Adolescence is that time when the body overflows.
Physical awareness is part of personal growth in the transition from childhood to adulthood.
In this metamorphosis, being comfortable with one's body is essential for emotional well-being.
What is happening in Spanish society so that 60% of adolescents feel uncomfortable with their body image?
The data comes from the survey carried out every five years by the Barcelona Public Health Agency to identify risk factors in adolescence.
The latest collects the perceptions of 3,290 students aged 13 to 19 and one of its most relevant data is that discomfort with the body does not stop growing.
In 2021, 55% of boys and 63% of girls are dissatisfied with their body image, compared to 36% and 52% respectively in 2016.
As can be seen, the problem especially affects girls, but it also grows among boys.
And what is worse, the perception seems to be anchored in reality: 53% of girls and 39% of boys have felt discriminated against because of their physical appearance.
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More than half of adolescents carry a body that does not correspond to their desired ideal.
They don't like each other at an age when liking each other is essential to building self-esteem.
Some will take it better than others, but with these figures it is not surprising that emotional discomfort also increases: among girls it has gone from 23.2% in 2016 to 38.6% in 2021, and among boys, from 11.7 % to 20.3%.
Has the pandemic influenced?
Without a doubt, but any situation rides on a background cultural current in which many young people, far from looking at the future with optimism, look at it with apprehension.
As if the horizon had been erased.
In the urgencies of a continuous present, many live with anguish their personal imbalances with a world in which, as the sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky warns, everything is subject to appraisal, including oneself.
In
Gustar y thrill
, his latest essay, he develops the effects of the society of seduction, in which individuals are freer than ever, but feel the overwhelming weight of their decision-making power, including the ability to model their own body and Choose the image you want to project.
For Lipovetsky, it is not bad that there are beauty references and aesthetic models, there always have been.
What is harmful is feeling the overwhelming need to imitate them.
At one time it was the robust bodies of Rubens that embodied the ideal, but now those bodies generate frustration just as rates of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents are rising due to increasingly unhealthy diets.
Overwhelmed by the obligation to constantly make decisions, many young people perceive that appearance and image are fundamental and that success in personal and social relationships will depend on knowing how to sell oneself well.
All this is accentuated in a digital environment that has made permanent public exposure a requirement for sociability.
As Byung-Chul Han explains in
The Transparency Society
, “in the exposed society, each subject is his own object of publicity.
Everything is measured by its exposure value.
(...) The excess of exposure turns everything into merchandise destined to be devoured immediately”, which “generates an urgent need for beauty and good physical appearance”.
He calls it "iconic duress."
Feeling that you risk everything when choosing the photo that you are going to upload to the networks, the dress that you are going to wear for the umpteenth job interview or the new date on Tinder.
The idea that you will never get a second chance… to make a favorable first impression can be overwhelming.
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