Who Decided What a Woman's Body Should Look Like — And Why It's Time to Stop Listening

There's a question worth sitting with: Who actually set the beauty standards you've been measuring yourself against your entire life?

Not in a vague, cultural sense — but literally. Who decided that women's bodies should be a particular size, shape, or silhouette? Who determined that the soft belly of a postpartum mother was something to "bounce back" from? That the natural hormonal shifts of midlife were a problem to be corrected? That aging, for women, was essentially a form of failure?

When you start pulling that thread, the answer is uncomfortable. A significant portion of the beauty, fashion, and media industries that shaped the last several decades of Western beauty standards were built by — and deeply entangled with — men who had profound ethical failures, men who saw women's bodies as objects to be controlled, curated, and profited from. The industries they influenced didn't just sell us products. They sold us a story about what our bodies were for — and who got to decide if they were acceptable.

That story was never ours to begin with. And we are allowed to put it down.

The Standard Was Never Neutral

We tend to absorb beauty norms as though they simply exist — as if thinness, tautness, and youth were objective ideals that naturally rose to the top of human preference. But standards don't emerge from nowhere. They're constructed, funded, and distributed. They show up in the magazines on waiting room tables, in the before-and-after ads that follow us across the internet, in the casual language we use when we talk about our own bodies in front of our children.

When the people doing that constructing had a vested interest in keeping women insecure, smaller, and preoccupied with their appearance — that's not a beauty standard. That's a system of control dressed up as aspiration.

Recognizing this doesn't fix everything overnight. The internalized voice that critiques your postpartum stomach or your perimenopausal weight redistribution doesn't disappear the moment you understand its origins. But naming the source matters. It creates the first crack of distance between you and the criticism. It allows you to ask: Is this actually true? Or was I just taught to believe it?

The Postpartum Body Deserves Better Than "Bounce Back"

The phrase "bounce back" is worth examining for just a moment, because it contains an entire worldview. It implies that the pregnant and postpartum body is a temporary deviation — a problem state to be corrected as quickly as possible in order to return to something more acceptable.

But a body that has grown, nourished, and delivered a human being hasn't gone anywhere. It hasn't failed or fallen. It has done something extraordinary, and it carries the physical evidence of that. Stretched skin, changed hips, a softer belly — these are not damage. They are documentation.

The mental health costs of the "bounce back" narrative are real and well-researched. Postpartum body dissatisfaction is strongly linked to postpartum depression and anxiety. When new mothers are already navigating sleep deprivation, identity shifts, feeding challenges, and the enormous emotional weight of early parenthood, layering on appearance-based shame compounds everything. It narrows the window of self-compassion exactly when a woman needs it most.

What if, instead, we treated the postpartum body with the same reverence we extend to other kinds of healing? What if rest, nourishment, and gentle reacquaintance — rather than aggressive transformation — were the cultural defaults?

Perimenopause, Menopause, and the Audacity of Aging

Women in midlife are navigating one of the most significant physiological transitions of their lives — hormonal shifts, changes in sleep, mood, metabolism, cognitive function, and body composition — while simultaneously being told by the broader culture that they are becoming less visible, less relevant, less desirable.

The timing is not a coincidence. The years when women are typically gaining the most confidence, clarity, and hard-won self-knowledge are the same years the beauty industry ramps up messaging about fighting, reversing, and defying age. The message underneath is that the self you're becoming is not the self worth being.

This is worth pushing back on — not with toxic positivity or forced celebration, but with clear-eyed refusal. Aging is not a disease. A body moving through menopause is not a body in decline. The changes are real, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes genuinely hard — and they are also a completely natural part of being a person who has lived. The goal doesn't have to be erasing those signs. It can simply be learning to inhabit this body with curiosity and care instead of contempt.

The mental health implications of how we frame midlife bodies are significant. Women who hold more negative attitudes toward menopause and aging report higher rates of depression and anxiety during this transition. How we narrate what's happening to us shapes how we experience it.

What We Model for Our Daughters

This is where it gets both harder and more urgent.

Children — especially daughters and teenagers — are watching us. Not just what we say about their bodies, but what we say about our own. The offhand comment about your stomach before a beach trip. The way you avoid being photographed. The language you use in the fitting room. The sigh in front of the mirror.

These moments are data. They teach young people what women are supposed to feel about themselves — and the lesson arrives long before they have the critical thinking tools to question it.

Modeling a different relationship with your body doesn't require pretending you have no insecurities or that the work is done. It means letting your daughter see you eat without guilt and move your body for pleasure. It means saying "I'm still learning to be kind to myself" instead of narrating your flaws. It means talking openly, age-appropriately, about where beauty standards come from and who benefits from women feeling inadequate.

Teenagers especially need adults who will name the machinery behind the images they're consuming — because they are consuming more of them, more constantly, than any previous generation. Helping a young person develop media literacy around beauty isn't just a protective factor for body image. Research links positive body image in adolescence to better outcomes across mental health, academic engagement, and relationship quality.

We cannot fully dismantle the system in our own lifetimes. But we can refuse to pass it down intact.

Adjusting the Lens

So what does it actually look like to change the way you see your body — not as a project, but as a practice?

It starts with noticing the voice. When the internal critic surfaces, it's worth pausing to ask where that voice learned what it knows. Whose standards is it applying? What would it mean to respectfully disagree?

It means shifting the questions you ask your body. Less how do I look? and more how do I feel? What do I need? What has this body carried for me today? Functional gratitude — appreciating what your body does rather than how it appears — isn't a cure-all, but it's a genuine reorientation.

It means curating your inputs. The accounts you follow, the media you consume, the conversations you allow — all of it shapes the lens. Representation matters. Seeing bodies that look like yours at 45, at six months postpartum, at 60 — without apology, without the "before" frame — slowly recalibrates what your nervous system registers as normal.

And sometimes, it means working through the deeper layers with support. Body image struggles rarely exist in isolation. They're often intertwined with identity, trauma, grief, relationship patterns, and the stories we inherited from our own mothers and grandmothers. Therapy — particularly approaches that address the whole person — can be a powerful tool for untangling what belongs to you and what was handed to you by a culture that didn't have your best interests at heart.

You Were Never the Problem

The beauty standard wasn't designed to make you feel good about yourself. It was designed to make you feel just inadequate enough to keep buying, keep shrinking, keep seeking approval. Understanding that doesn't make the feelings disappear — but it does change who you're in a conversation with.

You are not failing to meet a neutral, reasonable standard. You are living in a body that has done real things, survived real years, and carried you to exactly here. That body is not a before photo.

If you're finding it hard to shift the lens on your own — whether you're postpartum, in midlife, or simply exhausted by decades of not measuring up — you don't have to do that work alone. Therapy can offer a space to explore where these beliefs took root and what it might look like to build something different in their place. That kind of work is available to you, and it's worth it.