposed to other people’s judgement, which lead the vast majority of young women to get mentally and physically ill.
Once women show their imperfections, they’re harshly body-shamed. Once women decide to modify their pictures with Photoshop or their faces with plastic surgery for whatever reason, they’re harshly criticized as hypocrites.
Kendall Jenner recently posted a few backstage pics in which she was wearing a skimpy Skims lingerie set. Her tall, slim, almost heavenly body was subject to millions of full-of-hatred comments, mostly from women, who engaged in fiery Twitter threads in which they tried to demonstrate the abundant use of Photoshop all over Kendall’s face and body. It is no secret that the Kardashian klan’s a huge fan of plastic surgery, as well as of Photoshop.
It is also true that Kendall’s always been very tall and slim, and that her body’s objectively hot and amazingly proportioned. Why do people waste so much time trying to find flaws in a body? It looks like a vicious circle in which women are trying their best to look good, and they’re fighting each other as if Instagram was an immense beauty pageant.
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Another harshly criticized celeb is Chiara Ferragni, the biggest influencer on the planet. She reached such a high status as a celebrity that she’s not only followed for her fashion and beauty content, but also for her real life narration.
A few years ago, she decided to narrate her first pregnancy with a no-filetr, very sincere approach, and she let her followers be virtual participants of her life as an it-girl, as well as a wife and as a mom. Since she posts a lot of photos and videos of Leone, her first son, as well as pictures of her daughter, who’s still the size of a little pumpkin and almost ready to come to the world, she’s been bombarded with critiques from her haters.
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According to them, she cannot show herself wearing lingerie, or being intimate with Fedez, or hundreds of other things, just because she’s a mother. However, we do find her choice both intimate and trailblazing. She spontaneously narrates her everyday life with such tenderness that it is impossible to not love her and her family. On the other hand, she understood that the social exposure was inevitable, and that narrating her pregnancy and maternity could have been a precious help to other women.
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Swedish top model Elsa Hosk became mother last February. Her pregnancy could be resumed as “cool”. She used to treat her followers with sophisticated fancy photos of her pregnancy OOTDs, and she always seemed very happy and positive.
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A few days after she had her baby Tuuli, she posted a series of very natural photos of her pregnant body, which all came with long captions that completed a six-part “Essay on Birth”
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Elsa opened up about how she got into labor, how she felt during the painful contractions, how she experienced her pregnancy and the travail, and how happy and peaceful she was, no matter the pain, as soon as she hold Tuuli in her arms.
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Her intimate confession was both helpful and almost illuminating. Pregnancy and labor are still perceived as taboos, being seen as something painful, raw, ancestrally hurtful and complicated. It’s hard to hear women talking about how they got through pain, we are always used to see impeccable neo moms who do not seem to have undergone such major fatigue. Elsa bravely started a conversation around women’s bodies and their natural superpowers.
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Another soon - to - be mom is Emily Ratajkowski, model and influencer. Emily’s been discussing the dark side of social media for a while.
Last summer, she published a touching essay titled “Buying Myself Back” on The Cut, in which she reflected about the controverse relationship with medias and paparazzis. She lately appeared as the digital star cover of Vogue, in which she revealed her pregnancy and disruptively claimed that she’s gonna raise her baby without gender distinction. A few days ago, she announced the release of her very first book, “My Body”.
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The long essay’s “a profoundly personal exploration of feminism, sexuality, and power, of men's treatment of women”, as seen on Amazon, where you can preorder the book. Emily turned into an all-round activist, both on social medias and on bookshops’ shelves. She fiercely speak up about the feminine and feminist revolution that’s been going on for a while now, and that definitely seem unstoppable.
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In a world full of such complex things that we cannot control, such as prejudice, criticism, toxicity and rooted stereotypes, these women are trying their best to engage into a debate about us, about our bodies and our choices. We’re not meant to satisfy anyone else but us.
Have a wonderful women’s day, you gorgeous girls out there.
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