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How social media affects body image TODAY
How social media affects body image TODAY
How social media affects body image TODAY
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Lookism is discrimination, normally of one’s physical appearance. It can be discriminative against race and gender as well. As a woman, we’re thought of as to be beautiful but the unattractive girls go unnoticed. With all going on such as plastic surgery and more. Us average people, on the other hand, don’t necessarily have the money for intensive surgery the same way celebs do. It’s almost hard to find a celebrity with no surgery. For example, the Kardashians and Jenners who have been around for a very long time. You can easily look at their before and after pictures on google whereas they had extremely different faces and body shapes. Clinical psychologists observe that men and women alike appear more concerned than ever with attractiveness and perceived physical imperfections (Ludden 2016). The obsession with looking completely perfect may be satisfying for the moment but won’t do any justice for the actual aging process. When thinking about the standard of beauty, you normally hear …show more content…
On social media, you can post both words and pictures. A very popular app amongst the younger generation is Instagram. Kylie Jenner is always trending on Instagram. She gets over a million likes and over a thousand comments. Just last week there was a major Hurricane, yet when you logged into the app, Kylie’s picture in her underwear was the number one trending topic. A lot of young girls look up to her which is understandable because she’s rich and her life is advertised to the public, but on the other hand, Kylie has had quite a few surgeries yet she tells the public she hasn’t had any and that it’s just puberty. She shouldn’t give young girls false images. Dr. Autumn Whitfield wrote a book about how beauty can shape a woman’s life. Whether this is surgery, a diet, or wear makeup. She even did studies where some women say they don’t want to feel beautiful for men but more so for
If a teenager or pre-teen is focused on particular celebrities and their goal is too look like them, it is not difficult to slip into acting like them as well, or at least being influenced by their behavior and perceived attitudes. The media abounds with bad examples of celebrity behavior, from Justin Bibber driving recklessly to Miley Cyrus parading around scantily clothed, and although every celebrity is not a terrible role model, a disproportionate amount of them can be found to have shaky morals and seem to have let the attention that they receive affect their behavior. In addition, the perfect bodies that most of them display are not realistic and in some cases not even naturally attainable, thanks to the modern tools of plastic surgery, augmentations, liposuction, and other cosmetic surgeries. The media too contributes to the unreal portrayal of models and famous people by using airbrushing on pictures and other editing that lead regular people to compare their bodies to images that are not even humanly possible. The Barbie-like models that girls compare themselves to and the ripped and muscled men that boys compare their bodies to are often completely unnatural and the people who have somehow attained them are,
Societal constructs of bodily perfection have a massive influence on both genders and on all ages. If you look at any magazine, you will see women constantly being compared to each other, whether it is in the “who wore it better” section or in the “do’s and don’ts” part of the magazine, comparing body images and overall appearances. All parts of the media that encompasses our daily lives are especially dangerous for young and impressionable teens because they see people being torn down for trying to express themselves, and are thus taught to not only don’t look like “don’ts”, but also look like the “do’s”. This is dangerous in that women in the magazine set very high standards that teens want to emulate, no matter the cost to themselves or their health. Celebrities have the benefit of media to make them appear perfect: Photoshop and makeup artists conceal the imperfections that are often too apparent to the naked eye. Viewing celebrities as exhibiting the ideal look or as idols will, in most cases, only damage the confidence of both young teens, and adults, and warp the reality of what true “beauty” really is. It makes teens never feel truly content with themselves because they will be aiming for an ideal that is physically impossible to attain and one that doesn’t exist in the real
To begin, social media has created unrealistic standards for young people, especially females. Being bombarded by pictures of females wearing bikinis or minimal clothing that exemplifies their “perfect” bodies, squatting an unimaginable amount of weight at a gym while being gawked at by the opposite sex or of supermodels posing with some of life’s most desirable things has created a standard that many young people feel they need to live up to. If this standard isn’t reached, then it is assumed that they themselves are not living up to the norms or the “standards” and then therefore, they are not beautiful. The article Culture, Beauty and Therapeutic Alliance discusses the way in which females are bombarded with media messages star...
