Adolescents and Body Image

540 Words3 Pages
Adolescents and Body Image Recently, the world witnessed a surge of criticism on fat-shaming, with many plus-sized women coming out to flaunt their bodies and starting “Love Your Body” campaigns. Size zero went from an ideal body size to something women started looking at as unnecessarily and disgustingly unattainable. Marilyn Monroe became the new ‘ideal’ of a woman. Today, more women want to be like her. More runway designers are showcasing plus-size models in their shows and designing clothes for bigger-sized women. There is a new-found conception that ‘real women have curves.’ Though I do believe that women with curves are beautiful and that they should prize their body shapes, I do not believe that all real women should have curves. In the midst of the movement to build self-esteem for plus-size women, we often forget that we might be demeaning women who are naturally thin or have size-zero bodies. While the world has become more body-positive, the movement to help bolster self-worth can sometimes inadvertently happen at the expense of someone or something else. In the light of body-acceptance and fighting the body ideal, it is a myth that thin women have it easy. Not only do the media glorify a slender ideal, they also emphasize its importance, and the importance of appearances in general. There is plenty of evidence demonstrating that the media glorify slenderness and weight loss and emphasize the importance of beauty and appearances. Surveys suggest that 83% of adolescent girls read fashion magazines for an average of 4.3 hours per week, and that “Seventeen” magazine has an estimated readership of 11,000,000 (Kilbourne, 1994). It appears that beauty and fashion magazines significantly impact the process of identity development in young women, especially with regards to gender-role learning, identity formation, and the development of values and beliefs. In
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