Images portrayed by the media tend to make people strive to be someone else's idea of perfect, while ignoring their own goals. The media influences us through television, health magazines, fashion, music videos, film, commercials, and various other advertisements. Sadly, as a result, this frequent exposure, the "thin" ideal, can lead many young girls in triggering depression, stress, low self-esteem, and suicide. The media's ideal body image has led to wide-ranging effects including, surgical procedures, body dissatisfaction, and clinical eating disorders. In “Body Image of Women” by Tabitha Farrar, she points out that the “thin-ideal media” concept highlights thinness as a desirable thing to be even if it comes to the point of damaging a person’s health.
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.).
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.
It's disturbing to think that girls like you and me are doing this to their bodies simply because of what is portrayed in magazines like vogue and fashion catalogues. Media targeting teenage girls, like you and me, are emphasising the ideal of thinness as beauty. The media and fashion industry in my viewpoint are pushing a dangerously thin image that young girls may try to emulate. The promotion of the thin, sexy ideal in our culture has created a situation where the majority of girls and women don't like their bodies. This then leads
Magazines, advertisements and television create and promote stereotypical images of females. Females are represented as sex objects with nurturing, motherly instincts, only focused on beauty, house hold chores, politically and professionally inferior. Males are depicted as the bread winners, career orientated, professional, political and important. This is in stark contrast to the truths of reality, where women in both Australia and America are professionals, and do infact hold numerous powerful positions in the workforce. This shows the immense influence the media has over western cultures, and how this can influence popular understandings of females.
Dear Plump Betty, The media portrays a very unrealistic idea of how an ideal body should look. The models that you see in magazines live a very unhealthy lifestyle. In the modeling industry, they would get paid to nearly starve themselves to death-in order to achieve a stick thin and anorexic body. It may look like a glamorous life, but behind the scenes, many of them are abnormally thin, and have eating disorders. It seems as if models nowadays or becoming even thinner, while many women are getting heavier, so there is a wide range between the "ideal" body shape and the reality.
It might be called entertainment standard to serve audience's pleasure. However, feminist’s observation is too delicate to recognize those film marketing plan, they note it like a threat. The more objective actress becomes on media, the heavier responsibility female feel for how should they look like, even from a young girl to adult women. They tend to pay more attention to their looking instead of their health, lives. And now, movies also give them some kinds of invisible pressure on what they sensitive most: Beauty.
The focus of this research was to see what caused girls to be so pressured into being really thin or why some girls were anorexic. In my research, I learned the media plays a big part in why girls go to the extreme to be thin. Major points I learned is that the media targets teen girls with photo-shopped images of models. There are positive effects of media, I think otherwise. When girls see these “models” they feel no matter how it takes to get there, they have to be like these models.
Weigh Too Far? We have all seen the pictures of ‘size zero’ celebrities like Victoria Beckham, Nicole Richie, Kate Moss and Paris Hilton, who are apparently style icons of the 21st century. But do these celebrities actually look good this size? We see them in their tiny clothes that no ordinary woman would fit into, does it make you go; “wow, she is gorgeous”, or does it really make you gasp and say; “wow, she is too skinny”? Size zero puts pressure on young women who are overweight.
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. “The mass media has long been criticized for presenting unrealistic appearance ideals that contribute to the development of negative body image for many women and girls” (Hargreaves and Tiggemann, 2003, p. 539). So, even though advertisements may be seemingly innocent, they may be causing harmful implications that affect adolescent girls for the rest of their lives. How Do Television Advertisements Affect Body Image? In the course of a hour television show, how many times do networks run advertisements for diet pills or food that will magically cause viewers to lose weight and look as skinny as the people in the commercial?