Cultural Idea Of Beauty And Body Image In The Media

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Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” He meant people search for beauty, even though people truly possess it inside themselves all the time. Beauty is in the individual and should be self-satisfying. However, today's cultural definition of beauty negatively influences individuals self-esteem. Society's idea of beauty is unachievable, demoralizing, and dangerously obsessive. Can people even achieve the cultural idea of beauty? Or is it set too high to reach? A Women. In. Media. Representative pictured in the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty illustrates today's ideal beauty to be unnatural, computer generated, unreal, unachievable. The model used …show more content…

It decides who is classified as beautiful and who is not. Media Awareness Network's article, “Beauty and Body Image In The Media”, describes how the media refuses to accept women's bodies as beautiful and instead gives the message women's bodies need to be perfected. Society looks upon media icons such as models, celebrities, and fictional characters as a standard for beauty. In the United States the Barbie-doll, owned by a majority of young girls, is held to be a desirable beauty. However, the Barbie-doll image of beauty is unrealistic. In the article “Beauty and Body Image In The Media” by the Media Awareness network, “Researchers generating a computer model of a women with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel”. “Beauty and Body Image In The Media” analyzes the image of the Barbie-doll in order to portray how a classic icon of desirable beauty is unattainable. Young American girls idealize this plastic doll for beauty, despite the fact that its beauty is ultimately …show more content…

Society keeps trying to set a baseline for the term beauty. The article "What Makes Us Attractive?" (August 13, 2009), by Dan Eden for Viewzone, summarizes facts about attractiveness. Dan Eden lists preferences for males and females in order to convey the definition of attractiveness and benefits of being beautiful. However, is there a one true definition of beauty? No. Each human creates their own personal definition of beauty, which can vary from culture, age, and individual. Not every "women looking for a mate likes small eyes, a big nose, and large jaw". Even when there is no set definition of beauty, people can still fall victim to the search for

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