When comparing Julia Roberts' cover to Blake Shelton's it becomes apparent how there is a double-standard when it comes to how the media portrays men and women. Other ads and magazines, as well as other forms of media, have shown throughout the history to repeat the same unrealistic beauty standard, focusing on perfection rather than realistic women and their true selves. Further, it demonstrates how women are not allowed to be sexy once they reach a certain age, while men become sexier with age and often are praised for signs of aging, such as grey hair. Magazines such as these can lead to self-esteem issues in women, particularly young girls who look at forms of media to get a sense of societal expectations. In order to fix this issue, magazines need to be cognizant of how their images and portrayals of women and men can impact people's images of themselves and others.
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.
The slender, “beautiful” women are regarded as influential, successful, and erotic. This being said, it is very much so based on facts and reason, also known as logos, in the aspect that real life is often viewed this way. Throughout Elementary school up to High school, no one wanted to be best friends with “the fat kid”. As the world already knows, girls and women in general seem to stress over their physical appearance and have been especially concerned about weight for many years now. The emotional effect media has on a woman’s mindset, or ethos, could very well send her overboard into what is commonly known as an eating disorder.
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.
The idolization of a Barbie-sized body shape results in low self-esteem and anxiety within medically fit women. An unreasonable appetite on a skinny body that women 'should' have can easily become a pathological behavior which exceeds any normal boundaries. A constant struggle from adolescence to elderly years may have been the consequence of striving for the ideals. Accompanying the psychological obsession with the popular standard of beauty is a series of devastating physical repercussions. Aside from eating disorder
On covers of practically every magazine we see physically fit and beautiful male and female models. That sends the message to viewers; “This is beautiful. Look like this to fit in.” “Almost any physical problem that affects appearance can be improved with plastic surgery, but just because something is able to be done does not mean that it should be done.” (Marfuggi 4) “In a bizarre story, a woman addicted to plastic surgery has admitted to injecting cooking oil into her face in an attempt to plump it up. This woman obviously has a major case of BDD. The problem with this psychiatric condition is that most people who have it don't think they do.
‘The Beauty Myth’ is an obsession with physically looking ‘perfect’ and traps the modern woman in an endless cycle of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to achieve what society has deemed "the flawless beauty" regardless of whether it is realistic or not. Naomi Wolf censures the exploitation of women by the fashion, beauty and advertising industries, particularly in women’s magazines as we delve deeper in to the chapter on ‘Culture’. She claims that as a result of being sequestered from the world and isolated from one another, the only real women’s space in modern mass culture where women can seek solidarity is through women’s magazines. Ironically, it is through the same myth that women are brought together and driven apart. These women may not share any particularly close relationship, but develop a sense of solidarity through sharing similar interests, agenda, or worldview.
People are spending more time making frequent trips to the mirror, and finding themselves quite unhappy with their self image as a result of the expectations of media and our culture. When you look at Covergirl’s makeup ads with super models, or a radio ad about not having large enough breasts, it all adds to the pressure of our self-proclaimed image. Everything from diet products, surgical procedures, trendy exercise regimens, and fashion must-dos muddle the minds of millions, all “starving for the same thing; a sense of belonging. This on-going struggle of self is also causing people to expend an incredible excess of monetary resources, especially in these harsh economical times. It used to be that the strife for ideal self representation would begin in adolescents in their early teens.
Because the media surrounds women with such unrealistic models, women have changed the way they think. The media has sent a hidden message that in order for a woman to be considered beautiful, she must be unhealthy. Women, no matter what size, are not satisfied with their body image and always want to be better. Women often try different forms of dieting, working out, and often times develop eating disorders. Such a standard of perfection is unrealistic and even dangerous.