Everyday girls are bombarded with advertisements telling them that they are not good enough. These commercials make girls believe they need take pills, diet, and have surgeries to “fix” them when there is nothing wrong. These commercials also paint an unrealistic and absurd image of women in men’s brains causing men to wait around for the supposedly perfect woman, when they do not exist. Being a girl, beauty industries affect me every day. Commercials on TV, magazines, or just walking through the mall, advertisements about make up or weight loss programs follow me wherever I go.
In our society many girls believe that image is everything and strive to become the ‘perfect size zero’. In this generation style is everywhere; magazines, popular clothing brands and t.v shows which all promote size zero models. Models are constantly blamed for setting a bad example for young girls when majority of the models are also feeling the pressure to be perfect by the media and modelling agencies who will not accept models who are not under a healthy weight of size 6/8/10 or above as it as commonly seen as ‘fat’ or ‘plus size’. Many models suffer from anorexia nervosa which is an eating disorder cause by people restricting their food intake because of fear of gaining weight. Those who are suffering from anorexia often view themselves at ‘too fat’ and overweight although majority of them are unhealthily underweight.
This really bothered me for many reasons. One of the biggest issues that I had with this program and major element of the photo business is the effect it has on young girls, especially girls aged 9-15. This is a very critical age for girls because, during this time, puberty happens. During this time, more girls will stop doing what they love because they are self-conscious about their bodies enough without the help of the fashion industry. It isn’t fair for a girl to open a magazine and think that the images they see are how they should look.
U1A7- That’s More Than Just My Opinion Assignment #4 By: Chelsea Holmes Many women around the world are being brainwashed by the appeal of how a woman should looked, based on the media’s perspective. They show women as skinny, chesty, and cane free but when they Photoshop these women, they don’t take into consideration the feelings of women. The media’s idea of a woman’s body image can negatively impact her self-esteem. It can cause them to feel fat and ugly, result to harmful and unhealthy weight loss and it can cause suicide. The media’s idea of how a woman should look causes many women to feel fat and ugly about themselves.
Friends and family may see someone that is perfectly normal, beautiful even, but as far that individual woman is concerned, the image of beauty the world proliferates has become restrictive and unachievable (Fox, 1997). Women these days simply cannot see or appreciate their own beauty because they do not look the models they see on billboards and on t.v. Because women are criticized on their appearance more than men and standards of female beauty are substantially higher and more uncompromising, women are much more self-critical than men (The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, n.d.). Women are repeatedly assailed with images of the ultimate face and figure on TV, magazines, and billboards that make extraordinary good looks seem common and anything short of perfection seem strange and ugly (The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, n.d.). It has been estimated that young women now see more images of exceptionally beautiful women in one day than their mothers saw throughout their entire childhood (The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, n.d.).
We know this is not true because women have done everything in this world that men have including dangerous adventure sports yet they considered to be lower than men .Their talents are not as recognized as men’s talents are and they are mostly looked upon as not being fit for the same jobs as men are. These issues are presented in the texts examined in this essay. The song “What it feels like for a Girl” by Madonna and the essay “Fifty one percent Minority” by Doris Anderson are about Gender Inequality and how women are treated in society. The song by Madonna describes the pressure women feel to conform to social norms of politeness and subservience and the essay by Doris Anderson is about discriminatory practises that are done against women in Canada. Anderson is also one of Canada’s leading advocates of women rights.
The Effect of the Media on Adolescent Girls' Body Images In today's society adolescent girls are faced with constant pictures and advertisements in the media of tall, skinny, models and actresses with beautiful hair and seemingly nothing wrong with their bodies. However, this is not how most women look, and not how most adolescent girls will look like in the future. Thus, girls are getting idealistic views of how they want to look when they get older. Santrock (2007) claims, “As pubertal change proceeds, girls often become more dissatisfied with their bodies, probably because their body fat increases” (p. 73). When girls go through puberty and gain body fat, most of them will start to differ from the images burned in their heads by the media of the “perfect” body, causing them to develop negative body images and self-esteem issues.
According to modern day society, girls should walk and talk pretty, have perfect skin, and cake on makeup; they should watch their weight and keep up with the newest trends in fashion. The mass media depicts unrealistic images of beauty, which have led many adolescent girls to attempt to become these unattainable figures. Girls go to extreme measures to imitate society’s impractical beliefs of beauty. The pressure that society puts on women to be thin is unhealthy, which links to the increasing rate of eating disorders and psychological problems among young women. There have been plenty of studies linked to the negative impacts of body image caused by the media.
The children that compete in these beauty contests aged generally between 2 to 10 years old (sometimes even younger) usually have one only goal: get the money and get the tiara. Of course, these little beauties do not enter the contests at their own request, but their mothers are the ones to fill in the applications on time, pay the participation fee, create or buy the outfit, establish the type of performance for the talent section (usually some song about the greatest love in one’s life and/or a terrible heartbreak,) create and exercise the hairstyle and make-up, keep a strict rehearsal schedule, hire trainers if the mum herself cannot coach the whole thing, fill in the gas tank and travel hundreds of miles with their children just to spend a weekend on an emotional roller coaster that for most of the mother-daughter teams ends in heartbreak and
While equality as a general rule has become more prevalent in society there are still stereotypes that women are encouraged to follow. These stereotypes can stunt the social developmental growth of women. Still to this day women are considered the main caregivers in households and are frowned upon when this does not always prove to be the case. There are also still many stereotypes concerning how a woman should dress, look, and the jobs that they should hold in society. This thinking has caused much heartache for young women across the world and could be rectified by further studying the differences between men’s and women’s social development.