The 1920s were a revolutionizing decade in which women flourished from housewives to being independent when the 19th amendment was finally passed and endorsed by congress. The 20s produced a new generation of women who were at liberty to get bob length haircuts, smoke Camels, and skip the housewife role if they chose to do so. It seemed as if the United States finally live up to its name as “the land of the free,” where women were allowed to vote, followed by a significant increase in the number of college degrees earned by women and women advancing in the workforce. Decades later, instead of women struggling for equal rights, a new mentality has been set upon women that is yet another barrier within gender in our society. According to Martin’s “The Famine Mystique,” seven million women in America suffer from an eating disorder, which first develops from women struggling with their self-image because the media strongly influences what is believed to constitute femininity and their duty to please men.
Magazines are one of the most, if not, the most influential source in which women are constantly bombarded with ridiculous ideals that are at most times, unrealistic. The magazine industry itself is a $40 billion industry in which an abounding amount of the readers are women. Magazines with big bold text reading “Loose 10 pounds in 1 week” while having Nicole Richie on the cover, in a short strapless dress, is a resemblance of the downfall most women of this generation are facing. Women now, are going on hunger strikes not for the right to vote or any other cause with significant merit, but merely because skinny is what the media praises. Most women are more interested in what dress makes them look thinner, or what lip-gloss will at...
... middle of paper ...
...he ideal body, skin tone, or hair length? Gender is not what defines a person’s true abilities, intelligence or beauty.
Works Cited
"TV, Movies, and Magazines: What Girls Gotta Watch and Read." PBS:
Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
Cole, Harriette. "Did Elle Magazine Truly Whitewash Gabby Sidibe?."
The Root | Black News, Opinion, Politics and Culture. 17 Sept. 2010. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
“How Do Magazines Affect Body Image? | Education.com." Education.com
An Education & Child Development Site. Web. 24 Apr. 2011.
Magazines, Girls, and Eating Disorders." Eating Disorders Treatment.
Web. 26 Apr. 2011.
Martin, Courtney . "The Famine Mystique." Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
6 ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 607. Print.
Top 99 Most Desirable Women of 2011 - AskMen." AskMen - Men's
Online Magazine. 1 Feb. 2011. Web. 27 Apr. 2011.
When we look into the mirror, we are constantly picking at our insecurities; our stomach, thighs, face, and our body figure. Society has hammered into our brains that there is only one right way of looking. Society disregards that there are many different shapes, sizes, and colors. Then society makes us believe that corporations can shove detrimental products to fix our imperfection. As a consequence, we blame media for putting all the negative ideas into women’s brain. It is not wrong to say that they are in part responsible, but we can’t make this issue go away until we talk about patriarchy. In the article Am I Thin Enough Yet? Hesse-Biber argues that women are constantly concerned about their looks and if they are categorized as “beautiful” by society. These ideas are encouraged by corporations that sell things for us to achieve “beautiful” but the idea is a result of patriarchy. Hesse-Biber suggests that if we want to get rid of these ideas we need to tackle patriarchy before placing all the blame on capitalism.
The idea that women are subjected to an unfair amount of pressure as a result of the fashion world and other media outlets is hardly new, but Naomi Wolf takes this claim to a new and absurd level. Her essay is as unorganized as it is impractical. Her ideas are presented in a smorgasbord of flawed logic. Particularly disturbing is what she calls the “beauty myth.” What I disagree with is the word myth. According to Wolf, women in magazines and advertisements have approximately 20% less body mass than that of the average woman, creating an unattainable standard. This fact in no way supports her claim of a “beauty myth.” The existence of a myth suggests something to be untrue in nature. Magazine companies and advertisement agencies are not in the business of showing an average woman. They are in the business of selling a product. Of course they are going to use beautiful people. These companies completely regard the fact that most women do not in fact look like this, but they know that their product would be less appealing if they displayed average or unattractive women. Therefore, they do not deserve scrutiny over the fact that they do not present a typical woman. They in fact do the same for men. Wolf says, “The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power” (page 485, first new paragraph). How does one begin to say how warped this impression is?
