Carolina Gómez Mena
La Jornada newspaper
Sunday, September 7, 2025, p. 6
Aesthetic violence is one of the most normalized forms of aggression against women in the public sphere, especially in social networks, says Dr. Geidy Mocafa Hernández, postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Research and Gender Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He adds that the scrutiny about female bodies and faces is a practice to which many people surrender without reservation or measure the consequences of what their criticisms can cause.
According to the National Discrimination Survey of INEGI, in Mexico almost 31 percent of women were discriminated against their way of dressing or personal arrangement. Also, of the total that discrimination, 30.3 percent was due to their weight or stature.
In Spain, a study by Fundación Mapfre and the University of Deusto on negative comments on social networks revealed that women received almost four times more critical about their physique than men (22 against 6 percent).
Hate one’s appearance
Marta’s struggle with her size began in adolescence. The signs in her school time led her to hate her appearance and undergo “food restrictions.” The influence of social networks began its boom and that fueled their insecurities. More than a decade and a half, he understands that his weight “was not something was control”, but the normalization of the idea that the female body should always be improved weighs many.
The survey on aesthetic violence conducted in the Canary Islands, Spain, in 2023 states that most of those consulted would like to have less kilos (66.2 percent) and a minority (4.9 percent) would like to weigh more, while almost 29 percent accept their weight.
The first diet
The nonconformity with its weight led 53.1 percent to undertake their first diet before fulfilling the age of majority; 30 percent did it between 18 and 25 years; 12.1 percent from 26 to 40 years and 4.8 percent made its first restrictive diet after 40 years.
Use filters, undergo skin tone bleaching and cosmetic treatments and plastic surgeries, even from an early age, hide or hide the signs of age and under The day.
The also a doctor of social and political sciences from the Ibero -American University warns that this type of aggression, which is amplified by social networks, promotes a unique body ideal: thin, young, white and un disabilities women.
“By means of this type of violence, unreal and exclusive beauty patterns are spread, reinforcing that pressure on women so that they have to perfect and correct, as if there are always something wrong in their aesthetics,” he explains.
The Women’s Secretariat warns that aesthetic violence “is more acute in some parts of the country”, and emphasizes that not to be always judged by how they are seen, the fight against aesthetic violence must “join the cultural change and stop normalizing this unique mold.”
He points out that before the image of a woman, the first attack is always against how it looks, and that is the result of the allocation of roles and the inequitable, unequal and patriarchal vision that forces us to be at home, be silent, submissive and beautiful, and that must change.
Iris Santillán Ramírez, research professor at the Law Department of the Azcapotzalco Metropolitan University, states that in one way or another, “all” women have experienced aesthetic violence, and therefore “put a name, call it and, above all, see it in a law helps to make visible” this phenomenon.
Visibility
He emphasizes that “one of the great benefits of women’s general access law to a life free of violence is that identifies the types of violence, and we can realize that what we live is aggression.”
The Women’s Secretariat indicates that there have been proposals to legally recognize aesthetic violence. “Guanajuato and Yucatán reformed their local laws to include it as a type of violence. On the federal scale, in the LXV Legislature (2021-2024) proposals were presented to reform the General Access Law and add aesthetic violence.”
These seek to “typify this pressure to meet beauty standards as a specific form of violence against women. There are real possibilities, because there is a demand from collective feminist collectives and platforms so that aesthetic violence adds to the legal catalog of gender aggressions.”
Santillán Ramírez states that the exercise of this form of violence is closely related to the economic aspect, because all women, some more and others less, “we spend on this social obligation to want to achieve certain standards of beauty.” Now, even “from a very young age they follow the gender mandate of being beautiful, but the models that are imposed are unattainable,” he concludes.
