Ganesh, with an elephant head magically small enough to fit on a pudgy human’s body, is giving our impressionable daughters an impossible ideal to strive for. I fear that girls across the country will be tempted to duct taping armlike projections to their backs in an attempt to look like their hero, Ganesh.

How do you tell a little girl that she’s perfect the way she is, when the female Hindu gods she looks up to promote such impossible standards?

Even more troubling is the lack of diversity in Hindu mythological pop culture. Virtually all depictions of Hindu deities that our nation’s kids will be bombarded with have either four or eight arms. What am I supposed to tell my daughter when she longingly looks at the necklace of skulls and three extra pairs of arms on the Goddess of Destruction, Kali?

There needs to be a push to eliminate the undue pressures of media on the youth of America. This means more body diversity. This means reworking images of Ganesh so that they are not so unattainable. This means teaching our daughters not to idolize this, or any Hindu god, and to instead look to themselves to find strength.

This millennia old tradition of depicting gods with multiple arms, animal body parts, and plump curvaceous figures needs to be rewritten. Every little girl, even if she is a regular, two-armed, human-headed one, deserves to love herself for who she is.