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Media's portrayal of body image
Society and body image essay
Media influence on body image
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Media's portrayal of body image
Society and body image essay
Media influence on body image
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
This constant fixation on physical perfection has created unreasonable beauty standards for women, ones we cannot possibly achieve on our own. Such standards permeate all forms of popular media, particularly fashion magazines and advertisements. Women are bombarded with the notion that we must be thin in order to be desirable. These images project an
Out of all the reading we read, the one that stood out to me was “Male body image in America” by Lynne Luciano. This reading stood out to me the most because in the society we live in this is the type of things people expect from men. Men would get surgeries, stay in the gym and buy many grooming things to keep up with society spectations of them. In the third paragraph (page 30), Lynne mentions about the four imperatives for men today. The four imperative were that “men must be men”, “second, men must be completive and constantly demonstrating their success”, “third, they must be detached and impassive”, lastly “they must be willing to take risk and confront danger”.
Everyday females are exposed to how media views the female body, whether in a work place, television ads, and magazines. Women tend to judge themselves on how they look just to make sure there keeping up with what society see as an idyllic women, when women are exposed to this idea that they have to keep a perfect image just to keep up with media, it teaches women that they do not have the right look because they feel as if they don’t add up to societies expectations of what women should look like, it makes them thing there not acceptable to society. This can cause huge impacts on a women self-appearance and self-respect dramatically. Women who become obsessed about their body image can be at high risk of developing anorexia or already have
According to a survey done by Jesse Fox, Ph.D., 80% of women feel bad about themselves just by looking in the mirror (Dreisbach). This has happened because of social media being changed to make girls feel like they need to have a certain body shape. Models and celebrities in magazines and media show unrealistic beauty and it contributes to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and much more (Seventeen magazine). Media has put lots of stress on women throughout history with changing body shapes. A survey done by Dove found results that 9 out of 10 women want to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance.
The media plays a huge role in body image, in social media men and women are expected to look a certain way. Men are expected to be tall and muscular, and the women should be slim, fragile and never be bigger than the men. This is horrifying that
There are a number of pressures that influence how one perceives their own body image. The largest pressures on the ideal body image are spawned from the influence the media have on society and the reactions that emerge from interpreting the media and advertisements. In documentaries such as Killing Us Softly and Dying to be Thin, the media is entirely made out to be the lone culprit of body image skewing. However, the media cannot be completely to blame. Many pressures emerge from family members or members of society that have the influence to shape how one feels about themselves, which has been apparent since the Victorian Era, and can still be seen today in the case of Frank Bruni.
An abundance of information has indicated that women are negatively affected by the persistent exposure to society’s media that exposes the unrealistic “ideal body”; however, it is uncertain on the process in which a women’s self-satisfaction with their physical appearance is affected by the
Enough is never enough to the society of today. The society of today is a consumer based society in which we all participate in and are all the victims. Trends are always continued through advertisement which help continue the cycle. Trends are proven to be followed through the following literary examples, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture by Mike Featherstone, Celebrity Endorsed Television Advertisements Affecting Purchase Decision of Middle Class Consumers in Lucknow City by Syed Haider Ali and Raj Kumar and Young Compulsive Buyers and the Emotional Roller- coaster in Shopping by Anna Saraneva and Maria Saaksjarvi.
It is often said that “In the 50s and 60s, things were very different. The celebrities back then had real figures, with real curves There was no constant pressure to lose weight, and no internet or weekly gossip magazines flaunting bikini bodies to make us feel inferior” (De Lucia). Six to seven decades ago, not only was the beauty standard more lenient, but it was not as heavily forced onto people. It does not matter what the beauty standard looks like because girls will aspire to be whatever the standard is because it is what is idolized at the time. A trend through history can be seen as “beauty ideal continues to get smaller in our society, body image within American women continues to plummet” (Depicting Body Image).
Since this is this case young women traditionally look to media as a way to gauge how they should act, what they should be wear and what they should look like. Young women are aware of the fact that the images and videos that are seen through the media are often doctored and idealize thin body images; however because media is ever present adolescent girls tend to give into the thin-ideal as normative and realistic representations of the female body, resulting in negative effects of exposure and reinforcement of thin-ideal standards as frequently aired in Western media (Harrison, 2000; López-Guimerà et al., 2010). Some experts argue that many of the studies done on media are inconsistent because in certain instances the thin-body ideal that is present in advertisements could induce negative perceptions of the body and in other cases there is little to no effect on the individual. This is the case because there are a variety of different factors that can affect body image and self-esteem that make some individuals more susceptive to having issues such as age, body weight along with peer and parental support and interaction to name a few. The results of a study conducted by Mike Featherstone a sociologist and professor at the University of London have shown that “an individual’s susceptibility to having negative body image issues reflects the extent
Men and women nowadays are starting to lose self-confidence in themselves and their body shape, which is negatively impacting the definition of how beauty and body shape are portrayed. “...97% of all women who had participated in a recent poll by Glamour magazine were self-deprecating about their body image at least once during their lives”(Lin 102). Studies have shown that women who occupy most of their time worrying about body image tend to have an eating disorder and distress which impairs the quality of life. Body image issues have recently started to become a problem in today’s society because of social media, magazines, and television.
In today’s modern culture, almost all forms of popular media play a significant role in bombarding young people, particularly young females, with what happens to be society’s idea of the “ideal body”. This ideal is displayed all throughout different media platforms such as magazine adds, television and social media – the idea of feminine beauty being strictly a flawless thin model. The images the media displays send a distinct message that in order to be beautiful you must look a certain way. This ideal creates and puts pressure on the young female population viewing these images to attempt and be obsessed with obtaining this “ideal body”. In the process of doing so this unrealistic image causes body dissatisfaction, lack of self-confidence
“The promotion of the thin, sexy ideal in our culture has created a situation where the majority of girls and women don’t like their bodies,” says Sarah Murnen, professor of psychology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Todd Morrison and Emer Sheahan recognized in their studies that “sociocultural
The media portrays these unrealistic standards to men and women of how women should look, which suggests that their natural face is not good enough. Unrealistic standards for beauty created by the media is detrimental to girls’ self-esteem because it makes women feel constant external pressure to achieve the “ideal look”, which indicates that their natural appearance is inadequate. There has been an increasing number of women that are dissatisfied with themselves due to constant external pressure to look perfect. YWCA’s “Beauty at Any Cost” discusses this in their article saying that, “The pressure to achieve unrealistic physical beauty is an undercurrent in the lives of virtually all women in the United States, and its steady drumbeat is wreaking havoc on women in ways that far exceed the bounds of their physical selves” (YWCA).
American society has created unhealthy beauty standards that people want to live up to, but they ridicule those same standards when their goals can’t be achieved. Woman criticize how other women look but are offended when others do the same to them. There is “fat-shaming” and “skinny-shaming,” and now, no one's body seems to fit the “ideal” mold that Americans have crafted. It’s a hypocrisy of ideas. Body shaming is certainly not a new phenomenon, but social media outlets have caused it to spiral out of control.