Erica Zhang Professor Nelson Intro to Mass Media & Communications 3/11/2013 Media Analysis Assignment In today’s media, the sexualisation of women has unfortunately also extended to young preteen girls, through a myriad of detrimental social constructs and internalized prejudices spanning centuries. The commodification of their sexuality is unnerving, as it encourages predators to project their fantasies onto unwilling participants that are too young to understand the nature of these harmful actions, and know how to escape or refuse them. In an attempt to shed light onto this issue as a concerned parent, Rachael Combe wrote the article Little Girls Gone Wild as a response to this sudden boom in increasingly sexualised behavior among and towards preteens. While her intentions remain sincere and her concerns as a mother legitimate, the article is flawed in the sense that she is not delving deeper into the causes behind this phenomenon, shaming the young girls for indulging in their outward appearances and for participating in a role that society has forced them into, instead of the predators that reinforce this sexualised image and make it something to be desired and aspired to.
The biology of beauty is judging people on whether they are either ugly or beautiful, attractive or unattractive. When people are judging by their looks and others by the way you dress. People all over the world look at magazines saying that I wish I was this model or I should try this for my body. I wonder if this product will work for my body or skin. They say that when they are looking in the magazines and other papers that have make up or they just buy a whole bunch of products. If the products don’t work they will just spend amount of money just to be thrown in the trash but some people keep it just in case they need it again. Famous people like actors, artists, and models get injections in their faces or tell the doctors to remove any type of fat from their body just to be in a movie or show they want to look skinny and pretty in.
Female beauty ideals are an overwhelming force in teen media. Approximately 37% of articles in leading magazines for teen girls emphasize a focus on physical appearance. This is none to surprising considering two of the top contenders in this media genre are Seventeen and Teen Vogue. CosmoGIRL and Elle Girl were among the ranks of popular teen magazines, but in recent years have become exclusively online publications. Add in a dash of publications Tiger Beat and Bop, and it becomes glaringly obvious that girls are charged with the prime directive of looking good to get the guy. The story becomes more disturbing when the actual audience, which includes girls at least as young as eleven years old, is considered. In a stage when girls are trying for the first time to establish their identities, top selling publications are telling them that their exteriors should be their primary concern of focus. Of course, this trend doesn’t stop with magazines. A study conducted in 1996 found a direct correlation between the “amount of time an adolescent watches soaps, movies and music videos” a...
Research shows “that regular readers of fashion and beauty magazines in early adolescence are more likely to suffer from a distorted body image during their teenage years” (“Children, Adolescents and the Media”), when they read beauty magazines they read articles and tips of how to look better and they try to them all to look and feel better about themselves. Research shows that “more than three-quarters of girls repot that television influenced their body image” (Mascarelli). Social media influences how we act and what we do Amanda Swartz once stated “Social media and mass media influence the way we react and interact with our world and potentially influence the perception of our own body image” (Mulliniks). In today’s worlds there are more ways to access websites to promote body image as a positive thing, “On the internet, there are now more than 100 pro anorexia websites that not only encourage disordered eating but offer specific advice on purging, severely restricting calories intake, and exercising excessively” (“Children, Adolescents and the Media”). It’s not a bad thing to eat healthy and work out to be fit and healthy but it’s another thing to eat less and work out excessively. Teens always compare themselves to others, either their peers, models and celebrities, “People are on Facebook or Instagram and they’re constantly comparing themselves to other people” (Mulliniks). Also reality television shows, show only the glamorous about what is happening, like “when teen moms become celebrities, the message to avoid teen pregnancy is lost” (Kroll). When teens watch shows like Teen Mom they don’t see the entire negative about becoming pregnant as a teen they see that the teen mom got famous and is on the show. Social media, media, magazines, and TV give teen’s unrealistical facts about body image, pregnancy and
The media and how it affects our society has changed tremendously over the past few decades. Our population of children who spend a lot of time in front of the television or on social media continues to increase, creating a superficial view of themselves and who they should be. This superficial outlook has been created by the media because it preaches to our society that looks matter. Not only are there millions of advertisements saying to lose weight and buy certain products to be beautiful, but there has been a specific standard of beauty set for models and actresses to obtain. These standards include big eyes, volumino...
