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Beauty standards and its negative effects
The impact of beauty standards
The negative impact of beauty standards
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In the movie America the Beautiful, Director Daryll’ Roberts argues that the media creates an unrealistic idea of a “perfect image” of beauty and this causes many problems. Roberts starts his documentary by introducing a model that seems to be the eye for the modeling world. Gerren wears the clothes of a twenty-year-old, hangs out with twenty-year-olds, and acts like a twenty-year-old; other than at her school. We then find out that she is only twelve years of age. Roberts then interviews girls and asks them if they feel pretty; almost all they said no. Roberts continues and talks to the advertising world, and how that affects girls in a negative way. Girls explain how ugly they feel when looking at a magazine or advertisement. He says social …show more content…
In Roberts documentary, he gives an example of a girl named Gerren who comes out in the modeling world getting a lot of attention. She’s 6 foot tall and very thin, so the perfect fit for the modeling industry. She wears a ton of makeup and very revealing clothes. Roberts then goes on to say that she is only twelve years of age. I found this very shocking that they would allow a twelve-year-old; that’s not mature enough yet to have a driver’s license, but can be the role model for girls everywhere. She’s only in the modeling world because of the perfect image she portrays. After all, she's very pretty, and in no doubt a bad face for a model. I believe there should be a cut off line when to say no even if you are what they’re looking for. When I see an ad in a magazine or on my social media it makes me feel less “perfect.” When I see girls in advertisements that are the same height as me, but way slimmer it makes me feel I should look like that. It’s very depressing that we have this effect on some people. If the perfect imagine continues to be drilled in our heads, I’m afraid of the future of younger …show more content…
If we went around asking girls if they felt confident in who they are, I’m sure almost all would say no. That could be before or after you show them a magazine of other girls. Roberts states a statistic saying, “A recent report states that 70% of all women that spent three minutes reading a fashion magazine feel shameful, fat and guilty.” This shows that all girls feel unconfident all the time because we have social media in our faces. Roberts asks girls of all age in the documentary if they felt beautiful, and they all said no. Girls that were only 11 years of age would say they didn’t. That makes me sick to think my little sister doesn’t feel confident in who she is because of the media and its effect. I get magazines in the mail every two weeks, most of the time I don’t want to look at them because I'll feel bad about myself. I do anyways and think I wish I could look that. I never will understand why I do that to myself, but it’s the ad agencies who want us to feel that way. I end up throwing the magazine away as soon as I’m done, and realize that I don’t need it to ruin my day, and I know half of it is fake. I always wonder if this will ever change and turn around to be positive affect toward
Female beauty ideals are an overwhelming force in teen media. Approximately 37% of articles in leading magazines for teen girls emphasize a focus on physical appearance. This is none to surprising considering two of the top contenders in this media genre are Seventeen and Teen Vogue. CosmoGIRL and Elle Girl were among the ranks of popular teen magazines, but in recent years have become exclusively online publications. Add in a dash of publications Tiger Beat and Bop, and it becomes glaringly obvious that girls are charged with the prime directive of looking good to get the guy. The story becomes more disturbing when the actual audience, which includes girls at least as young as eleven years old, is considered. In a stage when girls are trying for the first time to establish their identities, top selling publications are telling them that their exteriors should be their primary concern of focus. Of course, this trend doesn’t stop with magazines. A study conducted in 1996 found a direct correlation between the “amount of time an adolescent watches soaps, movies and music videos” a...
I was flipping through some channels on the television set one day and came across a woman's talk show, "The View." It caught my attention when one of the hostesses asked the audience of mostly women to raise their hand if they thought they were truly beautiful. Much to my surprise the audience did not respond with very many show of hands. The hostess then introduced a study done by Dove, the makers of the body soap. Dove polled over 6,000 women from all over the country and only two percent of the women polled said they feel beautiful. Women are surrounded by images screaming physical beauty is more important than their talents and accomplishments. Women are deriving their self worth from an ideal of how they think they should look and how they think everyone else wants them to look instead of focusing on their sense of who they are, what they know, and where they are going in life. In "Help or Hindrance?: Women's Magazines Offer Readers Little But Fear, Failure," Mary Kay Blakely states, "Instead of encouraging women to grow beyond childish myths and adapt to the changes of life, women's magazines have readers running in place, exhausted." She goes on to say, "This is a world we have 'made up' for women, and it is a perilous place to exist." One of the biggest culprits feeding women's insecurities are the popular women's magazine that line the book shelves of grocery stores, gas stations, and waiting rooms. They supply readers and the occasional innocent passerby with unrealistic images of what women should be instead of showing diverse age groups and women with natural beauty. Reading through a couple of magazines, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Shape, I found nothing but hidden agendas and...
