Melanie Field has always been fat.
In the shops of an ordinary shopping mall, it hardly fitted into any of the items of clothing.
None of the models in the magazines, no actress looked like her.
She understood the message early on: “I'm fat, and that's what you should be afraid of.” This is how the American actress tells it in her song “Now I Know”.
It is one of those videos that was suddenly shared in several Instagram stories this summer because so many women recognize themselves in them: being thin is the state to strive for.
One line in Melanie Field's song reads: "I can only be happy when I lose weight."
Annina Metz
Editor for social media.
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Manon Priebe
Editor for social media.
Follow I follow
The author and body image activist Melodie Michelberger knows this feeling well: "I used to use figures like my weight, clothes sizes and calories as measuring instruments for my self-worth," she says.
"The numbers on the scales decided my mood and all of my thinking."
But under the dictates of a supposedly normative beauty, it is not only people - mostly women - whose bodies do not correspond to the alleged ideal dimensions who suffer.
Ilka Brühl, for example, was born with a cleft lip, and when she was born her face had not grown together properly.
This can still be seen well after several operations.
Low self-esteem, fear of rejection, feeling different - the author and illustrator is familiar with all of these.
The result?
She has been hiding for years.
Johanna Kerschbaumer also tried for a long time to avoid creating images of her that show her as “imperfect” and socially “wrong”. What is "wrong" with her? Kerschbaumer's foot was amputated after an accident. She was never super slim either, says the former “Bachelor” candidate. It seemed impossible to her to post a photo of herself on Instagram: "I didn't want to come out as different and expose myself to the ridicule."
Of course, the Instagram world is only apparently perfect. “You shouldn't be led astray,” says TV presenter Evelyn Weigert. “What you can do with filters and good light is incredible. If I stand differently or have a different exposure, then I look completely different. ”She herself has been struggling with her own body again and again, and not just since the birth of her daughter. As a teenager, she stuffed handkerchiefs into her empty bra, she says. Today, pregnant for the second time, she keeps coming to terms with herself.
Social media didn't create the pursuit of the perfect look.
Ideals of beauty were already known in antiquity; in modern times, advertising, films and media have influenced our self-perception and our body feeling for many decades.
However, social media increases the pressure and makes it more mundane.
In the past, it was unreachable models on larger-than-life posters that adolescents compared themselves to.
Today it is influencers of the same age who present advertising and body norms in their stories, supposedly close and authentically disguised as everyday life.
"Likes and comments invite you to compare and determine the popularity and popularity," says activist Michelberger.
"Filters are like Spanx pants for the face"
But the equality of arms is missing: Your own reflection is real, the post on Instagram and Snapchat tricks with filters and Photoshop. Moderator Weigert does not consider filters to be problematic per se: “You have to see them with common sense. It's not real, it's like Spanx pants for your face. I would like to see a lot more education for young women, maybe also from older people from their personal environment, who keep saying: The way you are, you are good! "