Media Body Image

“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

become younger, fair skinned women become sun-kissed, and women without muscles become more defined. Editing is used to rid of the unwanted and unnecessary traits while enhancing or creating new ones, predominantly for the purpose of advertisers to sell the audience a product or an idea, making it more favorable to the eye. Harrison and Hefner (2014) conducted a study in which they showed twenty sets of photos to adolescents. One set of photos were of a younger African American woman. The original was unretouched and the other was retouched, portraying the woman as thinner with a larger bust and lighter skin. Another set of photos were of a young male, again one was unretouched and the other altered to give the man more defined muscles and tan skin. The participants were separated into groups, the first received unretouched photographs, the second received retouched photographs, and the third were aware of the retouched photographs. The findings of this study expressed that “objectified body consciousness and decreases in body self-esteem were observed only for adolescents who viewed images that had been explicitly identified as retouched” (Harrison & Hefner, 2014, p. 146). The research suggests that making an audience aware of retouching leads to recognition of imperfections, including the imperfections of the self, inadvertently lowering an individual’s self-esteem. Interestingly, the same study also found that retouched photos receive appraisal from the audience, assuming that those with higher status are often those having photos retouched.
While advertisement companies are selling their products, society is being filled with unrealistic standards.

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

image.
Media influence and how it relates to eating disorders has become a popular area of study, progressing heavily within the last decade. Eating disorders are abnormal eating habits including any form of fasting, binge eating, vomiting, taking laxatives, etc. Lopez-Guimera et al. (2014) compiled research from multiple experimental studies, each arguing that at least in some fashion, women’s exposure to television, commercials, and magazines has resulted in heightened body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal, and enhanced eating disorders in women. Media prevails to invest its audience with messages that hold arbitrary values and manufactured perceptions. The promoted messages and images present an idea that successfulness and attractiveness correlate specifically with being thinner than the average person. “These are the images that set the current standards of beauty and sexuality that are seen as real and normative, but are actually impossible to attain” (Lopez-Guimera et al., 2014, p. 389). The idea has inclined people to become dominated by their weight, leading to anorexia and bulimia in an attempt obtain a standard that cannot be accomplished.