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 deep, causing flawed expectations, illusions, and wrong information about the truth of the physical body in the real world.
First, Kilbourne’s research should be praised tremendously for bringing to light the unhealthy impression of true beauty in today’s culture. Kilbourne challenges the audience to reconsider their viewpoints on advertising that is sublime with sexual language. The evolution of advertising and product placement has drastically changed the real meaning of being a woman. According to the movie, every American is exposed to hundreds and thousands of advertisements each day. Furthermore, the picture of an “ideal women” in magazines, commercials, and billboards are a product of numerous computer retouching and cosmetics. Media creates a false and unrealistic sense of how women should be viewing themselves. Instead of being praised for their femininity and prowess, women are turned into objects. This can be detrimental to a society filled with girls that are brainwashed to strive to achieve this unrealistic look of beauty.
Leah Hardy (2010) argues that models in today’s magazines are no more than works of the digital retouching. Digital retouching is the use of computer program to remove unwanted impurities of the body, making a person look ideal. Digital retouching is sending a negative message to women because it sets up a false sense of what beauty is. It is impossible for women to look like a digital retouch models, because they are not real. In the film, Killing Us Softly 4 Jean Kilbourne argues that advertisement sends out the same type of message to women (Kilbourne, 2010). Kilbourne states “Advertisement tells women that what’s most important is how they look, an advertisement surround us with the image of ideal beauty. However, this flawlessness cannot be achieved. It’s a look that’s been created through airbrushing, cosmetics, and computer retouching ” (Kilbourne, 2010). Women are being told that in order to fit in society, they have to look a certain way, yet it is nearly impossible because the standard is too high.
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 ...
...r young, impressionable mind will have been exposed to more than 77,000 advertisements, according to an international study. Last week, it confirmed the link between the images of female perfection that dominate the media and increasing cases of low self-esteem among young women..” (Shields,2007). The propaganda techniques such as liking, sex appeal, and celebrity endorsements are used in advertisements constantly. Commercials on television, billboards, magazines, and various other advertisement types are everywhere you look in America, and sadly it has become very important for women of all ages to try to be perfect. We come into contact with these messages every day, and the beauty industry is getting bigger and bigger. Propaganda has molded our worldly perception of beauty and will only continue to hurt us and gain from our lack of self-esteem if we allow it to.
“According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, about 70 percent of girls grades five through 12 said magazine images influence their ideals of a perfect body, a fact that’s plain to see in the online world of teenage ‘thinspiration’” (Krupnick 1). This quote explains that girls in grades five to 12 are more likely to have a lower self esteem because of the idea of a perfect body beinging spread through social media. Models enjoy sharing their work with their fans their instagram and twitter accounts, which isn’t wrong. However, sometimes the pictures they post are exposed subtly, this causes for the pictures to get under someone's skin before they notice. These models, like Kylie and Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, are idealized but billions of people and have millions of followers on social media but all they do is post pictures of them living the luxury life that everyone watches. These posts could either help influence teens to work harder or cause them to try to achieve what they want in a harmful way. Having weight and height limits will lower the self esteem of others because they put out an image that most people think they must look
In modern society there is more and more digital editing without the knowledge of consumers. Currently there are various reasons for why women develop negative body image, low-self-esteem and eating disorders. According to Naomi Wolf in her novel “Beauty Myth”, one of the many reasons women obtain concerns with their bodies is due to the universal images of young female bodies presented through advertisements in fashion magazines. Advertisements in magazines are altering and shaping the desires of men and women. Magazines sell viewers images of beautiful, skinny, flawless confident young women. When people are constantly antagonized with the magazine industry’s ideal of “perfect beauty” the viewer’s then, subconsciously believe these images to be true and begin to form biases about what they themselves should look like and what other people must also look like. People who view magazines get mislead by advertisers because they are unaware that all the images displayed are digitally altered through Photoshop and airbrushing. Today’s magazines are formed completely on false ideals of flawless beauty and unattainable body images, to prevent women and men from falling victim to the magazine’s deceitful images we as a society need to become aware and educate ourselves.
