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Social medias effect on body image
Social medias effect on body image
Social medias effect on body image
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Throughout history the ideal of beautiful has been difficult to achieve it has been shaped by social contexts. From in early age people have been surrounded by images and advertisement that reinforced that thin is beautiful and in order to be happy and successful one must be thin. Women are consistently given the message they are not pretty enough or thin enough. It is nearly impossible to open a magazine, shop at the mall or turn on the TV without being confronted with the message that to be fat is to be undesirable and unattractive. This has left us with a society full of girls with eating disorders, low confidence and depression. “Miss Representation” is a documentary that is directed and produced by Jennifer Siebel. She discusses how advertising through networks such as Disney, CBS, Time Warner and NewsCorp are big influences on making women want to be something they are not. (Siebel Jennifer) The document exposes the pressure that many girls feel to be beautiful and how these pressures let to negative impact on them and in many cases have even lead to eating disorders. It al...
The documentary, “Miss Representation,” is a film about how women are perceived in the media. It is written, directed, and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. She is an actress and a film maker who advocates for women. In the beginning of the documentary, Newsom discusses her struggles as a young woman surrounded by the pressures of looking a certain way. This film is targeting mainly women of all age that has experienced her struggles. Jennifer Siebel Newsom effectively convinces the audience of “Miss Representation” that the media has molded women in a negative way through statistics, celebrities’ and younger generation’s testimonies, and clips from the media.
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.
The television and film industry have gone to far extremes to shape the women we see in our everyday lives to be very over-idealistic, these women always seem to have their hair and makeup done, fancy clothes, and incredibly thin bodies. People don’t understand how much harm and pressure all these materials put on women. This idea the film and television industry has created for not only wome...
The documentary Miss Representation describes the struggle of female leadership. It is based on the way the women look, the way they carry themselves, and the way they brutalize themselves to fit in with others. This documentation allow different women to tell their ways that the media have slashed them, and allow others to stand up for women. Women portray themselves to fit as the image that has been altered with to get it to look that way. Margaret Cho explains that her show All American Girl was cancelled because she had problems with the network who aired the show because they constantly said was not thin enough. That is a prime example of today's problems with pursuing your dreams as an actor or pursuing your dreams as a model. You have to change your physical features to fit in, and if you do not you won’t get in.
...el and Lacey in 1992 which analyzed 221 American TV shows and found that 69% of characters that were female have “thin, anorexic body types” (Raphael & Lacey, 1992, p.108). Our society’s unhealthy obsession with being beautiful has lead girls at very young ages in to very unhealthy decisions. Plastic surgery being a number one thought in my head. I personally like to blame the media on making girls believe that it is not about being healthy and looking healthy but doing things that have developed in to very serious and dramatic issues such as eating disorders. Why not encourage diverse body types instead of skinny ones? Thankfully, I feel as if I do have control and a sense of what is realistic beauty, however, as mentioned in my biography, my personal experiences related to beauty insecurities are linked to the more important and broader social forces of the world.
As seen in films like Killing Us Softly 4 and Miss Representation, we can see how much media and advertisements affect everyone consciously and subconsciously. Through images and advertisements, women’s bodies are hacked apart to sell products. This has a negative effect body image and self-confidence in young girls and women all over the world. It is extremely important to understand the extent to which circulating images of women in media affect standards and expectations of women in our society in order to hopefully cease to create such degrading images. Our society hurts itself by producing the types of images we see in media and advertisements today, yet it has done very little to try to reverse the messages put out. For the sake of our
In the early 1990’s, it was reported that eleven million women in the United States suffer from various eating disorders. At the same time, at least ninety percent of people struggling with eating disorders are female (Stephens). Many researchers tried to figure out why so many women today were suffering from these terrible conditions that destroy people from the inside out. After thorough amounts of research were done, it was concluded that today’s society generates intense amounts of pressure on women to fit an “ideal image” of the models they see in various ways. Thanks to false advertising, false images of women, and the changing “desires” of society, the Beauty Myth gives women an image of themselves that is physically impossible to achieve.
Miss Representation, a documentary film produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom released in 2011, presents a contemporary issue which is the misrepresentation of women’s portrayal in mass media. The media is powerful in shaping audience’s belief in how to be feminine. Women are expected to be beautiful, attractive, and even sexual on the media to attract audience’s attention. Also, the film points out the existence of social system in which men are considered more powerful and dominant than women. Finally, the film tries to increase the awareness of female real value including capability, educational achievement, and leadership. Consuming the media wisely to eliminate gendered stereotypes can help young women build their confidence and be successful.
In modern day society, many adolescent girls are self-conscious of their bodies, like Samantha Murray. In “Female Body Image and the Mass Media: Perspectives on How Women Internalize the Ideal Beauty Standard,” Kasey Serdar writes, the standards of the woman’s body are visibly set through forms of media; furthermore, the pressures are high to achieve these unrealistic looks (1). A plethora of self-esteem issues result from the media’s portrayal of unrealistically thin models. In addition, today’s society places a significant amount of importance on what the eyes perceive, rather than what is on the inside, as the article “Factors That May Contribute to Eating Disorders” states (1). As a result, eating disorders now begin at a younger age, since girls grow up viewing the “ideal body” as skinny; furthermore, images in the media affect the self-esteem of women so immensely that many develop eating disorders after spending time viewing these unrealistic images. Women should not feel the need to cha...
Exaggerated interpretations of what beauty really is, continues to be promoted by unrealistic expectations and induced by modern society. The very concept of associating beauty with being rail thin seems to have resulted in a rapid increase of people that are literally dying to be skinny.
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 ...
I would like to begin with the fact that women have always been known to dedicate their time to beauty. Those who are devoted to their appearance most often believe that beauty brings power, popularity, and success. Women believe this, because they grow up reading magazines that picture beautiful women in successful environments; not to mention they are popular models and world famous individuals. Beautiful women are no longer just a priority for most advertising, but we have become a walking target for the working class employers. It is documented that better-looking attorneys earn more than others after five years of practice, which was an effect that grew with experience (Biddle, 172). We cannot overlook the fact that it is always the most popular and most beautiful girl who becomes homecoming-queen or prom-queen. While these are possible positive effects of the "beauty myth," the negative results of female devotion to beauty undercut this value. These effects are that it costs a lot of money, it costs a lot of time, and in the long run, it costs a lot of pain.
...y standards, further resulting in negative impacts on their self-esteem and confidence. Furthermore, this limited perspective of beauty causes women to be blinded and not realize that there is not one specific look of beautiful, but many. In a sense, women are taught to think that beautiful is being thin, having silky hair, toned legs, big breast, blemish and acne-free skin, and so on. However, in order to reach these beauty standards set by society, a woman can overwork her body in order to lose weight by dieting, or not eating to be “thin”, which also puts her health at risk and acts as an additional issue. Women who fail to reach these beauty standards set by society, may feel as though it is their fault and end up feeling even more insecure and bad about their body image, when in fact, the beauty standards were unrealistic and unattainable from the beginning.
...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.
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,