The Relationship Between Television Viewing and Young Women Perception of Their Bodies

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No one is born with the instinctive sense of what constructs beauty and ideal body shape. Instead we are brought into a world that teaches us how to embody cultural standards of beauty by which we must adhere to. The average teenage girl spends a considerable amount of time watching television shows and advertisements plastered with thin body ideals. Therefore, television presents a considerable amount of information and images to suggest how we need to look, in order to succeed in life and be popular. They are very boisterous when it comes to forcing thin ideals on young women but seem quiet when it comes to the negative effects. This paper was written to explore the relationship between television viewing and young women’s perception of their bodies.
In every home there sits an unknown intruder lurking around just waiting to contaminate the minds of young women. The intruder is square in shape and ranges in sizes 10 to 73 inches. This meddlesome squatter I speak of is non-other than your television box. The average adolescent in the United States watches about 20,000 television commercials a year (Gentile & Walsh, 1999). With that being said we never stop to realize just how much time we spend or how the viewed content is affecting us. Let’s face it televisions are everywhere; in our homes, in the stores and sports bars. Fact of the matter is television is the most popular form of mass media and that’s because it has the greatest mass appeal, acceptance and is convenience.
Corporations exploit and use television as an outlet to market their products; they see television commercials as an elaborate gateway which allows more and more companies to buy into the artificial beauty augmentations in order to gain financially. W...

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Barrie, G. (2012). Media and appearance. The Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Appearance, 455-467.
Bessenoff, G. R. (2006). Can the media affect us? Social comparison, self-discrepancy, and the thin ideal. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30, 239-251.
Yamamiya, Y., Cash, T. F., Melnyk, S. E., Posavac, H. D., & Posavac, S. S. (2005). Women's exposure to thin-and-beautiful media images: body image effects of media-ideal internalization and impact- reduction interventions. Body Image, 2, 74-80.
Posavac, H. D., Posavac, S. S., & Posavac, E. J. (1998). Exposure to media images of female attractiveness and concern with body weight amoung young women. Sex Roles, 38(3/4), 187-201.

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