Wanting to be Beautiful

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Wanting to be Beautiful

How do women’s magazines influence how women think, look, and feel? What is so special about these magazines to get some women to center their lives around them? Personally, I didn’t really understand why any women would listen to anything a magazine says until I opened one up. While I was waiting in line at a department store, I picked up and flipped through a Cosmopolitan magazine, and found a story that caught my attention. The story was about the loss of a father, and for that reason I purchased the magazine. Although I do know there are many other women who have dealt with the loss of their father, I wanted to see if they felt the same way I did, how they were dealing with it every day, and how their lives have changed. Of course, after getting the magazine home I started flipping through it more and found many other interesting stories to read like “How to Make Sex Hotter” or “Get a Life You Really Love,” but what I really noticed was diets, beauty, sex, and more sex. In “Help or Hindrance? Women’s Magazines Offers Readers Little but Fear, Failure,” Mary Kay Blakely states, “the current purge of serious issues means [a woman] must proceed without information.” It’s hard to imagine how much women’s magazines can influence someone, and for some women these magazines are like a bible; whatever it says, goes whether it’s on hair, make-up, or fashion, women do what these magazines say. However, when it comes to the important issues, magazines do not provide any type of support whereas with a bible anyone can turn to it for guidance or spiritual support, but sadly for women who read women’s magazines end up suffering the consequences.

Being thin seems to be in style every ye...

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...ply relating to the stories—but for other women it’s just entertainment. 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.” Today we live in a world that is filled with silicone, plastic, and chemicals all of which women use to stay, look, and feel young and beautiful where they are able to be amongst the younger generation, knowing they look as young as they do. The world of women’s magazines has created women that truly don’t exist; young girls grew up wanting to look like a Barbie doll, and older women end up being one, plastic. It’s a shame what lengths some women go through to become this perfect creature instead of embracing the beauty that sits within them. Being happy with yourself is loving yourself, and loving yourself is being beautiful!

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