Body Image

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It is no secret that today’s society defines beauty as thin, long-legged women with statuesque bodies. Examples are found everywhere just by glancing at the closest magazine ads or by scrolling down the latest fashion article online. Normal, everyday women are being forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the “Top-Model”-like women currently crowding up Hollywood. Media depicts women as an unattainable image. They pressure ladies to buy the products they’re advertising; luring them with false advertisements promising that with it, they too could be perfect. While the media portrays women in a certain way for advertising and marketing benefits, it has caused numerous negatives effects to women’s self-esteems nationwide, it contradicts the definition of an every-day hard-working woman, and it poses the question that with all that power, should there be an ethical responsibility to uphold?
Media has been pressuring people to look a certain way since the beginning of show business. Every generation has stories of women conforming to the latest fashion fad. There has always been, and always will be, a pressure to look a certain way. Back in the 1700’s, the bigger and paler you were, the wealthier and well-off you were meant to be. Nowadays skin-cancer and anorexia is being sold to the public and with it comes serious consequences. There have been many studies proving that women who have been presented with images of the thin women, they later admit to have feelings of depression, inadequateness, and lower self-esteem. Eating disorders and diets have been linked to these feelings due to these images. Females from the young age of 11 have admitted to worrying about their weight and figures due to being influenced by the media’s d...

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...everyday are told to strive for it or else rick feeling inadequate.

Work Cited
Chrisler, J. C., Fung, K. T., Lopez, A. M., & Gorman, J. A. (2013). Suffering by comparison: Twitter users’ reactions to the< i> Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Body Image.
Fernandez, S. Pritchard, M. Relationships between self-esteem, media influence and drive for thinness, Eating Behaviors, Volume 13, Issue 4, December 2012, 321-325
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human relations, 7(2), 117-140.
Lemish, D. (2013). The Routledge international handbook of children, adolescents and media. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
The Self Esteem Act: Parents Pushing to Pass Anti-Photoshop Laws in the US. (n.d.). PetaPixel RSS. Retrieved December 3, 2013, from http://petapixel.com/2011/10/17/the-self-esteem-act-parents-pushing-to-pass-anti-photoshop-laws-in-the-us/

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