Fashion and lifestyle magazines are also large contributors to the self-destruction of women. Magazines, such as lifestyle, are intentionally aimed to give people an idea of how they’re supposed to live their life: hence the name “lifestyle magazine.” We are told how we should dress, where we should eat and the kinds of people we should associate with. We’re constantly reading about the amount people drink, smoke, take drugs, have affairs, and party, which doesn’t seem to affect people the way it should because in their opinion, they’re not doing anything wrong if everyone else is doing it as well.
women in powerful positions on television. If girls are not able to see themselves in such
One of her points is how the media negatively affects many women’s self esteem. She talks about how in “Fashion, magazines, talk shows, ‘lite and fat free food in stores and restaurants, and diet centers and all daily reminders of these expectations [of women to have a slim body.]” She explains how fashion is moving to be more revealing, which is only flattering on the
The media’s depiction of female bodies has a detrimental influence on women’s perception of themselves and has come under fire in recent years. Girls growing up in our media soaked culture internalize society’s ever-thinning standard of beauty, believing that they can never be slender enough. The negative effect of the media has been linked to the spread of eating disorders (“Never Just Pictures”, Thompson). This has led to a public outcry against impossibly thin, airbrushed models and a demand for more honest advertising.
While women have made significant advances over the past decades, the culture at large never fails to place a strong emphasis on the way women look. The new standards for beauty are ultimately causing dramatic influences on adolescent females and their body image. Anyone who is familiar with American culture knows that these new standards for beauty is proliferated through the media. No matter the source, we are constantly surrounded by all kinds of media, and we continue to construct ourselves based on the images we see through the media. The more young girls are surrounded by the “thin ideal” kind of media, the more they will continue to be dissatisfied with their bodies and themselves. Thi...
America has become a society of relatively sedentary people that do not exercise or worry about their health. Magazines that show pictures of healthy models are simply saying that women can achieve this look if they practice healthy and beneficial lifestyles. The opposition might argue that magazine covers, and articles, force women to feel inadequate an in turn they diet, exercise, and use cosmetic surgery in an attempt to enhance their looks. The issues on dieting stem from women being health conscious rather than, being self-conscious. Articles on dieting and exercise give information on ways to help improve health and to still maintain active family and business lives, and because it is only suggestive information it is not harmful to ones self image. Cosmetic surgery is an approach that both men and women consider to improve their self-image. Articles that discuss information on these procedures are not only informative, but necessary. For instance, those that are uninformed settle for cheap renditions of surgery and are left scarred and mutilated. ...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In our society today, people would rather see what celebrities are up to than what is going on with our health plan. Watching the news makes us aware of the latest trend, new gadget, who’s in rehab, or who has an eating disorder. In the eyes of society, women like Eva Longoria, Kim Kardashian, and Megan Fox are the epitome of perfection. What girl wouldn’t want to look like them? Unfortunately, this includes most of the girls in the US. Through TV shows, commercials, magazines or any form of advertising, the media enforces a certain body type which women emulate. The media has created a puissant social system where everyone must obtain a thin waist and large breasts. As a society, we are so image obsessed with the approval of being thin and disapproval of being overweight, that it is affecting the health of most women. Women much rather try to fit the social acceptance of being thin by focusing on unrealistic body images which causes them to have lower self esteem and are more likely to fall prey to eating disorders, The media has a dangerous influence on the women’s health in the United States.
I was flipping through some channels on the television set one day and came across a woman's talk show, "The View." It caught my attention when one of the hostesses asked the audience of mostly women to raise their hand if they thought they were truly beautiful. Much to my surprise the audience did not respond with very many show of hands. The hostess then introduced a study done by Dove, the makers of the body soap. Dove polled over 6,000 women from all over the country and only two percent of the women polled said they feel beautiful. Women are surrounded by images screaming physical beauty is more important than their talents and accomplishments. Women are deriving their self worth from an ideal of how they think they should look and how they think everyone else wants them to look instead of focusing on their sense of who they are, what they know, and where they are going in life. In "Help or Hindrance?: Women's Magazines Offer Readers Little But Fear, Failure," Mary Kay Blakely states, "Instead of encouraging women to grow beyond childish myths and adapt to the changes of life, women's magazines have readers running in place, exhausted." She goes on to say, "This is a world we have 'made up' for women, and it is a perilous place to exist." One of the biggest culprits feeding women's insecurities are the popular women's magazine that line the book shelves of grocery stores, gas stations, and waiting rooms. They supply readers and the occasional innocent passerby with unrealistic images of what women should be instead of showing diverse age groups and women with natural beauty. Reading through a couple of magazines, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Shape, I found nothing but hidden agendas and...
