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Media Effects On Body Image

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Seven out of ten girls believe they are not suitable, appealing, intelligent and/or amiable enough. From the beginning of time to the present day, people of higher influence have caused both males and females alike to look to them for the way their lives should be perceived by others. Today’s media and those conventional lifestyle portray what the “perfect” body should be like. However, these body images constantly change over time. Those who control the media, ranging from people within the government to Hollywood, flood the media with messages that tell people that their way of living is not good enough if they do not mirror this version of perfection. Therefore making the average person believe that they cannot be happy and live a peaceful …show more content…

Those who have jurisdiction over the media influence society in many ways including: subliminal messaging, manipulation, through creating role models and advertisements, fabricating their ideal of what they believe to be the right way of living and the body image they want everyone to emulate. Subliminal messaging plays an immense role in influencing the society of the world. Subliminal messaging works by affecting the subconscious part of the human mind through visual and audio. Visual mediation, publisher of, Subliminal Messages: How They Work and How They Affect Us, makes the following analogy, “Think of your mind as an iceberg. The conscious part is the tip of the iceberg that you see on the surface of the sea, say 5% of the total part of the iceberg, while …show more content…

Manipulation is the act of getting people to believe that what those of a higher power in society are saying is unerring. One way influential people take advantage of manipulation is through a technique called, photo manipulation. An example of photo manipulation is photoshopping. Photoshopping plays both a negative and positive influential role in the way youth feel about their body image. Corporate-owned media use this to create what they feel is the perfect body. Media use models with already close-to-flawless bodies and then utilize photoshopping afterwards to make it quintessential. In the episode of the classic tv series “Twilight Zone”, “Number Twelve Looks Like You”, there are two body types available to males and females. The young men and women are forced into choosing between one of these likenesses. Because of this, civilians are manipulated to believe that their figure is ugly if their physique does not look like one of these ideal bodies. Society today is doing the same thing through the media and television ads. Manipulation also plays a role in how people feel about certain subjects, including: someone 's religious, political, or even parenting views. In George Orwell’s 1984, the government of Oceania, also known as The Party, had complete control over what the residents viewed. Winston, the main character, wrote “If there is hope, wrote Winston,

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It’s an argument we’ve all heard before and there are more than a few books that have tackled the subject. But what’s different from even the last three years is just how widespread the media has become. Today’s teens spend an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes absorbing media in just one day, which includes the amount of time spent watching TV, listening to music, watching movies, reading magazines and using the internet. This is a generation that’s been raised watching reality TV – observing bodies transformed on Extreme Makeover; faces taken apart and pieced back together on I Want a Famous Face. They are, as Tina Fey puts it, bombarded by "a laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful.”

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Everyone always want or desire for something in this world. And to get their want they must somehow bargain for it; whether it was begging or persuading, they are still considered rhetorical techniques. In the story “Whose Body is This,” the author Katherine Haines talks about how society setted a certain standard of what a woman's body should look like, and it practically destroyed majority of woman’s self esteem. Haines further explains that pictures and advertisement on tv and magazines are teaching young girls that they need to look like the models in the picture. Girls don’t feel comfortable to be in their own skin, because they were not taught to love themselves for who they are, right in the beginning.

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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

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Manipulation is something that has embedded itself into society. Much of our lives are and can be manipulated whether we know it or not. In most examples the people who are being manipulated are being manipulated by the ones that they trust the most. Many times use of fear to cause mass hysteria is often invoked. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible characters take advantage of fear in order to manipulate fellow townspeople and gain an advantage in their community.

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Over time women have faced and overcome multiple obstacles. In this day and age, women have gained the right to vote, receive an education, and make their own decisions about their life. However, women are still faced with the struggle of fitting into societal norms, and this is becoming increasingly dangerous in our mass media society. For centuries, society has made females feel as if they must fit into the barbie doll image created by a patriarchal society. Some women face eating disorders, plastic surgeries, an abundance of makeup, or even the idea of suicide to elude thoughts of being less than ideal in other people's eyes.

