Women Body Image Essay

Four out of five women today struggle with self-esteem and body image issues, although this isn’t surprising. The world is obsessed with slim, yet curvy, women, and surrounds girls with images of women with impossible bodies, causing young women to set unattainable goals and then rely heavily on unsafe dieting supplements, plastic surgery, and extreme dieting to control their weight. Several areas can be especially damaging, including: advertising, popular culture, and the fashion and music industries. Surrounding young women with images of unrealistic and unattainable figures causes these unusual body types to be normalized, which in turn, contributes to the extreme dieting culture that these expectations have created.
Advertisements, things that take up most of television air time and magazine pages, are a crucial part in how women view themselves. The purpose of an advertisement is to sell a product or service, and what better way to do that than to post images of photo-shopped models with the slogan: “You can be like this if you buy this!” Not only does this trick young women into buying a product, hopeful that it will actually

Advertisements depict airbrushed and photo-shopped women, telling viewers that all they have to do to look like the models is to buy the product advertised. However, the harsh reality is that these body images cannot be attained by the most popular new product on the market, and women only ever get close to these unrealistic body images by unhealthy and drastic dieting habits. Women are unaware as they buy into these body images, and as social media and other forms of media inundate and bombard them with these “beautiful” bodies, women become less and less happy with their own bodies. Thus, it comes as no surprise that four out of five women struggle with body image and self-esteem