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.
Personal experience has leaded me to believe there is a war between “skinny” and “thick” women. Skinny meaning a lack of bulk, not curvy, more of the model looking type. Thick on the other hand is filled in all the right places, that attract the opposite sex, some may say voluptuous. The war is really between attitudes, self-confidence, and personation. Thinner women tend to be more of the load, attention hungry, very emotional type everything is said dramatically.
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.
In our society many girls believe that image is everything and strive to become the ‘perfect size zero’. In this generation style is everywhere; magazines, popular clothing brands and t.v shows which all promote size zero models. Models are constantly blamed for setting a bad example for young girls when majority of the models are also feeling the pressure to be perfect by the media and modelling agencies who will not accept models who are not under a healthy weight of size 6/8/10 or above as it as commonly seen as ‘fat’ or ‘plus size’. Many models suffer from anorexia nervosa which is an eating disorder cause by people restricting their food intake because of fear of gaining weight. Those who are suffering from anorexia often view themselves at ‘too fat’ and overweight although majority of them are unhealthily underweight.
It states that many women’s focus is on her wardrobe so they can impress the opposite sex as they feel useless if they fail to impress, they also argue that fashion is a more female dominated area, they show that most of the top fashion designers are male ruled and that Radical Feminists such as Germaine Greer believe that all key societies (including fashion) have been found on patriarchy (ruled by men). They believe that men are the enemy and that they bring out clothes that result in the oppression of women and cause them to be exploited for sexual purposes only. They argue that the fashion industry segregate sexes with many popular singers exposing their body for money, this can be the case for Miley Cyrus; where she obtains money by exposing her body. Feminists view this as them doing this to please men and that women are exploited in this sexual way in order for men to find pleasure. They argue that the fashion industry promotes the women’s expressive role of doing the housework, looking after the children and not going out to work while they are used as a sex tool by the fashion industry making clothing which shows many body parts of women’s bodies such as their legs which males will like to look at.
Being viewed as prejudice and discrimination, Spake shares the common idea of being overweight, and not losing the weight, is caused by laziness (Spake 284). “Too Close to the Bone” and “Rethinking Weight” both discuss weight issues that deal more with the mind than with the body. However, the articles contrast in the ways that “Rethinking Weight” focuses on the agitation of the medical world. The agitation being if obesity is caused by genetics or if it is a choice, while “Too Close to the Bone” focuses more solely on women and the complexity of the idea that the ideal body is constantly evolving to our society. Thus leading to a similarity in that both articles discuss the effects of the mistaken beliefs fueled by our society and misconceptions of history’s impression of the body.
When we see an obese woman on the street, in a restaurant, or out shopping, we often have an instinctive negative reaction: What's wrong with her that she can't lose weight? Even knowing that some people have a chronic condition or genetic makeup that predisposes them to weight gain, we still criticize them. "People are enraged at fat people because of the very strong Puritan ideal that we should control our desires," says Esther Rothblum, Ph.D., a psychologist and a professor of Women's Studies at San Diego State University, who is an expert on weight discrimination. "They see fat people, especially women, as lazy gluttons who lack self-control." However, those attitudes are so widespread, Rothblum says, that even fat people share them.
In today’s world, media heavily affects the way we perceive ourselves. The ideal body image that most people perceive nowadays is no longer based on an average but based on how media and society promotes it and that is a body that is highly unattainable for most women. Media promotes size 0 as the ideal body image causing many women judge themselves based on the beauty industry’s standards. Mass media defines the ideal body image by promoting it through the various platforms such as magazines, advertisements, and television and that is extremely immature. One example to prove my point is that the girls on magazine covers are mostly photo shopped to perfection.
Today, the advertising world promotes products to young girls using thin models influencing them that being thin is the only way to be. Fashion designer Ralph Lauren fired a female model because she was considered to be too fat because she wore a size 4. When these stories come about, this causes women to have problems with
According to Miss Wolf, the myth has a number of uses. It pits women against one another, thereby diluting their political influence; as she puts it, What women look like is considered important because what we say is not." It stokes the consumerist engine of our economy, where women shoppers play a pivotal role; and it enables employers to get away with paying women less than men. Indeed, Miss Wolf charges that the success of Western economies is linked to the chronic underpayment of women. The author notes the historical roots of this problem.