Media Influence On Women's Body Image

The majority of girls in today’s society have looked at a model in a magazine or on television and wished they looked like them. The media presented in this generation has impacted women on how they feel towards their body image. Media presents unrealistic women as the “ideal,” making this culture of girls feel dissatisfied with themselves. This is a problem because with plenty of girls already feeling unsatisfied with their body, by using unrealistic models, it creates a further problem with wanting to change themselves by doing dangerous actions such as eating disorders. It’s difficult to cut out the media impact but surely, something can be changed. Magazines and the fashion industry are huge corporations that are not recognizing the impact

Body dissatisfaction is described as “the experience of negative thoughts and esteem about one’s body.” (Dittmar 1) The problem with being unsatisfied with one’s body, “can be understood as one of the most consistent and significant precursors of negative self perception, negative emotional states and unhealthy body-related behaviours. (Dittmar 2) Within this generation, “The ultra slender ideal body image is typically reported as 15% below an average weight of women. (Spurr; Berry; Walker 18) Even girls as young as 5 years of age showed greater preference for a thinner figure.” In today’s society, “body image was important (Spurr; Berry; Walker 28), the adolescents were focused on the possible flaws of their personal body image and were candid about their experiences relating to the pressure to be thin and beautiful.” A problem within teenage girls is that they “firmly believe that females were not being truthful if they did not find a flaw in their appearance.” (Spurr; Berry; Walker 30) Being “exposed to thin media images may activate and highlight these particular gaps (between their ideal body and their actual bodily self) within an individual’s bodily self-concept, which causes negative affect and body dissatisfaction.” (Dittmar 6) After viewing images in a magazine or online of an underweight model, “college woman experiences decreased body

However, the majority of girls lead to problematic actions such as, eating disorders, plastic surgery, etc. Within this underweight desired generation, “anorexic proportions conveyed an appealing vulnerability” (Burke 42) for adolescents. Eating disorders went from being a horror to something people saw as rewarding. The problem with eating disorders presented in media is that “anorexia became a tool for defining bodies outside the boundaries of acceptable or marketable slenderness and identifying which bodies were fit for public consumption.” (Burke 42) As well, pro-ana is a group of adolescent girls who were following this “trend” of anorexia which created their own support system through social media, “pro-ana came to represent a whole catchment of experience concerned with body image and eating by producing a community unified in the belief, despite the pathological status of anorexia and eating disorders.” (Burke 43) This trend of promoting eating disorders to live up to the slim model in the media is affecting plenty of teenage girls, “1 in 3 pre-adolescent girls are trying to lose weight and 1 in 10 show symptoms of an eating disorder.” (Graydon 19) It’s sad that in this generation, “adolescents made reference to girls hurting their bodies while attempting to lose weight,” (Spurr; Berry; Walker 27) just