Media Effects On Anorexia Nervosa

The Effects of the Media’s Photoshopping Disorder
Almost everywhere a person looks, they are bombarded with pictures and advertisements. Whether one is simply glancing at a magazine while waiting in line at a store, or just watching commercials on television, advertisements can be seen everywhere. It is quite evident, by looking at the thin waisted and skinny pictures of young women, what the media considers to be the ideal body figure. The perception of the ideal body type that society has produced, plays a huge role in our country’s obsession with thinness and appearance. The United States’ obsessions exhibiting slim, thin models as beautiful, gives a distorted impression leaving many young women the wrong idea about beauty and body image.

Ultimately, eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa, continue to grow as a result of the media’s use of airbrushing techniques that portrays young women as having unrealistic appearances. These unreasonable expectations of physical beauty in our culture need to become more real and include the many various forms of beauty that our world offers, if our society wants to help reduce harmful accounts of anorexic practices.
Anorexia nervosa, as described in modern society, is a disease that is “characterized by a relentless pursuit of thinness and an unwillingness to maintain a normal or healthy weight, a distortion of body image and intense fear of weight… and [an] extremely disturbed eating behavior”, largely in part to dissatisfied body image (“Anad”). However, accounts of voluntary self-starvation, in the same sense of anorexia nervosa, have not been recorded or known to have occurred throughout ancient history. In an

The first attempts at classifying anorexia nervosa as a more formal disorder, were made by French physician Sir William Gull and psychiatrist Charles Lasegue in the late eighteen hundreds. Both men documented multiple instances of refusals to eat amongst many young women. Ultimately, their reports helped to initiate the modern concept of anorexia nervosa, which has helped lay out the foundation of what is known about the disorder today (Bemporad 229). Although medical facts of anorexia nervosa have been documented since the late eighteen hundreds, the more modern version of anorexia; the concept of body image being a motivating factor for excessive fasting or self-starvation, did not emerge until the mid-1960s. It was during this time that the media began to promote thinness amongst the population. With the advent of Photoshop and other photo manipulation technologies, the media progressively began its obsession with displaying thin models and actresses throughout every form of media: magazines, photographs, television, and more. This wave of bodily expression pressured many people to attempt to achieve the desired forms of body shape suggested by the media. As a result, many people, especially young women, began to participate in anorexic practices like recording food intake, self-vomiting, and more. All of this would later develop into