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Through social media, messages, which cause many young women to question their bodies and overall self-image, are delivered daily. Media sells the idea that; “girls’ and women’s value lies in their youth, beauty, and sexuality and not in their capacity as leaders” (Miss Representation). Through advertisements,

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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.

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In the novel 1984, written by George Orwell, the government of Oceania controlled the citizens through a variety of ways, one of the most important being psychological manipulation. 1984, written in the perspective of a man named Winston, told a story of a dystopian society where the nonexistence of privacy lived primal and the society lived in a state of everything, almost everything, being controlled. The man, named Winston, did not agree with the way the government psychologically manipulated people into doing what they wanted. For example, the slogan “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” (page 4) manipulated the society’s citizens into believing things that were not true. Many other examples of psychological manipulation

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How do people see themselves in the mirror? The way your body is represents who an individual is as a person. Everybody looks different. Even though everyone has an opinion about what they would want to look like. Changing one's personal features would take away from simply being them.

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Today’s society is obsessed with being perfect. Having the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect everything. This influence and drive for obtaining perfection does not simply appear out of nowhere. Taking a look at the production of our mass media consumption and the media culture it displays, it is clear that messages from the media not only idolizes certain body ideals and lifestyles it provides the basis for self-hatred and shame. Not to mention, there are thousands of websites that aid and help individuals to achieve false hope for obtaining these unrealistic standards.

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I believe that American culture and media has had a negative impact on our perceptions of body image. In American society now, beautiful qualities are denoted by a skinny figure, large bust and hips, long hair, and a submissive personality. These attributes are unimaginable and have truly caused strife and complications to the other individual self esteem. Women today now stress over trying to obtain and maintain the specified attributes to stay what they believe is beautiful. Many girls become bulimic, anorexic, and or depressed in response to the verbal abuse or pressure that they may experience.

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Whether it’s magazine covers, instagram, twitter, on television or just on the world wide web in general, everywhere we look we see stunning models. Models that are incredibly thin and can look good in anything. Our society is obsessed with how perfect they look, yet at the end of the day women everywhere looks in the mirror and doesn’t see the body of the girl she sees on social media. Even though women come in all shapes and sizes in nature, the expectation to have a skinny, perfect body just seems to be the expectation for our society nowadays. Society puts too much pressure on females to have the perfect body.

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When having a negative body image or high body dissatisfaction, one believes their body is inadequate. Because the media has recently been promoting an extremely specific body type only a few are able to obtain, an increasing number of people are viewing their own bodies as unsatisfactory. The two aspects of media causing the most damage to people’s body image are advertisements and social media. Adolescents from ages 13 to 18 are those affected the most due to the media’s messages. Although teenage girls are known to be the group damaged predominately by the media’s messages, recent research shows that teenage boys are also at risk of gaining a negative body image due to these messages.

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In Europe, Valerie Boyer, a member of the French Parliament thought that warning labels should be put on advertisements, art photography, political campaigns, etc. that have been altered, say that it has been “Retouched photograph aimed at changing a person’s physical appearance.” And if they did not do that then they would have to pay 50% of the cost of the publicity campaign. Bur Boyer says he is not doing it to “damage creativity of photographers or publicity campaigns, but to advise the public on whether what they were seeing is real or not.” Many in France are trying to get the Photoshopped pictures to have labels saying they are altered, Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister of Britain, says, “I am very keen that children and young women should be informed about airbrushing, so they don’t fall victim to looking at an image and thinking anyone can have a twelve-inch waist…”

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Envision experiencing childhood in a current society. All over you look there are pictures of magnificence, representations of how excellent women should look; faultless and thin. You grow up trusting that this unattainable picture is the main picture of excellence. As you look in the mirror and see just blemishes in your appearance, you concentrate intensely of approaches to make yourself more excellent. There are several studies which shows that women's self-perception, self-regard, and eating disorder are influenced contrarily by what she sees from the media.

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