The Fight to be Beautiful
Growing up we are surrounded by the media, and without acknowledging what is taking place, we are formed into gender roles that dictate our perspective and place in society. I remember opening my very first Seventeen Magazine. Flipping the pages I found images of beautiful girls, expensive clothing, and what would be, my very first diet plan. Headlines filled the pages on ways to improve your physical appearance, how to make all the boys want you, and what you would have to buy in order to make this happen. As a girl I did not question the path that these popular sources of media were leading me down. My friends and I would crowd around the television screen watching depictions of women that we envied. Beautiful, rich girls and the perfect romances they attracted. Now that I’m older and more aware, I sometimes question who actually lives like this? How can the media set a standard for women that the average girl can never achieve? The media is sending a negative message to young girls. Instead of trying to expand their knowledge and develop a superior sense of self, they are trying to fit into a size two pair of jeans. Young girls are being swept into a world of powerful messages telling them how to dress, how to act, and how to be, what they would consider, a woman.
The media comes in many forms, but the most publicized outlet would have to be the vast expanding movie industry. These well constructed films are developed for the purpose of entertainment and pleasure. Young viewers watching these feature films are not only gaining a sense of entertainment, but they are now consumed with the stereotypical roles of the actresses filling the big screen. When I think about beautiful, caddy,...
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...f humor. We all concede to viewing the media because that is what our society considers entertainment. Should we base our self-image off of what a well paid consulting team and group of marketers deems beautiful?
Works Cited
America the Beautiful. Dir. Darryl Roberts. Perf. Ted Casablanca, Eve Ensler, and Paris Hilton. First Independent Pictures, 2007.DVD
"Eating Disorders Statistics « National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders." National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. Web. 23 Feb. 2011.
Mean Girls. Dir. Mark Waters. Perf. Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and Jonathan Bennett. Paramount Pictures, 2004.DVD
"Report of the 2010 Plastic Surgery Statistics." American Society of Plastic Surgeons: The Resource for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Web. 23 Feb. 2011.
Seventeen Jan. 2011: 240+. Web.
In "Where the girls are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media," Susan Douglas analyses the effects of mass media on women of the nineteen fifties, and more importantly on the teenage girls of the baby boom era. Douglas explains why women have been torn in conflicting directions and are still struggling today to identify themselves and their roles. Douglas recounts and dissects the ambiguous messages imprinted on the feminine psyche via the media. Douglas maintains that feminism is a direct result of the realization that mass media is a deliberate and calculated aggression against women. While the media seemingly begins to acknowledge the power of women, it purposely sets out to redefine women and the qualities by which they should define themselves. The contradictory messages received by women leave women not only in a love/hate relationship with the media, but also in a love/hate relationship with themselves.
Instead, women are being discriminated and treated as inferior due to the stereotypes that are portrayed in the media. The media creates and reproduces ways of seeing that at a minimum reflect and shape our culture. We can look at the media to understand more about a culture’s values and norms, if we realize the limitations of looking at the media. For example, one may ask, does the news based in the United Sates represent what the American culture is like, or only what stands out from everyday American culture? The answer to that is no. Instead, the media represents what it thinks it will be able to sell and is supported by advertisements. This includes violent acts, the sensationally and inappropriate. Jhally reminds us that “it is this male, heterosexual, pornographic imagination based on the degradation and control of women that has colonized commercial culture in general, although it is more clearly articulated in music videos” (Jhally 2007). Therefore, “media content is a symbolic rather than a literal representation of society and that to be represented in the media is in itself a form of power—social groups that are powerless can be relatively easily ignored, allowing the media to focus on the social groups that ‘really matter’” (Gerbner,
In the United States, women are universally experiencing misogyny and pressure to conform to the ideals of hegemonic femininity. This experience for women is in part due to the acceptance of controlling images such as stereotypical gender roles and sexual objectification in the media and other broadcasting outlets. On the opposite side, men are also experiencing the stress and pressure of conforming to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity. The media is thus creating a vicious cycle of rhetoric and images persuading men and women that they have to act, look, and live life a certain way. Within this vicious cycle, the commodification of difference is created to benefit mass media, marketing representatives, and the generally white, upper-class
In our media, women are objectified, hypersexualized, or shamed, which both reflects and conditionalized the prevailing hegemony and standards of our society. It exists to be seen by men, or subordinate women, continuing the existence of a mindset which many believe, or would like to believe, has dissipated through out the years to no longer be socially relevant, but on the contrary, has become the basis of media and the perception of our society today. Various archetypes of the portrayals of females include patriarchal subordination, the deadly “female fatal”, and stereotypical ethnic representations. These portrayals have dealt a great deal of damage to both men and women in society, where today, we are faced with how to address and transcend
On a daily basis people are exposed to some sort of misrepresentation of gender; in the things individuals watch, and often the things that are purchased. Women are often the main target of this misrepresentation. “Women still experience actual prejudice and discrimination in terms of unequal treatment, unequal pay, and unequal value in real life, then so too do these themes continue to occur in media portraits.”(Byerly, Carolyn, Ross 35) The media has become so perverted, in especially the way it represents women, that a females can be handled and controlled by men, the individual man may not personally feel this way, but that is how men are characterized in American media. Some may say it doesn’t matter because media isn’t real life, but people are influenced by everything around them, surroundings that are part of daily routine start to change an individual’s perspective.
