THE MEDIA AS AN INFLUENCE
- Media messages such as advertising and celebrity spotlights help our culture define what is beautiful and what is good, the medias power over our development of self-esteem and body image can be incredibly strong.
- Media emphasizes the importance of appearances. If you watch a television show it is easier to name five lean actresses than to name five that are overweight.
- According to The New York Times a study in Fiji was done to study the eating attitudes and behaviors of Fijian adolescent girls prior to regional television exposure. Fiji has a media-naive society. They exhibited a significant increase in disordered eating attitudes and behaviors.
- In a 2006 Wesleyan journal article there is a study that exposed young women to images of slender models in fashion magazines and measured body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, mood, and self-esteem before and immediately after exposure. Most women experienced increase in body dissatisfaction and emotional distress.
The Illusion of Modern beauty
Magazine Covers
"47% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported wanting to lose weight because of magazine pictures."
"69% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of a perfect body shape."
"Almost 80 percent of the girls who made themselves vomit were frequent readers of health and fitness magazines."
"Of those who used appetite suppressants or weight-control pills, about 73 percent were frequent readers of these magazines."
"Of those who used appetite suppressants or weight-control pills, about 73 percent were frequent readers of these magazines."
- Magazine Articles contribute to body dissatisfaction and lead to improper eating.
- Fashion magazines significantly impact the process of identity development in young women because this is normally the stage when women are gender-role learning, trying to form their identity, and figuring out their values and beliefs.
- According to Rader Programs, some of the pictures of models in magazines do not really exist. Some of the time the computer actually modifies sets of different body parts.
The Pressure from Celebrities, Models, & Toys
Barbie
"90% of all girls ages 3-11 have a Barbie doll, an early role model with a figure that is unattainable in real life"
Researchers used a computer to generate barbie-doll proportions in a woman and found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body. Her feet would be so disproportionately small that her chest would pull her forward onto her toes and she would have to walk on all fours. Her waist would have the same circumference as her head and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. If a real woman were built like that, they would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition.
Barbie gives children a belief that her beauty and body size associate with happiness. Barbie has an excessive amount of accessories to make her set for life: A boyfriend Ken, a convertible, multiple jobs, and a glamorous wardrobe to name a few. It is vital to emphasize that barbies are pretend during a time that children are seeking to be like the role models around them.
Rader Programs states that when preschoolers were offered dolls identical in every respect except weight, they preferred the thin doll nine out of ten times.
Celebrities & Models
Media has widely been known as a factor to the increased obsession to be thin. Most children spend a lot of their time in front of the television. The T.V. spends countless hours showing advertisements telling us to be beautiful and lose weight. Advertisements are created to do one thing: get you to buy or support a specific product. Overweight characters are usually portrayed as lazy, the one's with no friends, and the bad guy, while thin women and buff men are depicted as the successful, sexy, popular, and powerful ones.
The question that most may ask themselves is: How can we tell our future children or students that it's what inside that counts, when the media constantly contradicts this message?
- It is important to remind ourselves and others that these images are fake. Most models go through plastic surgery or tape themselves up to mold their bodies into a more photogenic portrayal. Before going to print, pictures are airbrushed and photoshopped to perfection.
Celebrities such as Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan, beauty pageant contestants, and Victoria's Secret models puts constant pressure on people to be perfect. They are held up as ideals of beauty. Actresses and models are not just putting pressure on society, but also sending people the false message that anorexia is becoming a standard of beauty.
For example, Pamela Anderson is 5’7” and weighs 120 pounds. She is supposed to be the desirable ideal yet she is 11% below ideal body weight. In contrast, a generation ago Marilyn Monroe set the beauty standard at 5’5” and weighed 135 pounds. Today it is likely to assume that her agent would tell her she had to lose weight.
Actresses Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, and singer Diana Ross all meet the Body Mass Index physical criteria for Anorexia.