Scars To Your Beautiful: Empowering Young Girls
- Leena Mustafa 25020392
- Dec 8, 2022
- 2 min read
In a world where young girls are accustomed to obsessing over and internalizing pop genre songs, Scars to your beautiful by Alessia Cara is an effort towards neutralizing the toxic impact such media has on girls. As we've discussed in class, the increasing exposure to the lives of celebrities and influencers propagates girls to question their body image and not embrace their true selves. In a world where hiding society's proclaimed flaws are as simple as hiding them within layers of makeup and filters, there is a need for more of such content by influential singers.
Alessia Cara said to her fans before premiering this song "The standards that we have to kind of face as young women in everyday life just to feel, or look a certain way, or act a certain way, because there's a lot of pressure being a young girl, and just girls and women in general. So I wanted to make a reminder to just love yourself and appreciate yourself no matter what."
The song validates the feelings of young girls in a world disguised as perfection. With low esteem in young girls stemming from body image being a concern today, the song probes girls to feel special in their true, unfiltered skin and care less about what people have to say about them. There's an effort to boost self-esteem and validate the pain young women feel every day. The lyricist mentions self-harm and how people who have eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia hurt themselves to achieve the socially acceptable hourglass body. This is evident when we hear "Covergirls eat nothing" and "beauty is pain". The song powerfully uses Pathos's rhetoric to allow girls to acknowledge their pain while beginning to accept their true, unfiltered self regardless of societal constructs.
The song has touched upon the heart of millions of affected people struggling with self-confidence and peaked at number eight in the United States. Especially because the empowering message comes from a 20-year-old girl who pours down her feelings in the song, girls of the same age group feel validated and more accepting of themselves. At the premiere of the song in Las Vegas, Alessia narrates her struggles as a girl and how the pain has shaped her into a person who cares less about how society perceives her and more about her confident self. Young girls look up to celebrities and influencers of the same age as them; hence the world needs more empaths driven and empowering content from stars, so that young girls internalize positivity rather than the excessive toxicity they're already internalizing through other media platforms.
Following is a powerful performance by Alessia Cara on the same song at the MTV Video Music awards in 2017, which vent viral and recieved 42 Million views. The most empowering element is how she performs with zero makeup on her face and removes her jewellery and wig one by one at the every line she sings. https://youtu.be/1tAvYhW1ZLI
With the slow return of "heroin chic", I feel as though we need music like this now more than ever. Music about self love and self acceptance is so necessary and impactful because of how music is consumed. If it sounds good, we continue re-listening to the song and internalize its message through repeated listens. Lizzo and Meghan Trainor do a fantastic job of creating catchy, trendy music that pushes a self-love agenda. The fact that this song came out in 2015 is very meaningful, as the charts were dominated by conventionally skinny, picture perfect (sorry Aiza I'm stealing this phrase) women. Around this time, diet culture was also through the roof. The fact that she sings "we" when listing…
In the era of 2013-2015 music, the industry’s famous singers like Selena Gomez or Justin bieber seemed to focus on describing the physical attributes of feminine nature while Alessia Cara’s “Scars to your beautiful” disassociates male validation from determining a woman’s beauty. As you mentioned in the post, young females are internalising what the media teaches them to be. To consume unattainable beauty standards and body images through idolising models who pay millions of dollars to achieve these “picture perfect” faces impacts adolescent as well as adult women more than is visible to the naked eye. Facing body issues myself, i recall being extremely emotional the first time i came across this song so i completely resonate with your though…
I really love this song because this has made be feel really empowered and acceptable towards my own self. Growing up seeing all those fair-skinned females in Pakistani dramas, their faces acne-free, them not being too skinny, and not too healthy, perfect thick hair, I grew a lot of insecurities in myself. And society also accepting them as norms, and me being called out on these things made me really hate myself, but since childhood I wanted to accept myself and wanted a boost in that; Alessia Cara’s song was the validation I required since my teen years. Her concert at MTV’s Video Music Award ceremony 5 years ago was a very powerful performance. As Hall says, language operates as…