Have you ever taken a second to compare the size of men and women today to the sizes years ago? Recently there is a huge new trend of becoming as thin and fit as possible and thinking this is how one becomes beautiful. No one actually knows where this idea has emerged from. In the past big has been known as being healthy and beautiful. Take for instance Marilyn Monroe, she was the pin up girl for many men and wasn't exactly thin to today's standards. Today's celebrities wear sizes 0 - 2 and are the supposed poster girls of what beautiful looks like. There are many factors that are causing people young and old to get caught up in the new health and fitness craze. One of these factors affecting almost everyone is the media. Celebrities are setting the standards for the new thin trend. In Hollywood the pressures for actresses to get and stay thin is the source of a shocking and alarming trend. Females, especially celebrities, have become tinier and skinnier then ever. The look of being `skinny' has changed from being simply health conscious to a dangerous obsession. This sudden obsession with thinness hasn't always been around as said by Sandy Szwarc, "At no time in history have women been so pressured to be thin" (Dying to). This new fad started in the late 90's out of no where. In the past, big full bodied women have been considered beautiful, while in today's day and age the public is influenced by the media to strive to become as thin and fit as possible. Calista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle were the first of many celebrities to take thinness obsession to the new extreme. This new weight fixation has set the bar higher than ever, and in turn, created a dark side of `fitness." Roberta Seid brings up a very good point in her... ... middle of paper ... ... shallow our society is becoming. This new thin and fit fad is causing many problems for everyone. Everyday you are bombarded with advertisements and pressures from society it self to obtain this new unhealthy look. But what many people don't understand is that being under weight is just as harmful and unhealthy for one as being overweight. This knowledgeable statement was made by Szwarc, "A populace absorbed with desires to be slim and repulsed by fat is obviously advantageous for the diet industry, but generates a hoard or harmful repercussions for consumer" (Dying to). Diet industries are taken advantage of the public's sudden skinny craze. Our money is going to continue to be wasted on dangerous diet and fitness gimmicks. We the consumers are the only ones who can change this fat a phobic lifestyle back into the healthy life styles that were once lived before.
From Twiggy to Kate Moss, the fashion industry has been attached to idealizing extreme slenderness, encouraging real women to hate their bodies and at extreme, develop anorexia or bulimia. If these models are exemplars of ideal beauty, then the measure for women is that to be beautiful, starvation level is required. It appears that the media and the fashion industry would have the public believe that ultra thinness symbolizes beauty when in reality, the standard represents infertility, and premature death. The public has to realize that Twiggy is different.
No one wants to be or feel like they are overweight, unhealthy, or unattractive. When someone in the general public looks in the mirror or steps on the scale, and they are not satisfied with what is being shown, one of the first ideas to bubble to the surface is dieting. There are so many dieting solutions out there and one of the most popular are the fad diets. Dieting should be about getting healthy and losing weight in a healthy way. Fad diets however, are about losing a lot of weight in a disproportionally short amount of time. Due to the loss of weight that the dieter wanted, when they reach their goal weight, they stop doing the fad diet and go back to their regular diet. This causes the weight that they shed to be put back on again in a disproportionally short amount of time, which is also just as unhealthy. This cycle of losing and gaining weight is only one of the many dangers of fad diets.
Marilyn Monroe created a legendary image and was one of the most beautiful women of her time. Today, Kate Upton is almost the same size and some refer to her as “fat.” The ideal image fifty years ago was much more attainable than today’s standard extremely tall and thin models. What has changed in society to make us think this way? Modeling has changed drastically from an image that was curvy and healthy to an image that is very thin and hard to achieve.
According to Beverly Ballaro, the combination of two trends, the technology-enabled media saturation of the American public, and the promotion by this media of highly unattainable body types, is largely responsible for an epidemic of body image pathologies afflicting American girls and women, as well as an increasing number of boys and men. She also mentions that the media has given certain images for each gender. Generally, for females the body image is extremely thin, and there is an emphasis on large breasts and for males, tall, slender, muscular and toned. For both genders, the most valued and appreciated appearance i...
The media can impact people’s lives in many ways, whether it’s fashion, movies, literature, or hobbies. One of the impacts is how women view their bodies. Movie stars and models feel pressured to catch attention and to look good in order to have a good career in their respective field. People tend to judge how someone looks based on their body composition. The result of this “judgment” is that Hollywood is getting skinny. Since models and actresses serve as role models for people, people tend to want to look like them. The result of this seemingly harmless model of behavior is in an increase in eating disorders.
All body types must be represented in the media. There has to be a balance between bodies, not biased towards one. There has to be equality within how people look. There has to be thin and fat models alike to represent everyone. Although a lot of female models are thin and most male models are muscular, not all of them are unhealthily so. In some cases, being thin is genetic rather than a disorder. Only a handful of models are Anorexic, but since the internet and other forms of media highlight these cases, it appears there are more than there
Although thin people seem to dominate society, the average size for a woman today is a size twelve. That puts the number of models on a smaller scale, and boosts the number of ordinary girls that make up most of society today. It’s not just about ordinary girls outnumbering models; it’s about the way that the media portrays these models. Slowly, the image of the “thin and beautiful” being the best is going down the drain. Larger models and actresses are taking the places of the “thin.” Hopefully, this will decrease the increasing numbers of anorexics in the United States as well as all over the world.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In our society today, people would rather see what celebrities are up to than what is going on with our health plan. Watching the news makes us aware of the latest trend, new gadget, who’s in rehab, or who has an eating disorder. In the eyes of society, women like Eva Longoria, Kim Kardashian, and Megan Fox are the epitome of perfection. What girl wouldn’t want to look like them? Unfortunately, this includes most of the girls in the US. Through TV shows, commercials, magazines or any form of advertising, the media enforces a certain body type which women emulate. The media has created a puissant social system where everyone must obtain a thin waist and large breasts. As a society, we are so image obsessed with the approval of being thin and disapproval of being overweight, that it is affecting the health of most women. Women much rather try to fit the social acceptance of being thin by focusing on unrealistic body images which causes them to have lower self esteem and are more likely to fall prey to eating disorders, The media has a dangerous influence on the women’s health in the United States.
