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Essena O'Neill - Reaction

What have we become as a society? A nineteen year old has just come to the world, sobbing about what social media has done to her. She stopped eating. She based her self worth on likes and followers. She looked up supermodels sizes, and compared them to her own.
Maybe, it might not be social medias fault, some may think. Maybe it was a form of an eating disorder that got out of hand.
But if it was an eating disorder, why did this young teenager gain so many followers?
Because we, as a society, see the ill as beautiful. We romanticise mental disorders, whether it be depression, or anxiety, or an eating disorder.
She was and maybe still is very sick. But when I first saw her, without any context, I thought
Wow. She is beautiful. Her body is perfect. I wish I looked like her.
We, as a society, are conditioned to think this. I know some people are naturally slim and slight. But supermodels, Instagram models, most are sick. I am naturally slim and slight, but I don't have supermodel measurements, and I have a barely healthy bmi. That being said, it can be assumed, backed up with statistics, that most of these models are underweight.
And we find this beautiful.
We drove her, I think. In a way, social media heightened her disorder. We encouraged it because we thought it was beautiful.
But just like she said, it's not real.

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