The mass media over the years has had such a profound role in creating an image on how women should be viewed. From their appearance to what their duties are in everyday life, the media has made sure to depict unrealistic images of women. These images have caused not only the male public but women themselves to believe that they must attain a certain kind of body or occupation to fit into society. Women often feel obligated and pressured to comply to this praised image of perfection. The media negatively influences the way women are portrayed in modern society and culture. This can severely impact the way a woman views her self worth and beauty. The ideal image that the media has created is to be exceptionally thin and tall. This is what the media considers to be beautiful. This ideal image can be seen on a daily basis just about everywhere on advertisements, which promote this unattainable image constantly. Research has proven that women tend to feel more insecure about themselves when they look at a magazine or television, which makes them feel self conscious(Mackler 25). The irony in this is that not even the women in the advertisements are as flawless as they appear to be. In order for a woman to appear in the mass media her image must be enhanced in several ways. A women is often airbrushed to conceal their actual skin but it does not end there. Through various computerized programs a woman's actual features are distorted until a false unrealistic image is reached. You can see in the media in almost all occasions women being sexualized. From beer to burger commercials women in the media are portrayed as sexual beings. If they are thin and meet society’s standards of beautiful they are considered marketable. Over the... ... middle of paper ... ... A woman should learn how to love herself despite the fact that her body does not look like that of a model. Whether you fit society’s standard of what beauty is or break the stereotype. “We live in an age where the mere idea Works Cited Mackler, Carolyn. Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image. Ed. Ophira Edut. Emeryville, CA: Seal, 2004. Print. Mankiller,Wilma, and others “Stereotypes”. The Reader companion To U.S Women History. Dec 1 1998: n.p.SIRS Issue Researcher Web. 26. Mar. 2014. . Romo, Samantha. "As Body Image Issues Grow in Society Be Aware of Medias Influence." The Crimson White 7 Mar. 2012: n. pag. Print. Silverstein, Alvin. So You Think You’re Fat? New York: Harpercollins. 1998. Print. Wolhart, Dayna. Anorexia & Bulimia. New York: Macmillan, 1998. Print. Bowden-Woodward, Kathy. A Negative Body Image. New York: Rosen, 1990. Print.
Like a blueprint or instruction manual, the objective of a rhetorical analysis is to dissect a written argument, identify its many parts, and explain how all of them come together to achieve a desired effect. Susan Bordo, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, wrote “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, published in 2003 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her essay examines how the media plays a pervasive role in how women view their bodies to the point where we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders. In “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, Bordo not only effectively incorporates numerous facts and statistics from her own research and the research of others; she also appeals to emotional realities of anxiety and inadequacy felt by women all over the world in regards to their body image. Ultimately, her intent is to critique the influence of the media on self-confidence and body image, and to remind her audience of the overt as well as subconscious messages they are receiving on a daily basis.
We hear sayings everyday such as “Looks don’t matter; beauty is only skin-deep”, yet we live in a decade that contradicts this very notion. If looks don’t matter, then why are so many women harming themselves because they are not satisfied with how they look? If looks don’t matter, then why is the media using airbrushing to hide any flaws that one has? This is because with the media establishing unattainable standards for body perfection, American Women have taken drastic measures to live up to these impractical societal expectations. “The ‘body image’ construct tends to comprise a mixture of self-perceptions, ideas and feelings about one’s physical attributes. It is linked to self-esteem and to the individual’s emotional stability” (Wykes 2). As portrayed throughout all aspects of our media, whether it is through the television, Internet, or social media, we are exploited to a look that we wish we could have; a toned body, long legs, and nicely delineated six-pack abs. Our society promotes a body image that is “beautiful” and a far cry from the average woman’s size 12, not 2. The effects are overwhelming and we need to make more suitable changes as a way to help women not feel the need to live up to these unrealistic standards that have been self-imposed throughout our society.
Graydon, Shari. "How the Media Keeps Us Hung Up on Body Image." Herizons 22.1 (2008): n. pag. Web. 5 Mar 2010.
Media is a wide term that covers many information sources including, television, movies, advertisement, books, magazines, and the internet. It is from this wide variety of information that women receive cues about how they should look. The accepted body shape and has been an issue affecting the population probably since the invention of mirrors but the invention of mass media spread it even further. Advertisements have been a particularly potent media influence on women’s body image, which is the subjective idea of one's own physical appearance established by observation and by noting the reactions of others. In the case of media, it acts as a super peer that reflects the ideals of a whole society. Think of all the corsets, girdles, cosmetics, hair straighteners, hair curlers, weight gain pills, and diet pills that have been marketed over the years. The attack on the female form is a marketing technique for certain industries. According to Sharlene Nag...
According to Beverly Ballaro, the combination of two trends, the technology-enabled media saturation of the American public, and the promotion by this media of highly unattainable body types, is largely responsible for an epidemic of body image pathologies afflicting American girls and women, as well as an increasing number of boys and men. She also mentions that the media has given certain images for each gender. Generally, for females the body image is extremely thin, and there is an emphasis on large breasts and for males, tall, slender, muscular and toned. For both genders, the most valued and appreciated appearance i...
Media is all around us from television to billboards, making it difficult not to be influence by media in one way or another. Unfortunately, media has influence women to believe that in order for women to be considered beautiful, they must for fill the characteristics of what media considers beautiful. Hurting women both psychologically and physically.
