Values, concepts, ideas and behaviors change, causing cultural transformations that govern a society’s way of thinking and being. As an effect of the current times, we see more and more people losing the ability to think, reflect and choose according to their own ideas. We live in a society where technology seems to be the perfect ideal of the self, the model to be imitated, where everything seems to be standardized on a large scale.
How to dress, where to go, how to behave, what to think, what body to inhabit. Things that before, even when mixed with cultural trends, remained a means of personal communication, that is, the life one led communicated one’s way of being. Nowadays, human beings seem to come out of factories. Produced with small variations, they lose themselves day by day in unattainable ideals and fight for a space in a path that is already full.
Perfection became the fashionable clothes, the fashionable style, the fashionable studio and finally the fashionable body. Wanting to absorb trends is not a problem, the problem arises when fashion is not mixed with the particular and unique style of each one, when it is exclusive and unanimous to become, finally, “I want that object because everyone else wants it too”, without any questioning or reflection.
The body went down this wrong path, becoming also an ideal, closing the doors to personal characteristics and leaving out anyone who is different, making unhappy those who do not reach what seems to be the general desire.
In gyms we see men and women of all ages oriented towards a single and equal goal: a plastic body, false, standardized and sadder, lifeless. Lifeless because they become identical, like a row of identical dolls on the shelf of a shop window. Instead of being a reflection of the life that each one has and leads, the body became a product to be seen, the intimacy of each one became public domain.
The few who choose not to follow the same line feel that they are rowing against the current, walking against the current. Today, a normal woman, with her normal curves and features, no matter how confident she is, feels pressured not to be left out. The healthier ones resist because they know that, deep down, it is much better to have the freedom to be the way you are than to fight against an artificial and produced body. Men confuse muscles with vigor and define for hours every part of their bodies while forgetting to define healthier life goals, physically and psychically.
Like everything in life, we cannot generalize and we have to recognize that there are people capable of taking good care of both their bodies and their minds. However, they are not the majority. Usually, what we observe are insecure and dissatisfied people striving more and more to be beautiful, desired and accepted and using their bodies as a means to achieve those goals.
Today’s standards are more than unfair to those who simply wish to lead a normal life; they are absolutely unrealistic. They rob freedom and, with it, the beauty of one’s particularity. They transform the house we live in, our bodies, into something almost unrecognizable, making us forget what makes us different from those around us and distancing us from the security that we are enough and that what we have and what we are is enough.