Negative Body Images That Women and Teens Have

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Millions of women and girls have negative thoughts about their body image. So many girls see a skinny model or a thin celebrity and think they need to look just like them. What makes girls think this way? Maybe summer is coming soon and they want to look good in their swimsuit, they’re getting bullied for the size they are, or they see somebody they look up to have a thin figure and they want to look them. America is a country of contradictions, particularly when it comes to body image. There are countless advertisements with beautiful, thin people plastered on every street corner, magazine page and TV commercial yet we have the 9th highest obesity rate in the world. The focus in recent media has been moving towards an overall healthier lifestyle, however it is no surprise that many teenage girls would rather take the easy way out and turn to crash diets and even develop eating disorders. Females, teenage girls especially, are influenced by the media and the image of “beauty” that it glorifies. In this paper we will discuss the history of beauty, America’s current definition of beauty and its impact on teenage girls and what can be done in the future to help teenage girls have a better body image. Beauty has changed throughout history. The idea that a woman had to be thin to be beautiful is a somewhat recent belief. This can be proven by one of the oldest pieces of art, Venus of Willendorf, a statue made about 25,000 years ago. As seen above Venus has a very round shape and looks like to total opposite of a typical American “beautiful” woman. “The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable.” [A] Fast forward to the late 19th century and the focus of beauty was more of a woman's face, where it had not been before. The body was also noticed and a

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