Women are generally supposed to look feminine, beautiful, delicate and in shape while men should be strong, masculine and in shape as well. If media swapped out skeletons with average, healthy looking women for once; the way people think will change and they'll see their bodies as normal, instead of "not good enough". This feeling of "not being good enough" is exemplified through a woman who had moved from India to America. She shares how the way she viewed her body and the way she felt she had to be, changed when she was put in a different culture. She remembered, "Like several million people on this planet, I weigh 15 pounds more than I'd like. But my 15 pounds appeared overnight, after an airplane ride from my home in India to Boston" (Iyer 1). In India, the gender roles and the way women are supposed to look are different. There, they admire women with a little more curves and a bit of "plump", which was considered healthy and beautiful. Surrounded by a new culture, she realized that the body she had considered normal was now revealed to be anything but (Iyer 4). She suddenly found herself trying to shed a few pounds, struggling to fit into this brand new mold, thinking that she needed to better herself. This pressure to "better oneself" and strive to look a certain way is found amongst many women and even men. Believe it or not, men have it just as hard (maybe even harder) than woman do when it comes to social pressures to conform to gender roles and the way they are supposed to look.
With women, it usually seems normal to talk openly about their insecurities or the way they look amongst each other. However, if a guy were to talk to "his boys" in the locker room about how his butt looks too big, he may be getting more laughs than actual feedback. Back to the gender roles, men are apparently not supposed to care about those sort of things like women do.
