Body Disorders In Young Women

From Healthygirl.org, Aria shares her story of struggling with body disorders. At the age of twelve, a young girl named Aria was repeatedly told that she was “too skinny” or “too chubby.” After repeatedly hearing these degrading comments, Aria started to believe them. This led her into serious health issues, such as anorexia, and then later on, bulimia and binge eating. Aria’s story shows how easily young women can be influenced. Magazines are a large influence in young women’s lives such as, Cosmopolitan, People, Us, and Seventeen magazine. All these magazines use photoshop and degrading language to persuade young women into thinking their bodies are not socially acceptable. Magazines cause mental, and physical health issues in young women,

Depression is a serious mental health issue that can lead to dangerous outcomes such as suicide. Author Marina Krcmar wrote, “Depression affects nearly one in five women with the higher incidence of depression in women arising during adolescence” (Krcmar, p.112). Depression affects a sizeable amount of women, especially young women. Young women are easily influenced when they are in their teenage years, and magazines influence their minds in a harmful way. Magazines can cause depression in young women because when they see photoshopped models and read dieting articles, they start to feel unworthy and not up to society’s beauty standards. The media is an extremely huge factor in body dissatisfaction. The organization Routledge states, “The media and its emphasis on what Harrison (2000) refers to as thin- depicting and -promoting characters have been implicated as a major factor in young women’s body dissatisfaction” (Krcmar, p.113). Body dissatisfaction is caused by magazines because of the images they use and also the dieting articles they feature. People may argue that the dieting articles exist to show young women how to live a healthy lifestyle. Although, dieting articles are helpful for a young woman, they can mentally cause her to feel like she needs to change her

Photoshop is an airbrushing tool used to make models and celebrities look flawless and very thin. When young women see these photoshopped images, they compare their bodies to the those unrealistic standards. People may argue that they are photoshopping out imperfections that the models and celebrities might have. Although, photoshop is used for a more malevolent reason than just “imperfections.” According to the Los Angeles Times, “The goal of showing perfect images is to make women feel bad about themselves--also making them buy more beauty products” (Stein, p.2). Magazine publishers have no good intentions when using photoshop, and they only want you to feel negative about your body image. Photoshop makes models look extremely thin; it makes them look so thin that if the average person looked like that, they would not be healthy. The average weight scale for teenage girls is 100-128 pounds; magazines photoshop bodies to look much lighter than that. According to the University of Management and Technology, “The thin-ideal women often portrayed in the media are typically fifteen percent below the average weight of women (Hawkins et al., 2010) representing unrealistic standards of thinness” (Javaid, p.30). Models and celebrities are shown below the average weight of women. This makes young women feel like their imperfections need to be fixed. Well-known celebrities are