Many teens today are faced with unrealistic body standards. Social media has an huge influence on how teens see their body. They may see a model or their favorite celebrity and ask themselves why don't they look like that, or how can they look like that. These body standards can cause some to body shame others. As social media continues to deem what is attractive and what is not, the number of women dissatisfied with their body will increase.
"Children are influenced by media–they learn by observing, imitating, and making behaviors their own" (APA, 2001, p.1224). Girl’s as young as 4-years sees Britney Spears music clip “Baby One More Time”, who at the time was a 17-year old girl/world pop icon at the time wearing a school uniform showing off her midriff, wearing a lot of makeup and a short skirt. Disney teen icons such as Miley Cyrus aka Hannah Montana taking personal photos of herself in “sexy” poses and sending it to her ‘older’ boyfriend and then having it all published all over the internet for the entire world to see. Boys also face sexualization too, as has been seen in Calvin Klein ads, where pubescent-looking boys pose provocatively with perfectly sculpted six-pack abs hawking teen fashion These pop culture celebrities both female and male are always in the media, for inappropriate actions and they’re meant to be role models for children. In fact most of these sexualized celebrities are still children themselves. The sad part is it’s not just sexualization being encouraged in the media other negative things such as violence, drug and alcohol use ...
Imagine you are at home, watching TV. Flipping through the channels, you see a preview for next week’s episode of Toddlers & Tiara’s. They show the girls dressed in frilly, sparkly attire, fake teeth, fake hair, fake tans, and makeup that could transform their faces into someone in their 20’s. These children are usually misbehaving, disobedient, overdramatic and they are between the ages of four and six. Any person could see that this lifestyle is incredibly harmful to these children not just because of what it does to their appearance, but what happens when these little girls’ minds become tainted with the thoughts of needing to be beautiful and talented in order for people to like them.
Like or not we live in a society that judge people based on their appearance. Thus people spend millions and millions on beauty parlors and plastic surgeries to improve their physical appearance.
In American culture today, society's view of beauty is controlled by Hollywood, where celebrities are constantly in the lime-light. The media watches Hollywood's every move, and is quick to ridicule “A-listers” whenever they dare to gain a few pounds or to let an uncontrollable pimple show. The media has created a grossly distorted mental image of what should be considered beautiful, and with almost every junior high and high school-age girl reading and viewing this message, the idea has been instilled in them as well. This view of beauty is causing many teenage girls to become obsessed with a highly problematic and unattainable goal of perfection.
According to K. Nola Mokeyane, a professional writer who wants to pursue graduate studies in social work, “It's no secret that media has had an increasingly negative impact on the way teenage girls measure their personal image and beauty standards”. Social media such as Instagram, are mainly based on pictures of oneself and others. According to Joan Stern, an ABC news technology editor, there are about 150 million users on Instagram, this social app that is mainly based on followers, comments and likes on a picture. Instagram allows people to share their every moment through pictures and small captions, its like an ongoing documentary of ones life. This social app allows one to share and manipulate their photo through ‘filters’. This would give the impression that each and every user on instagram is judged based on their pictu...
...ounds, having good hair, and covering themselves in makeup are what beauty should be perceived as. Every time someone flips through a magazine, sees a picture of a model and wish to look like them, they are contributing to an idea they are supposedly disgusted by. People might think that they have never done anything to support this, but everyone has. Everybody feels the pressure from society, because it is pressure from us. They only way to stop this is by not supporting “things” that advance this idea and by not feeding into it, so in the end it will eventually die.