Essay On Media And Body Image

1212 Words3 Pages

Macy Friedman
English 11 CP
Mrs. Keys
19 May 2014
The Media's Effect on Men’s Body Image
Within every time period humans go through, the influence of media on all aspects of our society has spread everywhere. The media can change the portrayal of models in magazines, television, and every other type of advertising out there. By portraying unrealistic models, studies can come to the conclusion that it causes a negative effect on men leading to taking steroids, self-esteem problems, and possibly even sometimes more dramatic actions such as suicide. While reading an online article from Psycology.org I found that the media only creates a large amount of problems to show what the ideal of a man is; “In fact, Ms Fawkner’s research has discovered that 68 per cent of steroid users contributed their usage to its enhancement of body image and other appearance related issues” (Gregor). Since advertisement has been brought to the world in the early 1900’s, not only women but men have become self conscious, and are highly affected by the media.
The media alters the human body within magazines and all over social media to unrealistic images. The media needs to help acknowledge the impractical things they are doing and show off humans in a more healthy way. Body image is not as much how one views others, but it is how one views them self, and thinks how others view them, “The more teens thought about the images and compared themselves critically to images they saw in magazines, the more likely they were to have problems with body image and eating disorders” (Brookeshire). For the study that was taken to come to those conclusions was done by taking around 200 boys and 200 hundred girls. The study started with her asking them about their reading h...

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...most of the time. Finish your task swiftly or be better at your job.” The reason people find skinny individuals more able to do things is because of the media. Although it is unhealthy to become obese, it is also ugly to starve and, and take steroids to live up to the men and women in the magazines.
No matter what time period humans go through, they all feel self conscious to a certain extent. Although we could simulate that the media doesn’t affect us, it always will. Until society puts a more realistic figure of what humans should look like. There will always be pressure to look better, stronger, and more handsome than the average man we see walking around today. Portraying the unrealistic models creates such an unenthusiastic effect on men today. Overall, there is no doubt that the media are out of control and failing to show body image of all shapes and sizes.

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