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...
Imagine if everything you did was labeled in a negative connotation. You eat unhealthy people say you are a slob, you eat healthy, and then you are conceited and care too much about your appearance. This is what happens to women through popular culture every day. Negative gender roles are fed to women through the media and subtle messages. Ladies are constantly compelled to be Barbie like and fragile. Young ladies are also frequently advised to have or embrace an easygoing nature so as to not be too masculine. To top it off women are viewed as objects of male sexual desire, rather than as a whole person in media very often. Young women are continuously, and often unknowingly, being exposed to gender stereotyping media that tells them to be
In today’s modern society, the media plays a large role in our everyday lives. We are each affected by the media each and every day as it is everywhere we go. The media surrounds us an influences our behaviour and our perception of the world. The media influences how people think and feel, especially about what is considered “normal”. People depend heavily on the media to inform them on what is important in the world and what is normal in the sense of how people dress, look, and behave. The media wants to target the “in” audience. The media wants to give the people what they want, and what people want is the normative because that is how society works, as also argued by Carrera et al. when they say “The implication of sex-gender in heteronormativity has been at the forefront of much trans activism.” (2013) The media display...
Women have been placed in the role of undesired in a male dominated world. Media has presented the idea that women should be subservient and inferior to men. Women are sexualized and degraded in American society. These images are accepted as the norms of the society. The images influence sexuality, societal roles, and the physical appearance. Pessimistic thoughts of women can change through technology. Although more images of positive role models are presented in society, women still are presented in submissive roles.
Have you ever thought about what the media does to women? The film “Miss Representation” was a documentary about how the media misrepresent woman on television, magazines, and music. Every teenager spends most of their time with a consumption of Media, and it has a great influence on them. Indeed, media always shows the standard of a woman on how the media itself likes every woman would look like. Although, there are many women who are successful they still focus on what they see physically and they will never stop criticizing a woman in every way. Therefore, men and boys see a woman as inferior to them and as an object that they could just use all the time. While, woman, and girls tend to follow the social norm so they could fit it. Media is the reason on how this gender representation started, and they are also the key on how it could be changed. The director of the film “Miss Representation” effectively convinces the audiences that media plays a high role in presenting women differently; by narrating her own experience, showing woman 's role in society, and revealing the truth on gender issues.
If people stop being critical about their appearance and start being critical about the media, then we can all build a better future! Not only for the women who feel insecure but also for the youth who get bullied everyday. It is high time for the media to take full responsibility in perpetuating these harsh images to society. Media is and will always be responsible but we as a society should fight the negativity and bring only positivity into everyone’s lives.
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...
I can recall a time when the media was influencing my life and actions. The week after I graduated high school, my girlfriends and I took a trip to Cancun, Mexico, where the MTV beach house was located that summer. As I look back on the week of drunken partying and sexy guys, I can only wonder how I made it home alive. How could any young woman find this behavior acceptable? Every young woman there was flaunting their bodies to the young men around them. They were proud to be sexual objects. Where did they learn such debauchery? This is the kind of woman that is portrayed throughout MTV and various other aspects of the media. They have even coined the term “midriff”—the highly sexual character pitched at teenage girls that increasingly populates today’s television shows—in order to hook the teen customer. Teenage women increasingly look to the media to provide them with a ready-made identity predicated on today’s version of what’s “cool.” The media is always telling us that we are not thin enough, we’re not pretty enough, we don’t have the right friends, or we have the wrong friends… we’re losers unless we’re cool. We must follow their example and show as much skin as possible. The type of imagery depicted by MTV-- as well as people like Howard Stern, the famous “Girls Gone Wild” videos, and various Hip Hop songs—glorifies sex and the provocative woman.
When people think of entertainment, media influence often comes to mind. Reality TV stars and celebrities alike have been placed in limelight acting as role models to not only the youth, but society as a whole. This is an example of the negative influences that entertainment can have as it leads people to hold unrealistic standards and expectations for themselves and others. Some may feel that the entertainment industry makes glamourizes immoral behaviors, making them look fun and harmless. The focus on fitting in and on appearance in the entertainment business have heavily impacted the way our society is today, by promoting the need to be a certain way, both in physical physique and behavior. In fact, people who are considered more attractive, or that fit the molds commonly shown to us, have an easier time obtaining jobs and have access to a broader s...
The mass media over the years has had such a profound role in creating an image on how women should be viewed. From their appearance to what their duties are in everyday life, the media has made sure to depict unrealistic images of women. These images have caused not only the male public but women themselves to believe that they must attain a certain kind of body or occupation to fit into society. Women often feel obligated and pressured to comply to this praised image of perfection.