Tiggemann and Zaccardo (2015) conducted research to explore the relationship between media and body image among young women attending universities. Studying university students is prevalent in researching body image because of the frequent use of social media and fashion magazines among young adults. Women’s magazines are one media format that focuses on body image and revenue. “For example, 83% of teenage girl’s report spending a mean of 4.3 hours a week reading magazines for pleasure or school” (Thompson & Heinberg, 1999, p. 341). The images presented in magazines are often unattainable for the average women and tends to oppress and manipulate women’s physical and mental health into conforming to the ideal (Wolf, 1991). Women 's magazines, probably more than any other form of mass media, have been criticized as being advocates and promoters of the desirability of an unrealistic and dangerously thin ideal (Wolf, 1991). Magazine articles and other types of media can lower women’s self esteem and create a negative body image. These realistic representations of people are created using Photoshop, photo editing, and filters. The artificial creation of the perfect body through social media has lead to negative self esteem, depression, and eating disorders throughout all stages of
In modern society there is more and more digital editing without the knowledge of consumers. Currently there are various reasons for why women develop negative body image, low-self-esteem and eating disorders. According to Naomi Wolf in her novel “Beauty Myth”, one of the many reasons women obtain concerns with their bodies is due to the universal images of young female bodies presented through advertisements in fashion magazines. Advertisements in magazines are altering and shaping the desires of men and women. Magazines sell viewers images of beautiful, skinny, flawless confident young women. When people are constantly antagonized with the magazine industry’s ideal of “perfect beauty” the viewer’s then, subconsciously believe these images to be true and begin to form biases about what they themselves should look like and what other people must also look like. People who view magazines get mislead by advertisers because they are unaware that all the images displayed are digitally altered through Photoshop and airbrushing. Today’s magazines are formed completely on false ideals of flawless beauty and unattainable body images, to prevent women and men from falling victim to the magazine’s deceitful images we as a society need to become aware and educate ourselves.
The media tries to make plus sized people self-conscious by saying you are only beautiful if you are skinny. Samantha Romo, a sophomore majoring in journalism who writes bi-weekly columns has done her research which shows that girls today are risking their lives by doing things to make themselves lose weight fast such as anorexia and bulimia. (Romo) Allie Kovar is a student studying health psychology. In her paper written to provide scientific overviews of topics on health and beauty, she has found out that between the years 1988 to 1993 bulimia tripled and studies have shown that 1-5% of girls are now bulimic. (Kovar) (Morris) The way that the media photo shops and edits the models that you see on television, in magazines and everywhere else shows that women are not viewed the same today as they were 20 years ago. Women are human beings being treated like objects trying to be formed into a mold of how they think they should look and what is “beautiful.” (Romo) The media targets teenage girls the most because they know that is who will be the most effected. Anne Morris, a specialist in the department of paediatrics and psychiatry and in the eating disorders program, the hospital for sick children at the university of Toronto, Ontario has found out that gi...
The media can impact people’s lives in many ways, whether it’s fashion, movies, literature, or hobbies. One of the impacts is how women view their bodies. Movie stars and models feel pressured to catch attention and to look good in order to have a good career in their respective field. People tend to judge how someone looks based on their body composition. The result of this “judgment” is that Hollywood is getting skinny. Since models and actresses serve as role models for people, people tend to want to look like them. The result of this seemingly harmless model of behavior is in an increase in eating disorders.
this magazine is aimed at women in their late 20’s as the woman on the