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Media's influence on body image and behavior
Sociological perspectives in mean girls
Sociological perspectives in mean girls
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Unrealistic Standards “Watch where you’re going fat ass!”. Quoted from the famous 2004 movie, Mean Girls, a high school girl hollers this at main character, Regina George, for gaining weight. Being in the middle of the school cafeteria, Regina gets laughed at and ridiculed in front of her peers. While this scene is a laughing stock for people at first watch, it actually does much more for our society than provide a couple of chuckles. It subconsciously instills a line of thinking in adolescence saying that acquiring weight is an abominable thing to do. This is just one example of how the media, in which society views, molds the perception of American beauty in adolescents. The American culture today, through different mediums, displays the message that the ideal female is to be skinny, tall, …show more content…
The truth is that no one actually looks like the photos we see in magazines: literally. In a TV commercial brought on by Dove beauty, the brand revealed the truth behind the camera. The commercial demonstrated how an editor can take an image of a person, completely alter/edit the photo, and turn the individual into someone else. By enhancing the eyes, plumping the lips, volumizing the hair, and thinning the neck, you wouldn’t even recognize the original model. In addition to photo shop, magazines also instill beauty expectations through their words. For example, there is no doubt in my mind that I cannot walk to the supermarket, go to the checkout registrars, and pick up a “How to loose 10lbs fast!” magazine. Needless to say, even the models in these advertisements are not that thin. With the flick of a finger an editor can take off a few inches on the waist or create the trending “thigh gap” adolescents strive for. These magazines, once again, ingrain the notion that you should not be content with your weight and probably need to hop on a
In the film Mean Girls, teenager Cady Heron was home-schooled in Africa by her zoologist parents. When her family moves to the U.S., Cady finally gets a taste of public school and learns a vital lesson about the cruelty involved in the tightly knit cliques of high school. She eventually finds herself being drug into a group of “the worst people you will ever meet”, The Plastics; and soon realizes how they came to get their name.
The film Mean Girls is about a young girl, Cady Heron, born and raised in Africa by her zoologist parents, who were also her homeschool teachers for sixteen years. When Cady moves to the United States, she enrolls in a public school for the first time. Here she realizes that high school students have the same hierarchy as the animals she observed in Africa. The lowest ranking group in this high school hierarchy is the outcasts, who also happen to be Cady’s first friends in the U.S. The highest on the high school food chain are the “plastics”. The “plastics”, are the most popular girls in school. The plastic’s notice Cady’s charming personality and stunning good looks and invite her to join their clique. In order to avenge her first friends,
Paige Bushnell Gender Development Film Review #1 For my first film review, I chose to watch and discuss Mean Girls, a movie about a previously homeschooled girl from Africa, Cady. Cady is portrayed as the stereotypical shy and naive “new girl” who is introduced to the pecking order of public high schools and the stereotypical cliques with which the student body divides itself when she befriends outcasts, Janis and Damian. Janis and Damian become Cady’s genuine friends, and we see examples of gender stereotypes and sexual orientation immediately with them. Damian is her hysterical gay friend, who Cady makes the mistake of mentioning is “too gay to function” in front of the Plastics, after hearing her other friend Janis say it.
Cosmopolitan is the queen of women’s magazines. Her royal court also consists of Glamour, Red Book, Vogue, and other smaller magazines. These magazines demonstrate these beauty standards. Naomi Wolf researched on body image and found a survey on this topic by none other than Glamour. Seventy-five percent of women ages 18-35 thought they were fat. Ironically enough, only 25% were medically overweight. What is sadder is that 45% of the underweight females claim they were too fat. These magazines are setting up the ideal women standards: skinny, 5’7” or taller, straight long hair, s...
People in magazines are absolutely stunning— to be like them is what men and women all over the world could only dream of. But little do they know, these models are not what they seem to be. Women are plastered with makeup and body alterations to make them “unrealistically thin” (“Beauty and Body”). Even for men, magazine editors alter pictures to make their bodies strong and fit. Although body expectations are set too high, specialists are seeking a way to set the bar lower.
