Media's Glamorous Influence

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Fashion models are becoming skinnier, while the average American woman is becoming plumper, and yet the malnourished supermodels with waists that you could wrap a child’s arm around are the prime examples of true beauty – according to today’s society via the media. Media, with the tiny models, the slender celebrities, and the idea that skinny is sexy is practically, yet sometimes unintentionally, creating eating disorders in the lives of young, insecure girls that cannot fully comprehend what they are doing to their selves. Social media along with the fashion and film industries are just a few outlets inadvertently encouraging eating disorders. Clacking their six-inch heels down the runway, always having their photograph taken, and appearing to live the elite and glamorous lifestyle are the models of the fashion industry. When super skinny women are chosen to model high fashion designs on the runway and in magazines, adolescents are given the message that this is the ideal body type that they must strive to attain. This is an unrealistic goal because fashion models weigh 20% less than the average women, and since young women are tuned into a celebrity culture that is full of stick-thin women, most girls begin to believe they are fat at a very young age. (Dying To Be Thin, McPhee) The constant repetition of the models that we see everyday changes our opinion of what is beautiful. The Professor of Psychology at Westleyan University, Ruth Striegel, states, “The repeated exposure to a particular image teaches you to like that particular image … We have become so used to seeing extremely thin women that it makes us believe that is what beauty is.” (Dying To Be Thin, McPhee) Evidently the repeated exposure to these thin images has incre... ... middle of paper ... ...loose the weight the fastest. (Stamford, 30) “It can turn into a competition,” Francesca Carrington Birch, 22, says. (Laurance, 1) These graphic websites are the cause of some young women’s eating disorders because they claim that this is okay, and it is not even as harmful as getting a tattoo. The young girls that are being exposed cannot even comprehend how wrong this is because it’s everywhere on the Internet. The fashion, television, and film industries, and the social media ruin self-image of young women, and since the self-image is linked to body weight, they are the direct influence on eating disorders. These industries must realize what they’ve done and start offering size diversity for models and actors, and stop posting “pro-eating disorder” websites on the internet before even more young women’s lives are destroyed before they’ve practically even began.

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