Media Body Image

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“Mass media transmit the ideas, values, norms, attitudes, and behaviors that socialize and construct the social reality of those who use them for a wide variety of reasons” (Lopez-Guimera, Levine, Sanchez-Carracedo, & Fauquet, 2010, p. 388). The world of mass media has a significant influence on its audience in terms of what is considered to be the ideal body type, pressuring society to look a certain way to receive public acceptance. This pressure creates a distorted perception that is not always a positive one, it can be detrimental to an individual’s mental and physical health. According to Marika Tiggemann (2014), body dissatisfaction results from exposure to skinny media images generating a harmful social comparison. An analysis covering the effects of media on body image shows that consumers are being deceived through edited images and can also be linked to eating disorders. However, can media really be that harmful to body image? In media portrayals of women, it has become a common practice to airbrush away blemishes and is expected by the consumers. Due to computer generated photos, curvy women become slimmer, elderly women …show more content…

Through social comparison, people are measuring how they stack up against others, determining self-worth on that comparison. Due to the increased exposure that young people are experiencing, they are impractically stacking themselves up against celebrities and models that are requesting for their photos to be altered. In 2011, 131,877 cosmetic surgeries were conducted youths under the age of eighteen (Harrison & Hefner, 2014, p. 136). The standards manufactured by the media are unobtainable because they are not real. Children are impressionable, they look in the mirror and want to look like what is seen in the magazines or on television, but getting procedures done is only the beginning of the impact media has on body

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