This paper explores my experiences and socialization through Instagram, the most popular social media platform of the decade. This specific platform was extremely influential to my adolescent socialization while attending Catholic private school for the first time. At this age, the mind is easily moulded and absorbs information involuntarily. Although most ideas portrayed on Instagram in 2011 were toxic and manipulative to the adolescent psyche, there was also more room than ever to express beliefs freely and powerfully using striking images that would inspire people to change. This paper more deeply examines the way my mind processed the sexist, fat-shaming and ignorant media, as well as how I learned that media does not dictate society’s rules because human agency dictates media’s rules.
When I saw Instagram begin to gain popularity, I was a sophomore at Pope John High School, and my popularity was also growing. I had fallen in love for the first time, and my friends were “popular”, but of course I was also struggling to please those around me and do well in school. I remember that at first, I avoided making an Instagram profile because I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t care to scroll through pictures of other kids in my school. However, with its growing popularity paralleling my own, I gave in and made the profile. My first impressions were not astounding, and I was unimpressed.
In March of my junior year of high school, the person I saw as the love of my life committed suicide. I was distraught and stopped eating, which caused me to lose around 30 pounds. In the following weeks, guys started to show a lot of interest in me, and I was in a place where I didn’t care what was happening as long as I felt good. The attention was a bandaid for a bullet wound, essentially, but we all cope differently. Once I started to shower and wear nice clothes and try to live again, I became obsessed with the “Fitness Revolution of 2013”.
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My Instagram feed became flooded with “fitspiration” or “fitspo” images that claimed the goal was not to be skinny, but to be healthy; but all the while these images were depicting only one type of “healthy” woman. I was bombarded and enthralled by pictures of what I then thought to be really attainable beauty standards, tips for losing weight, and tricks on how to do it FAST. The “before-and-after” picture became a model of my self-esteem: I gained some confidence finally, but not in who I was; I was confident in who I could become. Obsession took over, and I had devoted my life to being “fit”; I drank green smoothies, everything I ate was “clean”, I would binge on vegetables and hummus, scroll through Instagram, and work out two or three hours a day.
I started posting my own “fitspo”, thoroughly enjoying the feeling of finally seeing myself smaller than I’d ever been. The more I saw my clavicle sunken in or my ribs poking out, the more compliments I received and inspiration I felt to keep going. Of course, the trend eventually came to an end, and without noticing, I began to drop my “healthy” habits and start enjoying food again, but to the other extreme. Although looking back now I see only beauty, I had gained weight and felt as if I were failing and letting myself go. For a short time, I was close to looking like women and girls in popular media: But losing my obsessive habits drove me into depression and hopelessness about “losing” the image I’d so briefly possessed.
Fast forward five years, and a new kind of image began to circulate. The Body-Positive Movement snowballed, and I had found a light to follow that would encourage me to put back together the pieces of myself that were damaged by unrealistic portrayals of women and girls. I learned that I had crushed my own spirit by consuming toxic media, and I had to stop wasting time striving to be anything other than my best and most authentic self.
The first Body Positive post I saw that really inspired me was a post by Allison Kimmey, a public figure, “Self Love Expert, BodyPos Mama, and KidLit Author”, as titled by herself. She posts primarily about her children, and includes in some post descriptions the conversations between them. On December 31st, 2017, she posted a photo of herself and her daughter Cambelle in bikinis, followed by an entire conversation in the caption. It explained that her daughter was upset that her mother made her and her brother get out of the pool, and she told her brother, “Mama is fat”. She stated, “I told her to meet me upstairs so we could chat” and explained the following to her children in a kind and gentle manner:
Me: Let’s talk about it. The truth is, I am not fat. No one IS fat. It’s not something you can BE. But I do HAVE fat. We ALL have fat. It protects our muscles and our bones and keeps our bodies going by providing us energy. Do you have fat?
Cambelle: Yes! I have some here on my tummy. (…)
Her brother: I don’t have any fat, I’m the skinniest, I just have muscles.
Me: Actually everyone (…) has fat. But each of us has different amounts.
Her brother: Oh right! I have some to protect my big muscles. But you have more than me.
Me: Yes, that’s true. Some people have a lot, and others don’t have very much. But that doesn’t mean that one person is better than the other, do you both understand?
Them: Yes! I shouldn’t say someone is fat because you can’t be just fat, but everyone HAS fat and it’s okay to have different fat. (Kimmey, 2017)
Although I am not a mother, this post had a huge impact on me. I realized that if someone had taught me this way, maybe I wouldn’t have experienced so much self-hatred. But I also realized that if children could see things as they were, then there was hope for the rest of us. If we can change our opinions of ourselves, our future children will see and mimic that confidence. So if for no other reason, I started my body positive journey in high hopes that others would follow and keep spreading the pattern of embracing our bodies and knowing we are worthy. I want to be part of creating a different kind of media socialization for kids of future generations.
When I began to see more and more real women sharing photos of their bodies and captions of their stories, I knew a real revolution was growing and evolving. Different projects emerged through Instagram, such as Underneath We Are Women (@underneath_we_are_women) with 42.4K followers, as well as Every BODY Deserves LOVE (@everybody deserveslove_) with 16.2K followers; and the fact that tens of thousands of people are viewing their posts means that at least that many people have begun to listen. Instagram is the only platform which allows the current standards of beauty to be challenged even a little.
Photographer Julia Busato was banned from Facebook multiple times in 2017 for posting a collection of photos she called “The Mannequin Series”, which showed women and men of all shapes and sizes holding mannequins in front of their naked bodies but no actual nudity. She said about the banning, “I’m totally floored by it. I’m frustrated. They (Facebook) don’t justify why they do it” (Haydn Watters, CBC News). She has since taken to Instagram as the main platform for showcasing her art because there is less bias in their regulations and more freedom to express all types of user-generated content. It is the prime example of a structure that is being defined by the influence of human agency.
Social media was an essential tool in my socialization as an adolescent. As much as I let it affect me negatively, I feel that I wouldn’t be who I am without the experience. Instagram has become a platform that truly helps me feel empowered and has impacted my life more than any other social media platform. I cleaned out my feed of anything other than positivity and have thereby created a safe space that I don’t consider to be so toxic any longer. My agency is the key to my own success and happiness, and I am no longer afraid to use it because I am now aware of it. Instagram is a structure in which you can choose what you view and follow, so there are plenty of perspectives out there, and that’s the best part; to me, that’s a form of freedom.
Works Cited
- Croteau, D., & Hoynes, W. (2017). Media, society: Industries, images, and audiences. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
- Kimmey, A. (2017, December 31). My daughter called me fat today [Web log post]. Retrieved December 11, 2018, from https://www.instagram.com/allisonkimmey/? hl=en
- Watters, H. (2017, March 20). Facebook bans photographer for posting photos of nude models with mannequin [Web log post]. Retrieved December 11, 2018, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/mannequin-facebook-naked- models-1.4033371
