“OMG! I give you an “A” for that cute outfit!”
“What in the world? Look at what that girl’s wearing, that’s an “F”, she used to have such good style last year and now it’s totally different. UGH!”
These are the comments that can be heard throughout schools in our generation and it is the second comment that hurts the most… Sure, you will hear people claim that they were “just joking” and that there’s “no need to get hurt about it”, but have those people ever considered in which way they actually affected the other person’s self esteem? Probably not and come on, who does? I mean the speaker might feel a bit guilty about what they said, yet no one expects the one insulted to go around feeling down and losing their self esteem, whether it’s bit by bit or all at once in a huge blow. That “F” outfit and that “A” outfit were both attempts of the teen to be identified. The “A” was one of those more mature clothes teens have begun to wear and the “F” was a new style that the teen was trying for this year. Now you might say, “OK, hold up. What’s going on?” Well it all started with “Dressed for Success?”-
“Dressed for Success?”- an online article on psychologytoday.com talks about teenage fashion and its link to the teen’s mind. The study is supported by Erik Erikson’s theory with the article being written by Ann Naragon. According to the article, the adolescence period is the time when adolescents are searching for an identity to be known by and are trying to find a way to show who they are. During this time, they also greatly concern themselves with what others think of their appearance. Teens tend to experiment with varying fashion statements in order to either “find their place” amongst peers or be someone unique within all the other teens around them. This study also showed that fashion is a huge part in a teen’s life because they truly want to have an identity. In addition, it proved that despite the fact that teen girls are beginning to dress quite maturely and have a mature appearance as well as style or choice of clothing, they really, psychologically, still are adolescents who will not be able to handle the responsibility an adult handles, even the freedom.
Self esteem as well is created during this time according to how the teen dresses and how they feel about their appearance. But their appearance is not necessarily based on how they personally feel about their selves; in fact what significantly seems to affect a teenager’s mind is the comparison of their own body shape or overall appearance to someone else whose they find better. This case is evidently, found more common between females rather than males.
After conducting a simple experiment, psychologists discovered that when men were shown pictures of (as they stated it) “objectified women”, the men experienced negative emotions such as “anxiety and hostility”. On the other hand, when men were shown “neutral” pictures of women, the men did not experience such negative emotions. The hypothesis they concluded was that the level of stimulation that a certain male felt had to with the way the man thinks about the male “being in charge” of a relationship which is quite frequent in most couples. This actually ends up causing the man’s mind to imagine that he has to remain entitled to sex. On the other hand when a female was shown the “objectified images of women”, she grew self conscious and anxious while her self esteem figuratively went through the floor.
Some of the other negative emotions which both males and females went through as they saw the “objectified images” include: “anger, anxiety, and confusion in the woman they sampled”. In other words, the last part hinted towards the fact that now some people have begun to think that all women are as slutty as that one lingerie model or that female whose skirt was as long, or should I say short, as her underwear itself, showing some Spandex and whose shirt seemed like it was about to show a bit too much of something which shouldn’t be publicly displayed. Okay that sentence made me seem like a highly, overly conservative freak, which trust me I’m not. I don’t go around judging females on the way they look and hate them if they dress like a booty call or something. In fact I think that if someone wants to dress a certain way and they like it, then no one has the right to go about insulting that person and being biased or stereotypical. The only major thing that really bothers me is how the majority has begun considering all females alike, not considering the fact that everyone is a unique individual and that a quantity of both sexes feel pressurized to dress a way that they might not want to. I would just say: dress like yourself, be yourself, dress the way you want to, and be however you want to be just don’t become influenced by others…