In conclusion, women should be comfortable in their own skin and shouldn’t feel compelled to be as thin as a model. Women need to feel appropriate and content in their own skin, and to not feel inferior to the model on TV or pasted in a magazine advertisement. We are all different and no woman is exactly the same and even the ones that seem to be picture perfect have flaws and love handles, and women need to realize that is the truth. So, by accepting one’s self for who they truly are and what they have accomplished in life is what is going to boost our self-esteem. Once the world understands this, then the media won’t have such a monumental affect on society.
Many people might think they aren't influenced by the media, but in actuality they are. Andersen in Thinking About Women writes “Each of us sees thousands of advertisements per day. Advertisements not only sell the products we use, but they also convey images of how we are to define ourselves, our relationships, and our needs”(57). Every time we turn the television on, we can expect roughly twenty minutes of an hour show to be commercials. These commercials are normally aimed at women and how to become young again. Aging in society for women is seen as a failure and according to media influence, if your age is showing then your careless of your self-image. So in return women will spend money on beauty products sworn to work, but never do. The perfect woman is unattainable because we come from different nationalities and because of these differences, women will never be able to copy-cat their idol making their self-esteem drop. With the media continuance to say women need to look a certain way, there will be more and more women trying to obtain the perfect body-image.
Dittmar, Helga. "How Do "body Perfect" Ideals in the Media Have a Negative Impact on Body Image and Behaviors? Factors and Processes Related to Self and Identity." : Sussex Research Online. N.p, 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
In this age, media is more pervasive than ever, with people constantly processing some form of entertainment, advertisement or information. In each of these outlets there exists an idealized standard of beauty, statistically shown to effect the consumer’s reflection of themselves. The common portrayal of women’s bodies in the media has shown to have a negative impact on women and girls. As the audience sees these images, an expectation is made of what is normal. This norm does not correspond to the realistic average of the audience. Failing to achieve this isolates the individual, and is particularly psychologically harmful to women. Though men are also shown to also be effected negatively by low self-esteem from the media, there remains a gap as the value of appearance is seen of greater significance to women, with a booming cosmetic industry, majority of the fashion world, and the marketing of diet products and programs specifically targeting women.
Media as a tool that is worldwide can easily influence how one is seen in the modern society. It can help women improve their representation and stop the creation of strong stereotypes. The motivation that drives stereotyping of women is the image of an ideal woman. According to Stephanie Nicholl Berberick, who established a work in The New York Sociologist, the media exploit women into portraying characters that do not reflect the true image of women, which leads to a wrong message being expressed to the society. Women portrayed as skinny and sexy would create stereotypes that can influence other women that are not related to media (Berberick). When women portrayed such roles, they tend to affect the society into thinking that all women are similar. However that is not the case, as all women have different personalities and attributes that make them different from other women. Women should not bother about men’s ideal thinking of how women should look and behave as women have the same rights as men and they are no different from each other. However, the issue is that media chooses to only display the ideal image of women rather than the true self. Even so, this issue can be fixed if women choose to gain a better and less exposed representation in the media, it is possible that stereotyping women can be reduced to a small
The image that the media has created of women through advertisements, magazines and movies, has significant affects on how the public views women. The mass media has created a specific look for women to have by portraying that women should look young, be slim, have flawless skins and meet all the beauty components of the society (Davtyan-Gevorgyan 2016). The women in the media are used in association with household or sex objects and will lack important roles (Ibid). In advertisements, women are more likely to be have specific roles to gain the audiences attention, such as: laying down sexually and touching themselves or the products (D’Enbeau 2011, 55). However, majority of the ads also restrict women to home, show them as dependent on men and use them as sex objects (Ibid).
Schaefer talks about media from the feminist perspective and the beauty myth. Chapter six talked about mass media and how there is a stereotypical portrayal of women. One way that women are being shown as “ Being shallow and obsessed with beauty” (137), they are also portrayed unclothed or damaged. When the media portrays a female like that it is very sad and makes it seem like women do not care about their bodies, but the truth is they really care about these things. Some people especially men may like what they see and the type of figure that the female has and will try to encourage other women to be like that. By men doing this is can make a female feel very uncomfortable and sometimes a women wished that the media would not post and even talk about women like that because they feel like they need to meet society's standards. In chapter seven it talked about the beauty myth from a female and male perspective. “ Both overweight and anorexic people are assumed to be weak in character , slaves to their appetites or to media images” ( 152). Personally I feel that they become weak in character because they have so much pressure on them to be a different person and to look like others, so they finally give in. A person can handle only so much pressure from others. Looking at the beauty myth from a feminist perspective the sociologist noted that women feel very uncomfortable with themselves and lack confidence. They lack confidence within themselves and think that they need to change their appearance. In men a lot of them undergo surgeries to change also who they are to meet the beauty standards that the society has
Thus, the mass media promotes an ideal image of what a beautiful and desirable woman should look like, influencing women around the world to model after. An example is the Glamour magazine survey: 75% of women aged 18-35 were reported to feel that they were too fat; 45% of underweight women felt they were too fat; almost 50% o... ... middle of paper ... ... ay’s context is pursuing the best of everything. Desperate times that make image no longer important do not prevail in the modern day.
Women and girls seem to be more affected by the mass media than do men and boys. Females frequently compare themselves to others, finding the negative rather than looking at the positive aspects of their own body. The media’s portrayal of the ideal body type impacts the female population far more than males, however, it is not only the mass media that affects women, but also influence of male population has on the female silhouette too.