Advertisers use women that are abnormally thin, and even airbrush them to make them appear thinner. These advertisers promote a body image that is completely unrealistic and impossible to achieve (Dohnt & Tiggemann, 2006b). It has been instilled in these advertisers’ minds that a thinner model will sell more (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2003). Media has a direc...
In this film we see many typical high school behaviors such as cliques, cattiness, and popularity (or lack there of) issues. Many scenes in this movie have an array of stereotypes. Sometimes they are clearly stated and others just seen through attitudes of the actors/actresses character. Also through out we follow the main clique “the plastics” and they have this image they have to uphold. Be perfect, skinny, the best at everything, and in sync with everything they do; or they wont uphold their status. I chose this film because I think it shows a lot of what we have learned in this course and how it is in real life. Clearly the film is exaggerated but much of
The most fashionable, sought after magazines in any local store are saturated with beautiful, thin women acting as a sexy ornament on the cover. Commercials on TV feature lean, tall women promoting unlimited things, from new clothes to as simple as a toothbrush. The media presents an unrealistic body type for girls to look up to, not images we can relate to in everyday life. When walking around in the city, very few people look like the women in commercials, some thin, but nothing similar to the cat walk model. As often as we see these flawless images float across the TV screen or in magazines, it is hard to remember they are not real and hardly anyone really looks similar to them....
Fashion models don’t need to be thin, they need to be diverse and healthy at whatever weight that is. Not everyone is supposed to be thin, some women are big boned and curvy, others are naturally slim and small boned, some are tall, others are short, some are light skinned and others are darker. So many diverse looks exist in the world today and the fashion industry need to change their perception of perfect. Body image in our society is out of control. We have young men and women comparing themselves to unrealistic models and images in the media and feeling bad about the way their own bodies look because they somehow don’t measure up. (Dunham, 2011) The struggle for models to be thin has led to models becoming anorexic or bulimic, untimely deaths, and inferiority complexes. Even worse is the fact that they influence a whole generation of young women who look up to these models and think “thin” is how they are supposed to be. They influence what we buy, how we eat and what we wear. Why has this specific group captured our attention so much? Why do we seem to be so fascinated in their lives, to the point where we try to look and act just like them? The media is largely to be blamed for this, many people believe the media has forced the notion that everything supermodels do is ideal. Others believe that the society is to be blamed because we have created a fascination with their lives. There are many opinions, and I agree with both of these specific opinions. We allow ourselves to be captivated by these people's lives, and the media portrayal of their lives seem to also enthrall us. (Customessaymeister, 2013) Despite the severe risks of forcing models to become too thin, designers, fashion editors, fashion brands and agencies still ...
One could argue advertisements with ultra thin models helps motivate those who are at an unhealthy weight, however, the measures these overweight people take to achieve a “perfect bod” are often dangerous and fatal. It is just as unhealthy to be underweight as it is to be overweight, except society tends to brush the health hazards regarding the former under the rug. Additionally, it is possible that companies, such as Victoria’s Secret, are capitalizing on American’s obsession with “the supposed desirability of thinness” by marketing a certain body type that meets a standard of glamorized thinness (Campos). Furthermore, one should not mistaken the outcry from this advertisement as skinny shamming. Due to thinness being perceived as “a kind of privilege” that stems from beauty ideals, overtly representing thinness is not required, as it already occurs frequently.
The standard way of thinking while looking through magazines is to compare ourselves to the people we see in them. Innumerable teenage girls assume that the media’s ideal beauty is unrealistically thin women. Looking up to adults as role models, we are constantly influenced to be on a diet, to not eat as much, and to feel poorly about yourself if you aren't thin. Growing up with this expectation to be skinny, some women develop bulimia, anorexia, and binge eating. Americans today tend to believe that we can be as skinny as models if we just eat less, work out more, and get plastic surgery. Consequently, with technology growing, you can now alter a photo using an application called photoshop. Photoshop is a tool commonly used in magazines to enhance a photo to it more appealing to the consumers. The problem is, that many teenage girls don't notice the subtle changes the photo has gone through. Therefore unrealistic beauty standards women have been given are what makes us have negative body images.
