Media Inflience on Beauty

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Media Influence on the Female Form Works Cited Not Included The American definition of beauty is visible in any one of our forms of popular culture, whether it’s TV, movies, music videos, magazines, and advertisements, even billboards. “Women’s bodies sell products that have nothing to do with women, like tires, cars, liquor, and guns” (Pipher, Reviving Ophelia 42). As if using women’s bodies to sell completely unrelated products weren’t harmful enough, the women used to sell these products are a far cry from what most women in America look like. The average American woman is 5’4” and weighs 140 pounds, whereas the average professional model in this country is 5’9’’ and weighs roughly 110 pounds (Barnhill 49). Consistently, women are diminished by advertisers to pretty body parts used to sell products, a practice that perpetuates the glorification of this unreasonable ideal of beauty. Women’s bodies have not only become a huge money-maker for advertisers, businesses have picked up on women’s insecurities about their bodies and have capilatized on these insecurities. On one hand, advertisers heavily market weight-reduction programs and present young anorexic models as the paradigm of ideal beauty; on the other hand, the media floods the airwaves and magazine pages with ads for junk food. In 1996, the diet industry (as in diet foods, diet programs, diet drugs) took in over $40 billion dollars, and that number is still climbing (Facts and Figures 1). Young women seem to be especially affected by our culture’s obsession with weight and beauty. America today is a girl-destroying place where young women are encouraged to sacrifice their true selves in exchange for false selves that are more culturally acceptable. “More than any other group in the population, girls and their bodies have borne
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