The 1920s were a revolutionizing decade in which women flourished from housewives to being independent when the 19th amendment was finally passed and endorsed by congress. The 20s produced a new generation of women who were at liberty to get bob length haircuts, smoke Camels, and skip the housewife role if they chose to do so. It seemed as if the United States finally live up to its name as “the land of the free,” where women were allowed to vote, followed by a significant increase in the number of college degrees earned by women and women advancing in the workforce. Decades later, instead of women struggling for equal rights, a new mentality has been set upon women that is yet another barrier within gender in our society. According to Martin’s “The Famine Mystique,” seven million women in America suffer from an eating disorder, which first develops from women struggling with their self-image because the media strongly influences what is believed to constitute femininity and their duty to please men.
Magazines are one of the most, if not, the most influential source in which women are constantly bombarded with ridiculous ideals that are at most times, unrealistic. The magazine industry itself is a $40 billion industry in which an abounding amount of the readers are women. Magazines with big bold text reading “Loose 10 pounds in 1 week” while having Nicole Richie on the cover, in a short strapless dress, is a resemblance of the downfall most women of this generation are facing. Women now, are going on hunger strikes not for the right to vote or any other cause with significant merit, but merely because skinny is what the media praises. Most women are more interested in what dress makes them look thinner, or what lip-gloss will at...
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...he ideal body, skin tone, or hair length? Gender is not what defines a person’s true abilities, intelligence or beauty.
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America is the land of opportunity. It is a place of rebirth, hope, and freedom. However, it was not always like that for women. Many times in history women were oppressed, belittled, and deprived of the opportunity to learn and work in their desired profession. Instead, their life was confined to the home and family. While this was a noble role, many females felt that they were being restricted and therefore desired more independence. In America, women started to break the mold in 1848 and continued to push for social, political, educational, and career freedom. By the 1920s, women had experienced significant “liberation”, as they were then allowed to vote, hold public office, gain a higher education, obtain new jobs, drastically change their appearance, and participate in entertainment and sports. However, there are some that say that females were still suppressed by the advertising industry and stereotypes. But even with those setbacks, women achieved a new way of life that affected the entire nation.
Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, contended that women’s “growing independence” had accelerated a “revolution in manners and morals” in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased women’s economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but contradictory archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the emerging “science” of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to a specific standard of physical beauty attainable by few. By 1930, American women (especially affluent whites) had won newfound power and independence, but still lived in a sexist culture where their gender limited their opportunities and defined their place in society.
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...
The media can impact people’s lives in many ways, whether it’s fashion, movies, literature, or hobbies. One of the impacts is how women view their bodies. Movie stars and models feel pressured to catch attention and to look good in order to have a good career in their respective field. People tend to judge how someone looks based on their body composition. The result of this “judgment” is that Hollywood is getting skinny. Since models and actresses serve as role models for people, people tend to want to look like them. The result of this seemingly harmless model of behavior is in an increase in eating disorders.
...cy." Western Journal Of Black Studies 28.1 (2004): 327-331. Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 Sept. 2013.
Wolf argues that because women are increasingly attaining equal rights to men; such as voting, education, money and reproductive power they are challenging the historical power dynamics that enforce patriarchal dominance. As a result, she argues that the ‘beauty myth’ is the “last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women”(1990:4). She comments further “a culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one”
When we look into the mirror, we are constantly picking at our insecurities; our stomach, thighs, face, and our body figure. Society has hammered into our brains that there is only one right way of looking. Society disregards that there are many different shapes, sizes, and colors. Then society makes us believe that corporations can shove detrimental products to fix our imperfection. As a consequence, we blame media for putting all the negative ideas into women’s brain. It is not wrong to say that they are in part responsible, but we can’t make this issue go away until we talk about patriarchy. In the article Am I Thin Enough Yet? Hesse-Biber argues that women are constantly concerned about their looks and if they are categorized as “beautiful” by society. These ideas are encouraged by corporations that sell things for us to achieve “beautiful” but the idea is a result of patriarchy. Hesse-Biber suggests that if we want to get rid of these ideas we need to tackle patriarchy before placing all the blame on capitalism.
African American Review 32.2 (1998): 293-303. JSTOR.com - "The New York Times" Web. The Web. The Web. 11 April 2012.
Women are suffering from dissatisfaction, eating disorders, low self-esteem, and body dysmorphic disorders. However, there are solutions to this problem. Instead of concentrating on losing weight and going on extreme diets to meet an impractical ideal of beauty, we can promote healthy lifestyles. This will eventually allow women to feel happier with themselves. We will potentially see a decline in the number of eating disorder cases. People can share other forms of positive media , like the DOVE Campaign for Real Beauty, to fix the current issues on how women today are bombarded with destructive messages and images of beauty. More celebrities and supermodels could use their voice and speak out on eliminating the constant struggle to be thin. Additionally, feminist or political organizations can start movements against pro-ana websites or other damaging uses of technology. There should be a requirement for companies to publish a symbol on photos that have been airbrushed, just like labels on records and games that show they are violent. The media has a strong network, where the general public can produce their own content. Women must use their power to spread knowledge that unrealistic beauty standards are not beneficial and just bring
this magazine is aimed at women in their late 20’s as the woman on the
The advertising involved targets young teenage women and features models that portray desirable items, and the “norm” is for these women to be slender and beautiful (Vonderen & Kinnally, 2012). Research has been done to prove that the media’s pressure on being thin causes women to be depressive and have negative feelings about themselves. Women’s views are skewed and perceived incorrectly of what the typical female body should be (Haas, Pawlow, Pettibone & Segrist, 2012). Body image for women has always been stressed for them to look a certain way and to try to obtain “physical perfection.” But due to the pressure on women to be this certain way, it is common for the mass media to be destructive to the young, impressionable girl.
The Representation of Men and Women in the Media Men and women are both represented differently in the media these days. Then the sand was sunk. Ironically it was even represented differently in the title of this essay. Men came before women! I am writing an essay to explain how men and women are represented in the media.
Thus, the mass media promotes an ideal image of what a beautiful and desirable woman should look like, influencing women around the world to model after. An example is the Glamour magazine survey: 75% of women aged 18-35 were reported to feel that they were too fat; 45% of underweight women felt they were too fat; almost 50% o... ... middle of paper ... ... ay’s context is pursuing the best of everything. Desperate times that make image no longer important do not prevail in the modern day.
Portrayal of Women in the Media Gender is the psychological characteristics and social categories that are created by human culture. Gender is the concept that humans express their gender when they interact with one another. Messages about how a male or female is supposed to act come from many different places. Schools, parents, and friends can influence a person.
Socialization of people has been occurring through family, public education and peer groups. However in recent years, the mass-media has become the biggest contributor to the socialization process, especially in the ‘gender’ sector. The mass-media culture, as influential as it has become, plays the most significant role in the reproduction process of gender role stereotypes and patriarchal values. It is true that a family model of nowadays is based rather on equality than on patriarchal values and women have more rights and possibilities on the labor market. However, mass-media still reflect, maintain, or even ‘create’ gender stereotypes in order to promote themselves.