Feminist say that Barbie is the cause of worldwide eating disorders, low self-esteem and false perception of beauty. Girls see Barbie as a role model they set out to be like her, but researchers have recently found that her body is so disproportionate. Barbie measurements would be 38-18-34, her head would be the same size as her waist, her breast would be too large for her to walk up straight and she would be too thin to menstruate. What girl wants to grow up to be like that? Barbie’s weight is set at 110 pounds and 6ft tall but not all girls know that except when in 1965 Mattel came out with a “slumber party Barbie” that came with a bathroom scale permanently set at 110 pounds, a book called “how to lose weight” and inside it said “don’t eat”.
However, the hourglass figure that cover girls seem to posses are however not always real. Nowadays, with professional Photoshop skills, any photo can be warped into something totally different. Media uses such technology to conceal the true image of these women morphing the way people perceive an ideal body along the way. Media being immature as it is trying to use such images of thin, young, airbrushed female bodies to promote a “perfect” body image to the public which causes women to feel the lack the confidence in their body creating negative effects. In Singapore television, don’t you often see the London Weight Management promoting their packages by showing how women lost 20kg over 5 months?
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.
Shirley Temple in the Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison represents the American ideal girl and a representation of the stigma related to not being white in a society. In one way or another all of the characters in the Bluest Eyes are obsessed with beauty and defining what beauty is to them. The blue eyes closely tie to Shirley temple and baby dolls and their representation of a hierarchy of race. “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.
Many of these women and young girls were trying to emulate her look at the time, which considering her measurements of 39-18-33, was virtually impossible. A woman by the name of Cindy Jackson however has spent her entire life trying to achieve a “Barbie look,” she’s been through more than twenty operations trying to achieve this (Semansky 1). Piercy however realized that for girls of the African American, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and any other race besides the Caucasian this would be nearly impossible. They could never look “perfect” in the eyes of the society we live in, and so she began to write this poem. The personal experiences of Piercy also contribute to the outlook on how she wrote this poem.
According to the American Society of plastic surgery, the most common reason for women to get cosmetic surgery is because they are unhappy with their bodies. Ezine Articles states “Almost ¾ of women surveyed said they think about their size and shape every day unhappy with their bodies” (Women and Cosmetic Surgery). Most women use cosmetic surgery as a confidence boost. After receiving the treatments they feel more beautiful and more confident in themselves. Heidi Montag is a 23 year old American reality television icon.
What they wear, is what we want. We feel the need to look exactly how they are depicted to us and this is how models and the media affect body image – the most significant concern in young females in contemporary society. These skinny models project negative and false expectations of what girls are meant to look like at such a young age where their biggest concern should be their education. Beauty is positioned as the paragon of most teenage girls lives, and this is what causes many common problems to evolve around their lives, particularly eating disorders. Luisel Ramos is an example of a particular model who suffered from an eating disorder only wanting to be accepted into the modelling industry.
Dove Real Beauty Nikki Henderson MKT/421 February 11, 2013 Instructor: Phillip Spivey Dove Real Beauty Envision a world where beauty is a basis of self-confidence and optimism instead of apprehension and disquiet. So many women are fixated on their appearance and almost all of them have something they dislike about their body. Whether that dissatisfaction is with a chubby tummy, crow's feet, acne scars, hair that is too curly or not curly enough, or even a spot of cellulite, often times the imperfection, or perceived imperfection, is blown way out of proportion (Fox, 1997). The imaginary faults are time and again overstated in their own minds and are repeatedly perpetuated by the media (Fox, 1997). 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).
Size zero puts pressure on young women who are overweight. By comparing themselves to “zeros” young women only achieve low self-esteem. They are made to think they are unattractive. They go through the stress of unsafe cosmetic surgeries such as tummy tucks, to appear like fashion icons. Celebrity nutritionist Dr Adam Carey says that, “I think the current vogue is macabre.
The following two lines and second stanza speak of puberty and what her class mates think of her. This is a classic case where a social circle has profound impact of how young people see themselves; not for who they are, but for what their friends think of them. Further irony comes as the magic of puberty is not all magical and the only thing that changes is a girl changing into a woman with thick ties and big fat nose. In the third stanza she begins her quest for acceptance; diet, exercise, smile and wheedle. This is not who she really is and soon the pretense wears away, “Her good nature wore out.” when the real façade revealed who she was, she removed that which people dislikes about her, her nose and her legs and eventually gave up living.