Slutty vs. Sloppy

The world is buried in snow yet again.

Today, after seeing pictures of a beautiful teenage girl in a beautiful dress, I had the thought, "Beauty is wasted on the young!". And then I started really analyzing WHY I had that particular thought. So now you, my few lucky readers, get to sit through my thought process.

My gut reaction for saying beauty is wasted on the young is two-fold. First of all, most girls don't realize just how beautiful they are in high school until about 5-10 years later. Suddenly, they look back at their old photos and think, "Holy crap, I was gorgeous! Why did I waste so much time moping about because I thought I was too fat/too thin/too short/too tall/too ugly?" Second of all...beautiful young girls don't know what to DO with their beauty. Don't get me wrong, I am in no way trying to insinuate that teenagers should dress up to show off all their assets in a provocative way...which, oddly enough, is the first idea that seems to spring to mind when someone mentions "showing off assets". I just think it's a shame that girls don't seem to know or have much interest in dressing for their body type. They inevitably dress in far too revealing clothes that don't actually flatter their figures, no matter what they might think...or they dress in baggy jeans and T-shirts that ALSO don't flatter them.

I'm trying to understand this phenomenon. To break it down in a really basic form...it seems that girls dress like sluts because they want attention, and girls dress in baggy clothes because they don't want attention. What's sad is, both types end up receiving negative attention. If girls were taught to dress in a manner appropriate for their age and body type...I'm no expert, but I imagine it would do wonders for teenage self-esteem.

I realized pretty quickly after I had my first thought (beauty is wasted on the young) that there's a deeper problem. And, while I know the media is an easy target to pin society's problems on...I really believe the media is at least partly at fault here. It's not the only factor by any means. Even without media, teenage body issues would still exist. But fashion is affected by the media...and subsequently, the way teenage girls dress is affected. The ones who end up looking like sluts dress that way because they see adult women in magazines doing so. The women they see are touted as being the sexiest women in the world, so of course girls are going to try to emulate that. Magazines don't tell them, "Oh, by the way, those clothes the model is wearing? Yeah, they look good on her body type, but a very, very small percentage of real people look good in those clothes."

Some girls take the opposite route. They know they can never look like women they see in the media, so they cover their bodies up completely. They make themselves look sloppy, they hide in oversized jeans and boys t-shirts. Their posture slumps because they feel too tall, or because they're ashamed of their figures. They make fun of the girls who dress like sluts, mainly because they think slutty or sloppy are the only two options they have.

Wouldn't it be great if we started teaching teenagers how to dress for their body types? Instead of just showing them pictures of models in magazines and saying, "Here, this is in style. Go swipe your dad's Visa so you can look like this!", wouldn't it be better to teach them that one of the best ways to look fashionable and look good is to dress in a way that flatters them? I think so many girls could benefit from this. It should be a required topic in health class...and it should include all body types. Fat girls, thin girls, short girls, tall girls. Girls with big boobs, girls with big hips, girls who have pencil-thin waists but flabby arms.

It's true that beauty comes from the inside, but sometimes it's hard to see that beauty when you're wearing clothes three times too small that wouldn't even look good if they had them in your real size.