So I see a whole lot of people saying the media tells women that they need to look a certain way. These people say that women learn from a young age that it's important to be "pretty" and what pretty looks like. Which is confusing to me, because I consumed a ton of media as a kid and I didn't get the same messages. I definitely saw some fat hate, so I was anti-fat as a little kid, but even there it was a lot less than what I hear people saying -- I see a lot of people who think that anything over around 120 pounds is fat, whereas my idea of fat was 200 pounds or more. Most kids shows and books, at least that I saw, explicitly talked about how you shouldn't judge people for their looks. There was always an episode about somebody getting rejected for looking weird and then turning out to be a cool person after all. In fact, if a girl showed interest in makeup and fashion, shows and books judged her as "shallow" and put her in an "evil cheerleader" role. I picked up the "anybody who likes makeup and fashion is evil" value as a kid pretty quickly. So, did everybody else watch entirely different shows and read entirely different books, or what? How did so many other women get "you must be pretty, and this is what pretty looks like" when I got "you must not care about looks unless somebody is really fat, and people who care about looks are stupid and mean"? Note that I did prefer media marketed towards boys as well as science fiction/fantasy. Not sure if that explains it, though, because I'm pretty sure I've heard other people raised on the same things say they got "girls must look good" as a value through media.
My view of what "fat" or even "chubby" is pretty skewed and awful. For myself it is basically "anything even remotely above 120 pounds". Part of this I do think has to do with the media. I feel really, really fucking weird when I see things like Steven Universe or fanart of the Homestuck characters as having a bit of pudge. There's strange sense of joy because wow there is finally someone that LOOKS like me. People have stomachs. Wow. At the same time though there's an instant flash of "This person isn't pretty" in my mind. As far as makeup and evil cheerleaders that I think has also ended up contributing. Yes the woman who is very obviously wearing and concerned with makeup to "absurd" degrees is evil. ...but the good "frumpy" girls are a sort of perfect too. Their hair is either done very well or they get some makeover that makes it movie perfect. They don't noticeable acne or bumps on their faces. Indeed they are pretty and airbrushed Hollywood women being portrayed as "natural" and "right". So for me that entire lack of any blemish is just what I perceive as not just pretty but as normal. I, with my acne problem, am abnormal. In fact I'm ugly. I can't even hit the heights of being "normal" because I am just that ugly. In a way I find that more insidious than anything else. Because like you said these things are explicitly telling you that make up is bad. While still portraying something a lot of women aren't at and won't ever be at as being the baseline. There are other factors too, of course. Like how my family acts and so on. I get told that I'm fat all the time by various people in the family. Media I think has definitely fucked with my perception of what even "average women" look like though. I suppose I should add that I never really thought about this until recently. I just kind of thought it was normal that I thought I was fat and ugly. It weirdly enough took seeing one of the aforementioned chubby Homestuck fanart things to make me even consider that something might be wrong here. And then I actually looked at other women I knew in real life and basically went "...oh."
i think i never really had it affect me myself, as a result of being autistic and focusing on other things. like, i cared more about the cool sci-fi/fantasy stuff, cool ideas and information, fandom stuff and whatnot, than how i looked. that and my relatives have always told me that i looked cute, and i've always been thin. and i worried a lot more having anorexia ('cause my sensory food issues make me really thin and my class was forced to watch a ton of the Horrors of Anorexia videos in health class; i think it might've been slightly triggering) than being too fat. like, if i became fat, i don't know if i'd actually care - i might wonder how the fuck it was going on, sure, 'cause it would be a big change from my normal weight. also, at school, in health class, i did get a lot of education on how the beauty standards in the media don't reflect real life, so i knew there was messed up shit going on there and that i shouldn't take it as a guide.
What I'm saying is that besides "don't be fat," I didn't see any beauty standards in media. All I saw was media saying "don't be like one of those shallow girls who cares about beauty." Only in the last couple of years have I learned from Tumblr what those beauty standards are, and that's all secondhand. And I'm wondering how I missed it since I've always spend most of my time consuming media as opposed to, say, hanging out with friends. Where in media do people get these beauty standards from as kids? I can't recall a single kids' show where the lesson was "girls should look like X."
well, in fop, there were what the fans referred to as "marriage jokes," ('cause of what they assumed the creator's intent was, not 'cause they actually found them funny) which consisted of cosmo insulting his wife, wanda, and sometimes fawning over other, more conventionally attractive women (eg. princess mandie, the tooth fairy, britney britney, blonda). some of those jokes had to do with how she was fat or not pretty or whatever (and apparently her sister blonda was hotter than her, perhaps just 'cause of her hair colour). but yeah, that's the only example that springs immediately to mind, mostly 'cause the fop fandom, back in like 2005 - 2007, mostly, ferociously hated those "jokes." and even though i sperg(ed) over that show like whoa, that never caused me to worry about my appearance or how other people looked. i just was like, "okay, that is indeed a thing," and moved onto fop (and other) stuff that i cared more about.
With me a lot of it isn't explicitly stated from what I can see. It's implied through how women in movies are depicted. As well as how women are drawn in cartoons and comics. With messages like "The cheerleaders who care about makeup are shallow and mean!" this gets very insidious like I said because the "frumpy" "average" girl is still very, very done up. The implicit lessons and standards of normal that these things teach are the source of problems like mine. So it wasn't anyone outright telling me "This is what pretty girls are and you should be pretty". It's more seeing nothing but pretty girls and being told, implicitly or explicitly, that those girls are the baseline.
I agree with what Aondeug's saying, but I also think a lot of the social standards and whatnot that kids internalize that gets attributed to media is actually picked up from interacting with peers and especially slightly older kids (see also the transmission of "kid culture" for the most part independent of adults and media). I can also see how kids with some kinds of brainweird might just totally miss all the societal expectations being thrown around except for the ones that were explicitly spelled out, although I have no idea if that applies to you in particular or not.
Also autistic and didn't give a damn about this stuff, but the thing is: You base your idea of average on the average of the people you happen to be around*. For a lot of people, celebrities are a large fraction of the people they "are around" - there's an entire industry based on getting personal information about celebrities' lives so that regular people feel like they have some "exclusive access" to how the celebrities are feeling. In Farenheit 451, Mildred spent all her time with "the family", which I assume was supposed to be a sitcom - and while most people in real life don't do something so extreme as replace all of their social relationships with TV, a lot of people spend/spent a lot of time in front of TV and thus have diluted their sense of "what normal people are like" with a large number of very nice-looking actors. And the thing about celebrities is that 1) they have a lot of money (so they can afford personal chefs, personal trainers, and plastic surgery) and 2) they have a lot of people devoted to making sure they look really good on-camera (post-processing/photoshopping of absolutely everything). It's not like there's kayfabe happening here, exactly, so much as kids aren't often old enough to understand that a lot of "how attractive you can keep yourself looking" is based on social class and privilege and suchlike. * This is one of the reasons a lot of artists (especially online) have inferiority complexes. You need to be around people who are better than you to learn from them and improve, but then you start overestimating the "average" level of artistic competence thereby.