Some nights I whip my phone out in bed and think, “Just a short little scroll through social media then I’ll go to sleep.” An hour – sometimes two – later, I’m tired, know I won’t get enough sleep, and feeling worse about myself than I did before getting into bed.
Scrolling inevitably leads to me comparing myself to the seemingly perfect women with seemingly perfect lives on Instagram, Tiktok or Pinterest. Even when I know their feeds are heavily curated and too good to be true. Not only that, but a lot of what I see probably isn’t real at all and could actually be generated by artificial intelligence.
And I’m not alone, either. Personal care brand Dove recently conducted a sweeping survey of 33,000 respondents across 20 countries on beauty standards, perceptions of beauty and how they affect women – a follow-up to a similar study it conducted in 2004. Two decades later, the results aren’t looking pretty.
According to the study – titled The Real State of Beauty: A Global Report – four in five Australian women feel pressured to maintain a healthy appearance; it’s nearly the same for Aussie girls aged 10 to 17, at 78 per cent. Three-quarters of women (67 per cent of girls) are under pressure to maintain a slim figure, while 68 per cent of women (and 61 per cent of girls) feel like they need to have a small waist.
Heartbreaking? Definitely. Surprising? Not at all.
While there have been many positive changes around perceptions of beauty and societal expectations in recent years – thanks in part to movements like body positivity and #NoMakeup – we’ve faced a lot of setbacks, too.
It started as a way to connect with friends via images, but Instagram now spreads and amplifies beauty standards and ideals that are difficult to attain. Filters, influencers and an algorithm that favours narrow perceptions of beauty have led to increased body dysmorphia and lower self-esteem. More than four in five Aussie women say they’ve been exposed to harmful beauty content online. And the recent rise of AI-generated images on the internet isn’t helping matters.
AI image generators have been found to perpetuate racist, sexualised, bigoted and skewed perceptions of humanity at large – and this extends to how this technology generates images of women.
Dove’s study found that the majority of Australian women (74 per cent) and girls (68 per cent) are aware of the prevalence of digitally altered images in the media. Nearly half of Aussie women and over half of Aussie girls believe AI will have negative impacts on their self-image; almost one in two women already feel pressured to alter their appearance based on online images, even knowing they could be fake or AI-generated. They’re alarming stats, especially considering the projected spread of AI. By some estimates, 90 per cent of online content will be AI-generated by 2025.
Maybe it’s my turn to trade my smartphone for a “dumbphone”.
