30 is the new black

Social Media is a double-edge sword. On one hand, it’s nice to have a medium to catch up with friends who live interstate and more importantly around the world.

On the other hand, it’s also a handy platform for the sexualisation of women and cyber bullying and a breeding ground for sexual predators, paedophiles and stalkers.

A review commissioned by the Home Secretary and published in the UK by Dr Linda Papadopoulos, Sexualisation of Young People published in 2010 about the continual sexualisation of young women, how porn is becoming more mainstream and the growing alarming trend of women measuring their worth by their sexuality.

Dr Linda Papadopoulos, a psychologist who has written for magazines such as Australian Cosmo defines sexualisation in the report as ‘used to describe a number of trends in the production and consumption of contemporary culture; the common denominator is the use of sexual attributes as a measure of a person’s value and worth.’

We’ve had sexual imagery of women drip fed to us via the media, advertising, video clips, video games, the internet and fashion but now it seems sadly that sisters are doing it to themselves. Nowhere can I see the blatant impact of sexualisation more so than on the popular social media network, Facebook.

Porn-chic is on the rise as girls pose suggestively in bikinis and lingerie in their Facebook pictures and try and out-do each other in a game of social media strip poker and playing right into men’s hands. Their worth seems sadly determined by the number of Facebook friends, the number of ‘likes’ and comments photos and how often they are ‘tagged’.

Public displays of affection on Facebook are bad enough but public displays of affliction are something different altogether. Young girls posting pictures of themselves in lingerie, bikinis, showing their cleavage and/or being photographed in compromising positions seems to me to be a clear sign of low self esteem not confidence.

For me, it comes down to the motivation of why you posted these pictures. All you need to ask yourself is if I’m wearing this because I feel good about it or am I trying to win the approval of men? My view is that you are telling everyone in the world that you have nothing to offer than your body. Of course this is far from being the naked truth.

Now I’m all in favour of a positive body image and it’s perfectly ok to have photos of you in a revealing outfit if it makes you feel confident but if you feel slightly uncomfortable or you’re dressing this way to please your peers, then maybe you should think twice about it and stop taking the fashion adage ‘less is more’ so literally.

We still live in a largely parochial society with men who think they are pulling our strings. It is up to us to decide whether we want to live as puppets or not. This is partly determined by deciding how we would like to dress and what image we want to portray to the world, who we choose sleep with and when and the value we place on ourselves.

I agree with a post I read on a forum that the westernised women feels like they are wearing a burka that allows enough skin and paints a picture without the details to suggest to others what a man is going home to at night but is still considered to be respectful and not crossover into the arena of sexual temptation. It’s exhausting.

Oh you don’t believe me? That same man who was drawn to you by your enticing outfit maybe the same man who will try and make demands on you to wear more modest clothing when your Facebook status changes to ‘In a relationship’. Even worse, I feel women can even be more judgemental than men.

But as Justine Cullen, the editor of Shop Til You Drop rightly points out in her editor’s letter in the June 2011 issue of the magazine about ‘socially acceptable sluttiness’* that it’s not about what men, your girlfriends or society in general thinks about the way you dress but it may simply come down to the fact it simply doesn’t look all that great.

“And it’s not that I think anyone should care what conclusions guys come to when they see a girl with so much side-boob, it really should be called front-boob, or what it says to that sweet old lady at the shops when someone’s cut offs are so short she can see their c-section scar. It’s just that it doesn’t look all that good.”

And although I too have noticed the trend outlined in the Undressed to excess article in today’s Sunday Telegraph amongst teens and early 20 somethings wearing sexy short dresses but I have always maintained it’s not what you wear but the way you wear it and the way you carry yourself.

I do think that wearing tight dresses with peep toe shoes lacks any originality or personal style and these young girls are yet to develop their fashion identity and find their fashion feet. What I find more disturbing is the peer pressure to have higher hemlines so they don’t look ‘conservative’ and girls as young as 13 are dressing this way.

And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy wearing dresses, 4-inch heels and clothes that show off my body but I also like to leave something to the imagination. I want a woman’s value to be ultimately measured by the depth of their character and not by the length of their dress and the height of their heels. It can be a fine hemline between stylish and ‘skanky’.

Like a lot of women, I always feel like I’m walking a fashion tightrope and take my word for it; it’s very hard to balance in 4-inch heels.

* Her words not mine.