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Women and body image in the media
Media's impact on women
Media's impact on women
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The Media’s Effect on Adolescent Bodies
The stringent standard Barbie-doll proportions of body image and what is considered beautiful in today’s media has resulted in devastating effects on adolescent women. The images displayed of women who have long beautiful legs, thin waist lines and smooth flawless skin are very hard to ignore. Throughout history the female body has been on display as a selling tool to coerce people into buying that new fancy car or the latest new appliance that can make their everyday lives easier. Commercials of the extremely thin Kelly Ripa can act as a mantra of what a modern day picture perfect house wife should look like standing beside her magical ovens and washing machines. There are also constant ads on billboards, TV, magazines and in shopping malls of size zero girls in the latest fashion designs. The media can be applauded on its successful campaigns that have made young girls accustomed to striving to live up to the narrow, often uniform standards of what a beautiful girl should look like. Television shows like “Gossip Girl”, “Beverly Hills 90210” and movies like “Mean Girls” bombard young girls the media’s current trend of what is considered beautiful. Even at the tender ages between 3-to-10 years old, young girls are plagued by images in the media. These girls see fairy tale princesses like Disney’s’ (Ariel) The Little Mermaid, (Belle) from Beauty and The Beast, Cinderella and princess (Jasmine) Aladdin. They are all featured with very small waists and ideal symmetric facial features with very well proportioned curves that will surely catch the eye of any prince. These types of images are etched in the minds of girls when they are at a young age which leads them to turn to the media as a gu...
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...ucated and equipped to handle media propaganda. Once they are informed how to critically view some of the negative images that exploit young women, they can then associate these unrealistic body images as unhealthy and immoral. Until then the media’s unrealistic standard of the female body will continue to be exploited for nothing more than profit.
Works Cited
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Orbach, Susie. Bodies. New York: Picador, 2009.
Our Bodies Ourselves, Health Resource Center. 2005. 4 April 2011 .
Willis, Laurie. The Culture Of Beauty. Detroit: Christine Nasso, 2010.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Bantham Doubleday, 1991.
Today’s young girls cannot escape the culture of thinness and the white image. They feel pressured to conform to the ideal image: thin and white. As a result they suffer from mental and physical issues, and undermine the forms of capital not represented by mainstream media: emotional capital, ethnic capital, and symbolic capital.
Hass, Cheryl J., et al. "An Intervention for the Negative Influence of Media on Body Esteem." College Student Journal 46.2 (2012): 405-418. Academic Search Complete. Web. 16 Feb. 2014.
The misconception of what is beautiful can be detrimental to young girls. In a television industry attempt to sell goods, they are depicted as sexy. Creating a need for parents to intervene and present a more realistic and normal view of physical beauty. Today, TV presents sexually based images crafted to appeal to young girls. Unfortunately, they are led to believe that their value is only skin deep, causing flawed expectations, illusions, and wrong information about the truth of the physical body in the real world. In an attempt to look the part some have fallen victim to eating disorders, while others have exchanged childhood innocence for an Adult view of what is sexy.
Cusumano, D. L., & Thompson, J. (2001). Media influence and body image in 8–11-year-old boys and girls: A preliminary report on Multidimensional Media Influence Scale. International Journal Of Eating Disorders, 29(1), 37-44. doi:10.1002/1098-108X(200101)29:1<37::AID-EAT6>3.0.CO;2-G
...nly does have an effect when they are exposed to mass media frequently, which brings us back to the cultivation theory. This group will perceive that what they had seen on mass media is the “reality”, which might not be the case all the time. Not only do these media images have a negative impact on females, they do have a positive impact as well. These images may be a form of inspiration and motivation for these females to work hard to achieve their ideal body image.
... Developmental Psychology, 42(5), 929-936. Hargreaves, D.A., & Tiggemann, M. (2003). Female "thin ideal" media images and boys' attitudes toward girls. Sex Roles, 49(9/10), 539-544.
The most fashionable, sought after magazines in any local store are saturated with beautiful, thin women acting as a sexy ornament on the cover. Commercials on TV feature lean, tall women promoting unlimited things from new clothes to as simple as a toothbrush. The media presents an unrealistic body type for girls to look up to, not images we can relate to in everyday life. When walking around in the city, very few people look like the women in commercials, some thin, but nothing similar to the cat walk model. As often as we see these flawless images float across the TV screen or in magazines, it ...
