go to school, so umm, yeah, it started with that. And then, I guess I felt that pressure when I went away to school. At first I didn‟t care and stuff, and then, I had unintentionally lost weight first year when I came to school, and then that progressed further and it started, like, it kind of internalized within me. It was, you start losing weight, and then you can‟t stop. It‟s never enough, you know what I mean, like, you wanna lose more weight because it‟s like, you want to be thinner. Like thinspiration online, it‟s pictures of really thin girls. It‟s not about being fit, it‟s about being thin, and that eventually progresses into pro-ana sites, which are pro-anorexia sites. It‟s crazy what‟s out there, and you fall into that, and I was looking at those thinspo blobs every day, because it was like you just become addicted to it. -Kristen, White-Canadian, 20 years old The thin Western beauty standard impacted all of the women I interviewed. However, the women I interviewed experience this pressure with varying degrees of intensity. This intensity varied from focusing on maintaining a healthy body to restrictive eating and excessive exercising. 6.6. Resistance The women I interviewed not only experience Western beauty pressures with varying degrees of intensity, but they find unique ways to resist them depending on which strategies are effective for them. Kelly boycotts magazines that promote Western standards of beauty: I don‟t like them, I don‟t like supporting them. When I was younger I did, but I definitely grew out of that pretty quickly. I just went into a direction where it was like, this is fake, I don‟t like this. -Kelly, White-Canadian, 22 years old Nila resists Western beauty pressures by reminding herself that images of women are often digitally-altered and unrealistic. She said: I think until recently I have always had this negative association with advertisements and people on TV and people on magazines because I know also, they are not even real, so I don‟t really believe what I am seeing when I look at things like that. -Nila, Filipino and Jamaican heritage, Canadian, 20 years old Kristen resists Western beauty pressures by trying to avoid them: I don‟t watch TV anymore, I don‟t read Cosmo. I stay away from all that stuff. Even on the internet, I mean, it is kind of like, unavoidable, but I try my best to channel what I interpret, what I view as beauty. And you have to make a conscious effort to avoid it too, because it literally is everywhere. -Kristen, White-Canadian, 20 years old The women I interviewed resist Western beauty pressures in unique ways depending on which avenues of resistance are available and effective for them. 7. Discussion The findings in this research show that women experience Western beauty pressures differently and at different intensity levels. As Western beauty and body “ideals” intensify, more and more women feel inadequate and strive to make drastic changes to their appearance to relieve their discomfort (Kilbourne, 2010). Women‟s gender, race, class, culture and size all largely shape their experiences with Western beauty pressures. This was evident in this research project in a number of ways. Ashley Mckay, Shannon Moore & Wendee Kubik 9 Female athletes are often dehumanizedin a masculine domain in which gender differences are not evident through the use of makeup, clothes or other forms of “gendering the body.” Thus, women who are perceived to be masculine often endure sexual and homophobic harassment as a result. Being a mixed-race woman or a woman of colour in Western culture meant having to negotiate between two cultures with different beauty “ideals,” making it difficult for women to develop positive perceptions of their own beauty. People who question the legitimacy of a woman‟s identity based on presubscribed notions of how they think she should look reinforce this struggle. Class also impacted women who could not afford to spend copious amounts of money on beauty products and clothing. If women are unable to afford clothing and products needed to achieve Western beauty norms, they often feel excluded. Additionally, due to the idealization of the white Western beauty “ideal,” women of colour spoke of avoiding sunlight and using light concealers to meet Western beauty standards (Rice, 2010). This is fuelled by the new industry of facewhitening products designed to aid women of colour in achieving the white beauty “ideal.” Lastly, regardless of their intersecting identity, every woman in this study is impacted by the thin Western beauty standard. This intensity varied from focusing on maintaining a healthy body to restrictive eating and excessive exercising. Rice (2009) argues that women resist Western beauty pressures on their own terms, depending on what is available to them at the time. The women I interviewed found unique ways