To begin, social media has created unrealistic standards for young people, especially females. Being bombarded by pictures of females wearing bikinis or minimal clothing that exemplifies their “perfect” bodies, squatting an unimaginable amount of weight at a gym while being gawked at by the opposite sex or of supermodels posing with some of life’s most desirable things has created a standard that many young people feel they need to live up to. If this standard isn’t reached, then it is assumed that they themselves are not living up to the norms or the “standards” and then therefore, they are not beautiful. The article Culture, Beauty and Therapeutic Alliance discusses the way in which females are bombarded with media messages star...
In this age, media is more pervasive than ever, with people constantly processing some form of entertainment, advertisement or information. In each of these outlets there exists an idealized standard of beauty, statistically shown to effect the consumer’s reflection of themselves. The common portrayal of women’s bodies in the media has shown to have a negative impact on women and girls. As the audience sees these images, an expectation is made of what is normal. This norm does not correspond to the realistic average of the audience. Failing to achieve this isolates the individual, and is particularly psychologically harmful to women. Though men are also shown to also be effected negatively by low self-esteem from the media, there remains a gap as the value of appearance is seen of greater significance to women, with a booming cosmetic industry, majority of the fashion world, and the marketing of diet products and programs specifically targeting women.
Alexandra Scaturchio, in her article “Women in Media” (2008) describes the media’s idea of beauty as superficial. She supports her argument by placing two pictures side-by-side; a picture of a real, normal-looking woman and her picture after it has been severely digitally enhanced. Her purpose is to show young teenage girls that the models they envy for their looks are not real people, but computer designs. She also states, “the media truly distorts the truth and instills in women this false hope because…they will live their lives never truly attaining this ideal appearance”. Scaturchio wants her readers to realize the media’s distorting capabilities and feel beautiful about themselves, even with flaws.
The concept of “beauty” is something that everyone feels, thinks, or wants, in order to fit society’s standards. In today’s society, we are often faced with the unrealistic ideals of what beauty is. Due to society’s constant portraying of unrealistic beauty ideals, this reinforces a negative influence upon women’s idea of beauty, resulting in a negative impact in their confidence, and self-esteem, which leads to others, specifically women to be manipulated by society’s corrupted outlook of what beauty is. To add onto this issue, we are constantly surrounded by sources of this negative influence in our everyday lives, including magazines, television, advertisements, and so on. However, women specifically, are more prone to be victims of this negative effect, thus will have more pressure upon themselves to match society’s idea of “beauty,” which includes unrealistic and sometimes unattainable beauty standards. Women especially, can sometimes be so deeply manipulated by society’s unrealistic ideals of what is beautiful, such that it’s possible that they don’t even realize it Furthermore, in order to do so, women often will receive negative impacts rather than positive impacts, such as in their confidence and self-esteem. The negative effects of society’s beauty ideals also lead women to have an overall corrupted idea of what is “beautiful.” Society creates unrealistic ideals of beauty towards women through the media by creating an unrealistic image of what women should look like to be considered beautiful. Men negatively affect women’s idea of beauty by using the unrealistic beauty standards exposed by society which further pressures women to try to fit society’s idea of what is beautiful. Beauty pageants negatively affect women’s ov...
Throughout history there have been many claims about what is beautiful and what is not on the face and body. America’s idea of beauty in the past changed many times from the fragileness of the Steel-engraving lady to the voluptuousness of the Greek slave. The ideal beauty in America is not so different from the ideal beauty of cultures around the world and follows many of the traditions practiced throughout history. The widespread of advertisement and technology is something that’s said to be the contributing problem to the ideal women phenomenon, but I believe history and trend plays the bigger role.
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,