In “Little Girls or Little Women? The Disney Princess Effect,” Stephanie Hanes covers the sexualization of young girls and women in every aspect of the media that influences children and teens. She explains that girls see media figures, movies, and sports being sexualized, and how this is causing children to associate looking and acting a certain way to being ‘the perfect women’. Hanes believes the hypersexualized media is causing girls to obtain a negative body image and it’s killing their self-esteem. The author proposes what she believes society should do about overcoming this obstacle, and how people can crush the stereotypes about women; to her everyone is responsible and should aid in fixing these problems. She explains that the media
Holmstrom, A. (2004). The effects of the media on the body image: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 48(2), 196-217.
Nio, T. (2003). Cultivation and social comparison of the thin-ideal syndrome: The effects of media exposure on body image disturbance and the state self-esteem of college women. School of Journalism in the Graduate Scho, 105-113.
Tiggeman, Marika. “Body image across the life span in adult women: The role of self-objectification.” American Psychological Association 37. 2(Mar 2001): 1-253. ProQuest. Web. 12/20/2013
The mass media plays a large role in shaping a teenage and adolescent girl’s body image. By pushing an ideal body type that is uncommon and untrue to life, girls strive, and struggle to obtain this image. When the mass media only shows one type of body as desirable, they are alienating every girl who does not fit into that category. Pushing these ideal bodies onto teenage girls at an important developmental time in their lives can be detrimental to their bodies and their self worth. By showing what a girl should look like, the mass media is damaging the body images of young girls, and unless awareness is raised, could become more and more adverse on young women today and tomorrow.
However, it is evident that the media usually presents and sexualizes women who are “young, fit and beautiful” hence probably creating self esteem issues more than confidence especially in younger women who are religious towards the media’s expectations. This stereotype of being a desired body shape only forces women to meet unattainable perfect physical standards (Gill 2015). The media bombards the youth with gender representations and the types of bodies that are deemed to be attractive. Many teenagers all around the world are desperate to lose weight to be “beautiful”.
In recent times, the world’s view on woman is very unhealthy. Women portrayed on magazines and TV shows are thin, beautiful, and are always covered in perfect makeup and styled hair. Runway models are known to have ribs showing and look like they’ve starved themselves for days just to hold their job and to look beautiful. Women activist are actively protesting the use of dieting models or photo shopping a women’s body so that it looks good for the viewer’s eye. But when we show the younger generation Disney princess movies, what it shows is that thin, young beautiful girls is what women should look like. If someone who isn’t exactly like that, is ultimately judged as being ugly. Disney has eroded the self-esteem and confidence of young females. “Today, the average American woman above the age of 20 is 5'4" tall and weighs 166 pounds, according to the CDC. By comparison, the average Canadian woman is the same height, but weighs 145 pounds, and the average British woman is shorter at 5'3" and weighs 155 pounds.” (Sun, Is it Time) As for Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Elsa, or Rapunzel, their body types are so much different and hardly represent the average woman. These princesses have large heads with large ...
Show business promotes commercials, print advertisements, films and shows where unbelievably perfect women are seen as the ‘ideal beauty’ The ‘ideal beauty’ controls the behavior of young girls and manipulates their perception of beauty. The term ‘ideal beauty’ is defined to be a conception of something that is perfect, especially that which one seeks to attain. Many young girls everyday are exposed to fashion and beauty advertisements that feature models who are portrayed as ‘perfect’. Due to this Technological Age, girls are exposed to many advertisements that encourage them to be like the featured models- tall, skinny, and foreign. There is also a survey conducted by Renee Hobbs, EdD, associate professor of communications at Temple University which states that, “The average teenage girl gets about 180 minutes of media exposure daily and only about ten minutes of parental interaction a day.” Moreover, media also promotes and advertises cosmetics, apparel, diet pills and exercise gears in the name of beauty and fitness, convincing girls to buy and ultimately patronize their products. Becoming very addicted with using such products can eventually lead to overdoes and becoming vainer. It may seem obvious to most of us that people prefer to look at beautiful faces. While beauty itself may be only skin deep, studies show our perception of beauty may be hard-wired in our brains (Stossel,