A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

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Recommended: Perspective on how teens are represented in media

In regard to Susan Bordo’s, “Never Just Pictures”, I agree with the points she makes in her essay about what is being projected through advertisements and fashion modeling and the negative effects that these have on developing a healthy self-esteem and body image. Everyone, without gender as a factor, should openly embrace the good points of their body, flaws included. But still, we are surrounded by everything from commercials about diet pills, to articles on celebrities who are doing anything to become thinner and thinner, and the bizarre concept that a plus-size model is as small as a size 6 or 8. The saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” rings very true to the emphasis put on what is seen when someone looks at an advertisement for something because it acknowledges something much deeper than the image that is seen. Besides the company selling the product that is shown, they are in some ways, sending subliminal messages of what a person who would buy or wear the product should look and act like. Even though advertisers and the media would be quick to deny that their work has anything to do with young women turning to eating disorders to look like what they see all around them, it is evident that this obsession with self-image and being as thin as humanly possible is clearly a result from none other than what is depicted in those very ads.

In “Never Just Pictures”, the author Susan Bordo, brings to our attention just how much of an influence advertising in magazines and on television, as well as in the fashion industry, have on teenage girls and older women, but teenage boys and men, too. She makes it a point that “fat is the devil, and we are continually beating him—‘eliminating’ our stomachs, ‘busting’ our thighs...

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...eaching a wider audience. It is “a breath of fresh air”, if you will, to see this change of direction of the typical thin, made-up model to more of something that so many of us see when we look into the mirror every day. Hopefully, more of these types of women (and men), will be seen in future advertisements and will provide a new beginning for those people who feel so lost and unsatisfied because they do not look like what they are used to seeing. It may very well be that we are only in the early process of this new transition, but with some time and a sort of domino-effect, I am positive that what was once unseen or unheard of in ads will become the new norm—and a healthy one, at that.

Works Cited
Bordo, S. (1997). Never just pictures. In twilight zones: The hidden life of cultural images form Plato to O.J. (pp.1-3). London: University of California Press.

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