African American Beauty Standards

The obsession to lose weight is sometimes due to women being continuously pressured by some influential factors. These factors include models, physical attractiveness or even being peer pressured by a member of their family. However the most powerful factor is models in magazines that happen to have what people call perfect bodies. Models are responsible for human beings craving the ‘perfect’ body. The media is responsible for young girls becoming self conscious after buying thin Barbie dolls, thinking being skinny, fake and blonde is the correct way to go.

Third is the loss of power among women in today's society. According to unwomne.org in America there are

Females are constantly lowering their self-esteem because they don’t feel as pretty as the girls in magazines and they spend most of their time comparing themselves to celebrities and models. Society and Social media have high expectations towards the looks of a woman. They expect for a female to be fit, thin, and have a pretty face. Social media is everywhere continuously producing weight loss commercials showing fit bodies, recommending diet pills and nutritional shakes.

So many girls are forced into being fake, and they get really unhealthy; such as depression, eating disorders, and even sometimes suicide. These girls try to put so much make-up on to look nice, but they look plain disgusting and mistreated. Worst, too much make-up can put dangerous chemicals in your body, and it can even give you cancer sometimes! Are beauty pageants really worth cancer? No.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, almost every woman was concerned with obtaining the desired curves of the time. “Buxom ladies tortured their flesh to achieve the hourglass figure… all laced themselves so tightly that they distorted their figure into the exaggerated ‘S’ shape associated with the era... the ‘health’ corset produced a hand span waist…” (Thomas). The health corsets on the early 1900s actually allowed the wearer to breathe, a new privilege every other corset did not allow.

Unrealistic Expectations of the Beauty Industry The idea of beauty is said to be intangible and completely subjective. Beauty is defined as a quality present in something that brings satisfaction to the mind. Advertisements and billboards often display an image of what society has deemed to be perfection, although the majority of average people feel this image is unattainable.

Young women strive for the perfect body, even if they have to damage their body and emotional well being. Girls turn to eating disorders to solve their “problems”. They make delusions in their heads that show that these horrible disorders are helping her body. Anorexia and Bulimia are two of the best known eating disorders found in young girls around the world. Bulimia Nervosa is a possibly deadly eating disorder that damages your emotional well-being that we need to be looking for in loved ones around us.

Many images in media makes girls to be dissatisfied with their images since they believe that other individuals view the idealized images as desirable (Haugen & Musser, 2011). Most of the media images are stereotypical and not real but girls’ constant exposure to those images has led them to seek to attain them since they are made to believe they are ideal. These images affect the girls negatively since they will be dissatisfied with their bodies and have low self-esteem. This influences them to associate with irresistible urge to alter their body images so as to conform to what they deem ideal. They wrongly think that physical appearance is indicative of personal traits.

In Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender, Kathy Peiss argues that cosmetics transformed society’s criteria and standard of beauty which segmented the industry and heightened cultural constructions of gender, class, and race. Before cosmetics were commercialized, make-up was solely worn by prostitutes, thus it was considered offensive, degrading, and improper. As the market grew, it began to represent sexuality, femininity, and womanhood. The cosmetic industry popularized the idea that beauty could only be achieved by wearing specific products, thus persuading women to believe they needed to wear makeup at all times. It led to the assertion it was a woman 's duty to be beautiful to her husband, the world,

According to a survey done by Jesse Fox, Ph.D., 80% of women feel bad about themselves just by looking in the mirror (Dreisbach). This has happened because of social media being changed to make girls feel like they need to have a certain body shape. Models and celebrities in magazines and media show unrealistic beauty and it contributes to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and much more (Seventeen magazine). Media has put lots of stress on women throughout history with changing body shapes. A survey done by Dove found results that 9 out of 10 women want to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance.

All of the makeup, hair products, perfumes, etc., are completely hurting women’s overall body image and self-esteem. Trying to live up to such nearly impossible standards is so taxing on women. Tyler is a six-foot tall, beauty, who has posed for Maxim magazine in just her undergarments, yet she found it important to tell young women not to look up to super models and to embrace their curves. I found this so interesting since she has actually been considered to have supermodel stature and looks, yet often jokes about her ‘freakishly tall stature’ or being an ‘amazon’ or ‘giant’. Her tone is definitely one of a sarcastic feminist.

Have you ever wanted to be one hundred percent content with your life and the way you are living? In American Beauty, the 1999 comedic-drama, Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a husband and father who is fed up with his boring, day to day life, and quits his job deciding to recreate himself as a pot-smoking, free-spirited man with no worries or obligations. Through the use of satire of the American middle-class, the movie portrays personal satisfaction; social romance, materialism, self-liberation, and redemption. The main argument presented is that success is found when one secures the things that make them happy whether it be materialistic or idealistic. This movie is a phenomenal example of one persons’ idea of a successful American versus another idea.