Body Image Analysis

The Media and Body Image One’s body is unique and everyone has their opinion about the ideal, healthy perfect body. In today’s society there has been a rise on obsessing over the thin ideal body which many people think that media plays a role to it. “The Role in the Media in Body Image Concerns Among Women” by Shelly Grabe, Janet Shibley Hyde, and L. Monique Ward was published in 2008 explains how the increase of thin-ideal body has greatly affected women's view on their body. While Amanda Vogel’s article Body Image: The Impact of Social Media published in 2015 explains the positive side of the issue.

It is clear that society is responsible for cultivating a community in which beauty and thinness are interdependent. According to Lintott, “the average woman is preoccupied, if not obsessed, with thinness” (66). She argues that this comes directly from exposure to modern media, which “bombards us with images of impossibly thin models and exceedingly skinny actresses, among whom the rates of eating disorders are extremely high” (qtd. in Lintott 67).

From an early age, we are exposed to the western culture of the “thin-ideal” and that looks matter (Shapiro 9). Images on modern television spend countless hours telling us to lose weight, be thin and beautiful. Often, television portrays the thin women as successful and powerful whereas the overweight characters are portrayed as “lazy” and the one with no friends (“The Media”). Furthermore, most images we see on the media are heavily edited and airbrushed

Body image basically has a perception component, how one visualizes the size and shape of the body; an attitudinal component, what one thinks about one’s body both cognitively and affectively and how committed one is to a thin ideal and behavioural manifestations related to body image.(Botta, 1998)

Have you ever looked at an image on Social Media, seen a movie, commercial, or show and looked at yourself and felt ashamed or unsatisfied. Many women around the world have struggled with their weight and how others see them. Media images of ridiculously thin women are everywhere – television shows, movies, popular magazines. The Media often glamorizes a very thin body for women. These are also the pictures that are being shown to teenagers at a time of their lives that they are particularly susceptible to peer pressure and looking good(Tabitha Farrar).

Magazines, TV, music, books, and movies help one make decisions and take action whether consciously or subconsciously. This large sphere of influence, however, is not always beneficial for those who suffer victim to these forms of public entertainment. The medias version of beauty, shames those who are considered overweight and scares almost everyone into thinking that being thin is the only way to be pretty. Jolene Hart emphasis how important beauty is in the American culture in her book Eat Pretty: Nutrition for Beauty, Inside and Out: “There’s a multi-billion-dollar industry built on helping us achieve greater physical beauty” (Hart 33). By creating this manipulated and untrue image of beauty, the American culture encourages eating disorders like anorexia (undereating) and sustains obesity (overeating).

Do you ever wonder if you see what everyone else see when you look in the mirror? Everyone has a different perspective and taste in what they see and like. I do not believe everyone sees the same things, there are way too many different personalities and perspectives in the world for everyone to see and think the same way. Body image is huge in the media and the way people look and judge different people.

Every day, there are girls who look in the mirror and all they see is fat and ugly. Every day, boys look at themselves and say, “too scrawny”, “to fat”, “not enough muscles”. Every day people starve themselves just to fit into society’s mold of what the perfect person looks like. Every day we see stick thin models and buff male celebrities on television, in advertisements, and in other forms of media. The media influences people all the time to have a negative body image and nobody is doing anything to stop it.

This constant fixation on physical perfection has created unreasonable beauty standards for women, ones we cannot possibly achieve on our own. Such standards permeate all forms of popular media, particularly fashion magazines and advertisements. Women are bombarded with the notion that we must be thin in order to be desirable. These images project an

“In the past, eating disorders were generally considered to be confined to young white females from middle-to-upper class families living in Western societies” (Caradas 112). Both studies exploit the false stereotypes associated with eating disorders and culture. Both parties believe that non Western cultures are being influenced by the “slim is beautiful” idea. Each view points out the false misconception that non Western cultures traditional ideas of being thick is related to health is protecting them from eating disorders. Studies prove all ethnicities have shown concern towards body shape and eating attitudes in recent years around the

The fat shaming was left at the door when a person walked in. “Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance” by Mary Ray Worley expresses that today’s society of people reject fat people. Worley gives incite to some studies that show body size can be determined by their genetic makeup

Anorexia survivor Erin Treloar said “my eating disorder was perpetuated by retouched magazine photos”. Beauty standards has such a giant effect on women emotionally, psychologically and physically. The pressure on women to be thin leads to unhealthy weight loss practices (Battle & Brownell, 1996), eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia (Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-Dunn, 1998) and low self-esteem (Tiggeman & Stevens,

The idolization of slim figures are blinding teenagers to believe it is a necessity to practice these methods. As Blaid describes society’s perspective, “If you develop an eating disorder when you are already thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. If you develop an eating disorder when you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story,”(26-27) this is to point out how society has manipulated the point of view on health conditions to be viewed as a

Western society has been seized by twisted and unusual opinions about attractiveness, wellness, respectability, and hunger. Author Roberta Seid wrote the essay “Too ‘Close to the Bone’: The Historical Context for Women’s Obsession with Slenderness” in 1994, while she was a lecturer in the Program for the Study of Women and Men in Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In the essay, Seid covers the complex issue of the society's unhealthy obsessions with food, which can cause physical and emotional destruction. Although American culture bears distorted beliefs about weight, Seid deems that health should be held as the utmost importance.

In the essay Pressure To Conform there are many societal points covered that women face every day in regards to their looks. She covers the media stand point as well as the medical stand point. Many of the things she talks about I see and hear women talk about every day. In her thesis statement she points out the “the twin obsession of thinness and indulgence” (p-222). I agree whole heartedly that magazines and media are one of the biggest factors in why women face so many body image issues in today’s society.