Thin-Ideal Internalization

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The policing of women’s bodies is, and has been, a staple in western culture. Beauty ideals and standards dictate young women’s behaviors and attitudes towards themselves and other women around them. According to mainstream media a woman’s value is directly tied to her perceived sexual attractiveness, which is directly correlated to her body size. Through the close association between weight and worth of women, comes the rise of a culture of dieting and what is defined by J.Kevin Thompson in his article “Thin-Ideal Internalization: Mounting Evidence for a New Risk Factor for Body-Image Disturbances and Eating Pathology” as ‘thin- ideal internalization’ or the “internalization ideals of attractiveness” (Thompson 2001). Though the various lengths …show more content…

Objectification can be defined as viewing a human being for the use and pleasure of others, reducing them to the status of an object. Existing in western society as a woman comes with the assumption that one’s body is constantly being observed, evaluated, and potentially objectified. Self-objectification is the socialization to prioritize other’s views and ideas about them so that they are integrated into their own views about themselves, ultimately seeing themselves more as objects to be scrutinized.In the article “Bones, body parts, and sex appeal: An analysis of #thinspiration images on popular social media”, Jannath Ghaznavi outlines that “exposure to objectified images portraying the thin ideal has been shown to increase self-objectification, weight related appearance anxiety, body dissatisfaction,and disordered eating” (Ghaznavi, 2015). The presence of female beauty standards in the media are omnipresent, creating the idea that women should be physically appealing and act as a driving force for self-objectification, as well as the objectification of women by other women. Similarly, self-objectification is a major component in eating disorders, as one woman notes from the study done by Nick Fox, Katie Ward, and Alan O’Rourke, “Pro-Anorexia, Weight-Loss Drugs, and the Internet: An ‘Anti-Recovery’ Explanatory Model of Anorexia”, “With weight loss come the approval of these people [parents, sexual partners, other women], giving a high to the ana, giving her a reason to please them more and go further.” (Fox, 2005). This young woman is outlining how the ‘ana’, or the young woman with anorexia, feels compelled to lose weight in

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