Emily, age sixteen, watches her favorite show, ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ once again. She is entranced as the beautiful women flash across the screen. She wishes with all of her heart that she could be as beautiful as one of these slim women. The show is interrupted by a woman with a dark complexion. “She is the symbol of beauty,” Emily thinks as the amazing J. Lo appears on the screen. Jennifer Lopez, with eyelashes longer than Emily and her mom’s combined, starts the commercial for Cover Girl makeup. Her face is radiant, with zero blemishes or faults. J. Lo’s last line remains fixed in Emily’s thoughts. “Remember, every girl wants to be a Cover Girl.” “I want to be a Cover Girl,” Emily exclaims as she turns off the television and heads to her bathroom mirror. Emily picks up the magazine lying on her counter and stares at the women on the cover. She inspects her own reflection in the mirror. With a scrutinizing glare, she examines the contours of her body, the complexion of her skin, and the color of her hair; she frowns at the girl staring back at her. Her tummy rumbles, and she picks up the half-eaten apple lying on the counter. Taking one more look at herself, she throws the apple in the trash. She will be as beautiful as one of those women, even if it kills her in the process. For girls, and even guys like Emily, the rise in long lasting effects such as depression, anorexia, bulimia and low self-esteem is a direct result from the negative perceptions of beauty imposed by society. Society mandates what is and is not beautiful, through the use of pageants, models, celebrities, and media. In colonial times, the harsh environment demanded men and women to both contribute to survival; society valued strong, fertile women... ... middle of paper ... ...y signal an eating disorder: CNN Health. February 18, 2000. October 4, 2011. http://articles.cnn.com/2000-02-17/health/eating.disorders.wmd_1_eating-disorders- Chrisite, Catherine. “Nutrition and Well-Being A to Z.” 2011. 10, October 2011. http://www.faqs.org/nutrition/Ar-Bu/Body-Image. Holliday, April. “Women’s Sizes by Country.” U.S.A Today. Gannet Co. 2011. 10, October 2011. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2006-12-04-size-age_x.htm Croll, Jililan. “Body Image and Adolescents.” 10, October 2011. http://www.epi.umn.edu/let/pubs/img/adol_ch13.pdf Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New Edition for a New Era, 2005. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book/excerpt.asp?id=1 Nussbaum, Kareen. Children and Beauty Pageants. October 10, 2011. http://www.minorcon.org/pageants.html
It makes one wonder how society came to these ridiculous standards of beauty and the taboo of talking about women's bodies that still resonate today. I can personally attest to the uncomfortableness of the conversation of menstruation and developing bodies. My mother was taught, as her mother before and so on, that these conversations are to be kept in private and talked about quietly. In response to this, the power of men have an increasingly strong hold on the ideal physical beauty and how the changes of the body, such as menstruation, be in private and never spoke of. The Body Project gives a disturbing look at how women in the past few centuries and the present should act, look like, and keep hidden in response to what men think is most desirable. No matter how free women think they are, we are still under the control of men even if it is not directly. This book opens the conversation on the problems that are still plaguing women and how society needs to change to have a healthier environment for women to be comfortable in their
The human body is one of the most complex and yet beautiful things on the earth. We live in a time where our perception of the way we view the body is driven my social stereotypes. In todays world we are supposed to live by the standards of this unwritten code. All of this affects the quality of life we live in. It ranges from the workplace; our personal relationships to the way strangers perceive a person. At this very day in age we are categorized due to being born male or female and things that should be talked about are considered taboo to others.
In Jessica Bennett’s “Tales of a Modern Diva” and Daniel Akst’s “What Meets the Eye”,
The various and changing body images presented by media perplexes women. As the changes happen, women should keep up or risk missing out. This obsession gives a negative effect to both ends of the spectrum. Women who could not cope get depressed while those who could cope fear of not being able to cope enough. The race to social norms’ acceptance follows a feedback loop that reinforces its inputs and thus gives an even worse output. This is the dilemma faced by women since the beginning of time. As long as people submit to media’s demands and trust social norms’ stipulations, this cycle of cultural dominion will never end.
What is beauty? Beauty is defined as “the quality of being physically attractive or the qualities in a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or the mind” (Merriam-Webster dictionary, 2014, para. 1). Heine (2012) has found that beauty and attractiveness can vary across cultures. Although, there are specific features of a person that seem to be considered as beautiful and attractive across all culture spectrums. These features are: complexion, bilateral symmetry, average sized facial features, and biracial faces. However, weight in regards to attractiveness and beauty varies drastically across cultures. Through this discovery, there may be a correlation between the perception of beauty and attractiveness in each culture and its effects of body dissatisfaction and eating disorder rates. Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? We will examine how what is considered to be attractive and beautiful can have both similarities and differences across cultures. In addition, we will examine eating disorders, and how they are influenced by the beauty standards that are set in specific cultures.
In the course of time, the roles of Colonial women were defined primarily as wives and mothers. They had to run the household and raise the children, while they manufactured goods, such as dairy products and textiles, in order to be resourceful with their family’s budget. Simultaneously, men dominated their lives. Colonial women would be married by the age of twenty and bore large numbers of children, due to the fact that the child mortality rate was extremely high in that era.
...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.
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.
The female body is the site of extensive theoretical discourse and intense political struggle; it has become the expressions of culture but also has become a site for social and political control. Through history the female body has been the site of discrimination, exploitation, abuse and oppression. She has also occupied a dominant position in the discourse of beauty; its imagery being pervasive and manipulated throughout literature, visual arts and religions and also the site of scientific and psychological investigation. Through historically male dominated fields of expertise and political power, the female body has become the subject to conscious and unconscious patriarchal influences.
Fried, Marlene Gerber, et.el. Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
In American culture today, society's view of beauty is controlled by Hollywood, where celebrities are constantly in the lime-light. The media watches Hollywood's every move, and is quick to ridicule “A-listers” whenever they dare to gain a few pounds or to let an uncontrollable pimple show. The media has created a grossly distorted mental image of what should be considered beautiful, and with almost every junior high and high school-age girl reading and viewing this message, the idea has been instilled in them as well. This view of beauty is causing many teenage girls to become obsessed with a highly problematic and unattainable goal of perfection.
The media has one of the most influential impacts on what is seen as beauty in society (Bromley, 2012).Women spend thousands of dollars on products and cosmetics to achieve the unrealistic and unhealthy look of models on advertisements (Valenti, 2007). In most extreme cases, women who feel that their unhealthy weight goal is not achieved turn to extreme eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and binge eating (Cunning, 2011). However, despite the unrealistic frames of models on advertisements, women are still lured and pressured into the “perfect” image that is portrayed by the media using race, youth, and sexuality (Bromley, 2012).
There are over seven billion people on earth and every single one looks different. No matter how much people say that being different is unique, they are wrong. Society has set a beauty standard, with the help of the media and celebrities, that makes people question their looks. This standard is just a definition of what society considers being “beautiful.” This idea is one that mostly everyone knows about and can relate to. No one on this planet is exactly the same, but people still feel the need to meet this standard. Everyone has two sides to them; there is the one that says “you are perfect just the way you are”, while the other side puts you down and you tell yourself “I have to change, I have to fit in.” There is always going to be that side that cares and the one that doesn’t.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the Body. London: University of California Press, 1959. Print.
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,