The Media's Influence On Teenage Body Image

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The Media’s Influence on Teenage Body Image In today’s society, teenage girls are constantly being pushed and pulled into a million detrimental directions thanks to the media. With television, magazines, cell phones, and computers, women are constantly faced with advertisements and suggestions from the media. It is becoming impossible to avoid them, because they practically are everywhere we turn. Advertisements for make-up, hair products, and clothing are among the few that are the most influential to adolescent girls. They tend to feature flawless faces and very thin models. Turn on the television, and you’re force-fed commercials of super-skinny women with picture-perfect hair and fake body parts. Their barely-there clothing is the ultimate touch on their seductive attitude, and they always get the guy they are pursuing. This sets an unattainably high standard and misleading message to teenage girls universally. The media portrays “flawless” and “thin” as beautiful, thus creating a standard for what teenagers aspire to look like. The average person is exposed to over 400 advertisements of this type each day. By the time a girl is seventeen years old, she has been exposed to over 250,000 messages through the media. Studies have discovered that 56% of television commercials and 50% of advertisements in magazines use beauty as their focal point to make their product more appealing to females. The constant exposure to these beauty-oriented advertisements can have a very negative influence on adolescent girls, causing them to become self-conscious of their bodies and to obsess over their physical appearance. This obsession has led many women to become so insecure with themselves that it can lead to many unhealthy practices, with society and the media being the ones to blame. There are many damaging health effects that the media can have on adolescent girls; those

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