This paper will look at two areas, which are physical and mental problems. Fad diets are becoming more popular because the consumers spend a huge amount of their money to follow specific type of diets to lose weight hastily as industry contributes to the dissemination of more books and magazines that deceive people and take their money. The FTC deceives consumers by using advertisement weight-loss and as a result it has collected almost $107 million since 2010 (Giorgianni, 2014). In addition, people need to increase their awareness of fad diets by knowing the negative impacts of it.
Fashion models don’t need to be thin, they need to be diverse and healthy at whatever weight that is. Not everyone is supposed to be thin, some women are big boned and curvy, others are naturally slim and small boned, some are tall, others are short, some are light skinned and others are darker. So many diverse looks exist in the world today and the fashion industry need to change their perception of perfect. Body image in our society is out of control. We have young men and women comparing themselves to unrealistic models and images in the media and feeling bad about the way their own bodies look because they somehow don’t measure up. (Dunham, 2011) The struggle for models to be thin has led to models becoming anorexic or bulimic, untimely deaths, and inferiority complexes. Even worse is the fact that they influence a whole generation of young women who look up to these models and think “thin” is how they are supposed to be. They influence what we buy, how we eat and what we wear. Why has this specific group captured our attention so much? Why do we seem to be so fascinated in their lives, to the point where we try to look and act just like them? The media is largely to be blamed for this, many people believe the media has forced the notion that everything supermodels do is ideal. Others believe that the society is to be blamed because we have created a fascination with their lives. There are many opinions, and I agree with both of these specific opinions. We allow ourselves to be captivated by these people's lives, and the media portrayal of their lives seem to also enthrall us. (Customessaymeister, 2013) Despite the severe risks of forcing models to become too thin, designers, fashion editors, fashion brands and agencies still ...
Skinny was not the most beautiful thing to people, and it was not as big of an issue as it is now. So where did the ideals change from curvy being beautiful to skin-and-bones skinny being beautiful? In the 1960 's, popular figures like Twiggy promoted being skinny as beautiful, around the same time the Barbie doll became popular with young girls (Bahadur). Sure, many people are actually born skinny. But some are born big-boned and cannot help that they are that way - and they should not have to worry about it. However, we as a society have changed these ideals because we are constantly exposed to the media 's rendition of what being beautiful should mean and accepting it. The fact that being bigger used to mean that someone was wealthy just goes to show that our culture has completely thrown this principle away. But, however appalling the issue may be, there are solutions to this terrible problem that is still on the rise and hope that it will get better. Instead of letting these vulnerable people look at magazine covers and wish they were in different skin, our duty as a society is to promote the embracement of beauty and self-confidence in everyone. Motivational speakers, many of which have had their own share of self-esteem issues in the past, need to be brought to the surface and get their messages out in the open even more than they already are. Jessica
Fashion industry skinny trend seems to poison young women’s attitude towards their appearance. In addition, the startling deaths of the “three very underweight models” (Rosemary 2007) has become the last straw that makes it impossible to accept the eating disorders anymore. These have added to the controversy over the use of extremely thin models in the fashion industry because not only does it reduce the self-esteem of those who do not have ideal bodies but it also naturally forces them to become anorexic to look exactly like catwalk models which has been proven to cause “drastic weight loss and premature ageing” (Cooke 2000, pp. 1). 3) Having a severe condition.
Through history the image of beauty has changed thousands of times and it wasn’t really until the latter half of the 20th century that thin was in. In the 1960’s Twiggy, an ultra-thin model rose to fame in the fashion world and ultimately changed western view on bodies (Introduction to Anorexia: At Issue). Models were now thinner than ever. Suddenly there was extreme pressure on women to be thin, to look like the models in magazines which is difficult for many people to achieve. This causes people to resort to unhealthy weight loss techniques in a desperate attempt to become accepted in society and to be seen as beautiful.
Susan Bordo states in her article “Never Just Pictures”, that children grow up knowing that they can never be thin enough. They are thought that being fat is the worst thing ever. The ones responsible for this are the media, celebrities, models, and fashion designers. All of these factors play a big role on the development of the standard and how people view themselves. Everyone at one dreams about being the best they can in any aspect. But to achieve that most believe that one of the big factors is outer beauty. So people look at celebrities and fashion designers, and believe that to be accepted they have to look like them. That’s when they take drastic measures to change their appearance because they’ve been influenced by the Medias idea of “beautiful.” This feeling mostly happens in women but in recent years the gender gap has become smaller. Now men also feel the need to look good because of the media. On the TV, instead of having infomercials ...
...zine articles and television ads without understanding that appearances are altered and modified. They take on false role models and assume all people should be a certain way. With this in mind, obesity should be overcome to remain in good physical condition and lead a healthy life, not to follow trends that can get out of control.