mystery: thigh gap

Well … I’ve always wanted a thigh gap. I’ve always wanted a thigh gap? What the hell IS a thigh gap? That was the questioned I asked my roommate two days ago when she told me about the latest fitness trend which she discovered on instagram. 

A thigh gap is the space between your thighs when you are standing straight up. (I give you guys the German translation so that I can make sure that it’s absolutely clear about what I’m talking: “Oberschenkellücke”)

To tell you the truth, I’ve never even thought about a thigh gap. It’s completely new to me. I didn’t know that it is desirable and the latest must-have for body-conscious young women. But I started to get curious what’s behind this trend and after checking out some tumblr websites on the internet, the thigh gap got my attention.

So I read that the young Englishwoman Alexa Chung, model and Londoner It-girl, is thought to personify the trend. Of course lots of other celebrities follow her example. 

So what should you know about the thigh gap?

It’s an impossible beauty standard. Not everyone can have one. In fact it depends on the natural shape of your body. Women who have child-bearing hips are clearly at an advantage. They have legs that are farther apart from one another, making the thigh gap easier to achieve. 

 

The fact that not everyone can have it creates dangerous problems. For many women, especially young girls, the gap equals thinness which means that they almost starve themselves to get it. It can become an obsession like all other beauty trends. 

I read the story of a 16year-old girl who nearly killed herself because she wanted the thigh gap so badly. She started to plaster her bedroom walls with photos of skinny thighs of celebrities such as Alexa Chung or Cara Delevingne. She used to spend every minute of the day obsessing over the size of her thighs. After some months she felt so weak because she lost so much weight that she had to be taken to hospital. The doctors told her that if she didn’t change her eating habits, she would die in 2 weeks. Can you believe that? Actually I can.

There are so many other shocking stories like this one but that doesn’t stop people from uploading pictures of their way too thin legs showing the thigh gap. It’s driving me crazy! I don’t want to know how many girls or fully grown women suffer each day because of these terrible photos. Why can’t we just stop to create an unhealthy ideal of beauty? It’s dangerous. There are so many beautiful women out there who are afraid to be proud of them because they don’t fit in a size zero. It’s ridiculous! 

Still I want to give you the chance to decide on your own whether you like the trend or not. Take a look at:

• FuckYeahThighGap
• thigh gap on tumblr

read more about the negative aspects:

• stories
• Do you have a thigh gap?

body satisfaction and self-esteem

“Some people like to call me cocky or arrogant, but I just think, ‘How dare you assume I should think less of myself?’ “. When I first read this quote a couple of minutes ago, I was overwhelmed by its honesty and courage. I bet none of you ever thought about it that way? At least I didn’t. We live in a world in which we are forced to become better and reach our limits. We are trained to fail because what we do is never good enough – there will always be anyone better than you. Encouragement has been pushed aside in our vocabulary by a stronger and more negative marked word called “discouragement”. I wonder how on earth anyone could actually believe that sad and depressed people achieve better results than happy and joyful ones. Nonetheless, that’s the story of our lives – isn’t it?

The easiest way to keep somebody under your control is to lower his/her self-esteem in any possible way. The media knows that principle quite well and uses it whenever it gets the chance. Where do I want to go with that? I want to draw a special focus on “body satisfaction”, its relationship to “self-esteem” and why it is so hard love and accept yourself in the 21^st century.

Body satisfaction has been defined in various ways, particularly in terms of body cathexis, body image, and weight satisfaction. Body-cathexis reflects how satisfied people are with specific aspects of their bodies, body image reflects how close a person’s actual shape is to their ideal shape, and weight satisfaction reflects how close a person’s actual weight is to their ideal.

One way to define Self-esteem: it is the “level of global regard one has for the self”, or how well a person “prizes, values, approves, or likes” him or herself.

I think the connection between these two terms is quite obvious. Self-esteem mostly depends on body satisfaction because we live in a “body focused” world. You have to have a perfect body to be called beautiful; at least that’s what so many people believe. Skinny is the best. And if you can’t fit the rule, you’re out. 

I don’t know who “invented” the concept of a perfect body and why it became so important to our society. I guess that’s what we like to call “a first world problem”. Can you believe that there are so many people out there avoiding food because they are in a beauty mania, while others suffer because they simply don’t have enough to eat? Well, try to explain to a 4 year old undernourished child in Africa or Asia why you refuse to eat that piece of chocolate and prefer to throw it away. Oh I beg you please, just give it a try and explain it. Gosh, I get so mad when I think of it!!

I don’t want to give you statistics or other stuff. I just want to give you my personal opinion. Nobody will ever reach perfection. We have to accept our body. We can shape it – of course. We can try to stay healthy – well that’s amazing. But we can’t force ourselves to reach unreachable goals. It’s simply not possible. Get that in your mind. Everyone is beautiful. And that’s not just a stupid sentence with no meaning. That’s maybe the honest one in life. We have to accept us. Perfection isn’t objective. It’s a subjective decision you have to make for yourself in order to gain the amount of self-esteem you deserve. And you deserve the highest amount!