"Cold, shiny, hard, PLASTIC," said by Janice referring to a group of girls in the movie Mean Girls. Mean Girls is about an innocent, home-schooled girl, Cady who moves from Africa to the United States. Cady thinks she knows all about survival of the fittest. But the law of the jungle takes on a whole new meaning when she enters public high school and encounters psychological warfare and unwritten social rules that teen girls deal with today. Cady goes from a great friend of two "outcasts", Janice and Damien to a superficial friend of the "plastics", a group of girls that talks about everyone behind their back and thinks everyone loves them. Adolescent egocentrism and relationships with peers are obviously present throughout the film. I also noticed self worth in relationships, parenting styles, and juvenile delinquency throughout Mean Girls.
I had come across an ad about a modeling school in the town I lived in and I decided that I wanted to go to modeling school. My mother enrolled me at there, and after my mother spent hundreds of dollars on books, clothes, and on photo shoots, so that I could follow a dream of being this beautiful model like I seen in these magazines. But what they didn’t tell us was, in order for me to be a model I would have to go through great lengths to stay at a certain weight to walk and talk and mold me into someone I wasn’t. The demands of staying thin and eating healthy, the do’s and the do not’s were extremely stressful on me. I found myself doing what it took to weigh under 120 lbs. and that meant not eating heathy but starving myself. The reality is this, beauty is within not what is seen on the outside. The media tells us different, and the advertisements that we see say that it is. According to an article written by Taylor M. Chapman, “Women in American Media: A Culture of Misperception”, states “Being a woman in America’s media-obsessed culture also means living up to the beauty standard that advertisers set in place. Being beautiful is, in American society, the most important role a woman should fulfill”
"Many of the models shown on television, advertisements, and in other forms of popular media are approximately twenty percent below ideal body weight, thus meeting the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa" ("Female Body Image..." 1). We are trapped in a constant cycle of raising the image standards higher and lowering the age in which insecurities begin. "[Tiggeman (2003)]... found that women who read fashion magazines displayed higher levels of thin-ideal internalization, which is a powerful risk factor for development of weight anxiety and disordered eating patterns." Not only is the media-set beauty standard unrealistic, it is dangerous to the mental, as well as physical, health of those influenced. The numbers of eating disorder patients have skyrocketed over time, almost as if it is a direct relation to media use and the involvement of media in an individual's life. We live in a society that is centered around celebrities and hearing the press talk about a woman gaining five pounds like it is breaking news. With all our focus aimed towards their every move and appearance, it is hard not to become obsessed with our own. The problem of self shaming and unhappiness with one's body is stemmed from the distorted image we have been given by our society of what one is required to be. "Most companies that target women in the media actually attempt to foster social comparison with idealized images, in order to motivate women to buy products that will bring them closer to the ideal" (Female Body Image..." 1). Rather than finding the extreme insecurities which are an immediate result of news, television, movies, as well as advertisements sickening, large companies and corporations actually feed on to the virus overtaking the female mind by convincing women to buy their product in order to make
To most people the movie Mean Girls is simply a silly teen chick flick and is not good for anything but pure entrainment. Even though Mean Girls is slightly dramatized, high school in reality is perfectly portrayed through this movie. Every high school varies but there is always a domain group of students. The socially powerful are the rich and beautiful girls and everyone else are the loyal subjects to their castle. However, there is a twist in Mean Girls, the message is actually positive. Mean Girls is sending a message that women should not criticize one another to feel empowerment, it is unattractive to men to be mindless, and that White Americans have domains over other races. This movie also implies that nothing wrong with being different from what society accepts.