Analysis Of Melanie Martinez's Song 'MrsPotato Head'

Many people think that the poem A Song, by Helen Maria Williams, is just a love letter when, in fact, it is more of an expression of her relationship with her inspiration of writing.

Under society’s customs for decades, young women have found themselves immersed in the pressure and anticipation to have exemplary bodies. Nearly every young woman prefers to be slim, have a perfectly shaped body, that is beautified by applying pounds of makeup to their face but does not appear ridiculously overdone. Who’s responsible for these measures imposed on young women? When a young girl picks up the model on the cover of Vogue being called flawless, naturally it’s easy for her to then aspire to be a real-life imitation of the that model. These companies produce magazine covers shown with girls’ images daily. As if keeping the perfect body wasn’t hard enough, our culture also forces girls into the forever expanding world of composition, however, body image is a surging subject for young girls. Advertisements and pictures of lean female models are all over. Young women are measured and perplexed by their physical appearances with attire intended to raise their physical structures; social media, magazines, the society, marketing campaigns, advertisements, and the fashion gurus add to a strand of excellence.

Society and the media have an enormous influence on an individual’s concept of beauty and bodily perfection. Even the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” many people allow the media’s influence into their lives, which is a dangerous thing to allow (Vogel, 2015). According to David Newman, author of Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, society is defined as the “population of people living in the same geographic area who share a culture and a common identity and whose members fall under the same political authority” (Newman, 2010, 18). The people within a society constantly create and add to the pressure already placed on individuals which can severely alter and harm one’s self-esteem. Self-esteem is

The beauty standard is a culturally constructed notion of physical attractiveness that has become increasingly imperative for women and men. However, this standard has become extremely perilous to men and women’s self-image. Camille Paglia, a highly educated individual who earned her PhD at Yale University and became a highly acclaimed author, explicates this conception in her essay “The Pitfalls of Plastic Surgery”. Paglia suggests that the beauty standard idealizes women to look like “sex symbols with an unattainable grandeur” (776). She continues to claim that it forces her audience of higher class women to pay large sums of money in order to alter their features ultimately conforming to a very “parochial” definition of beauty (776). Although Paglia is a highly credible source, she illogically appeals to the reader’s fears in order to persuade them. Paglia fails to give any credible outside sources which affirms her preposterous beliefs. Contrary to her inconsistencies, Daniel Akst, a social journalist and graduate from New York University provides his audience with reputable sources in order to persuade his audience. Daniel Akst believes that there needs to be a “democratization of physical beauty” in which instead of attempting to alter the beauty standard, we must first change how we view ourselves. Akst provides credible sources to establish his credibility where he observes cases studies and cultural experiments from scientists and organizations including:

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. At least, that’s what is taught to believe at an early age. Elline Lipkin, however, holds fast to the understanding that as true as that saying may be, there are outside forces that are intent on readjusting our vision to “true beauty”: the kind that can be bought off the shelves. In her article, “Girls’ Bodies, Girls’ Selves: Body Image, Identity, and Sexuality”, Lipkin employs several different external resources to help demonstrate her belief that young girls’ (“Before they even abandon their teddy bears…“ (Para 2)) definition of their own appearance is polluted and distorted by the vastly massive world that is the American media. Besides pulling from other articles and fact sheets, she also effectively utilizes a clearly logical train of thought, an operative tone, and countless examples of emotional appeal.

Like Georgiana in “The Birthmark”, women often find themselves striving to reach society’s expectation of beauty and perfection. In Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll”, a young girl is finally able to reach society’s version of beauty but she must die to do so. Piercy criticizes the ways “women are socialized into stereotypical feminine behavior” (“Overview: “Barbie Doll”, para. 1) in this poem and suggests that the pressure put on women to meet certain standards of beauty and behavior is destructive. The poem opens with the birth of a “girlchild” and all the “typical toys” that go along with it. When the girl hits puberty, her classmates begin to make fun of her big nose and fat legs. The girl is intelligent and healthy, but the other children only see the imperfections in her appearance. She is told she should behave “coy” and always wear a smile, but the teasing takes its’ toll. She cuts off her nose and legs and offers them up

The dove beauty campaigns are again a perfect example of this, as they depict a digitally altered photo of a woman being presented on a billboard (Tpiper). Depicting a remarkable transformation of an ordinary woman, this video shows a billboard model being produced through means of excessive makeup and hair styling in conjunction with digital editing after the photo was taken. This woman is not natural. She has pounds of makeup on her face, as well as photoshopped touchups, and yet she is perceived by the public as the standard of beauty. Nobody is able to compare with such a carefully sculpted face, and therefore this establishes unrealistic expectations

Within popular culture today, objectified female bodies can be represented everywhere from advertising images to magazine covers, television, music and many more. Through these media institutions, we allow them to construct social identities in ways that allow us to understand what it means to be black, white, Asian, male or female etc. Within many popular culture mediums such as music, stereotypical representations of racially marked female bodies are often formed. Thus, these representations also have the ability to create stories about a certain culture. In music videos, it does not go unnoticed that women are portrayed as objects whose objectives are to pleasure men. In this paper, I will argue how racially marked female bodies are represented. This paper will mainly focus on how these racially marked women are depicted in the hip hop culture. To demonstrate this, I will draw examples by using award winning music videos by Nicki Minaj, R.Kelly, 50 cent to exemplify representations of the female body and how they are objectified as sex objects. In conclusion, we will be able to see how the female bodies are used in mainstream hip hop videos to convey seductively.

In both “Bitch Planet” and “Barbie Doll”, the authors aimed to exemplify the unrealistic body image that women are facing. “Bitch Planet” is about a futurist world where larger women are shamed for being larger rather than stick thin like the women in the advertisements and media. The writer uses a comic format and futuristic setting to display a setting that feels realistic. In “Barbie Doll” it talks about a girl who is made fun of for her small differences in physical appearance, even though she was perfectly healthy and normal. They each show how the body images set by men and other women effect how they feel about their own bodies. They each follow similar topics however; they have different techniques as well as time frames for conveying them.

In the 21st century, America is a melting pot of diverse cultures and races. Because of this, girls from different backgrounds react differently to these images seen in media. In a study with sixty white and minority girls, they found the reactions to these beauty ideals to be quite different. One thing they did agree on was, “most girls see the images as unrealistic; many prefer to “see” real girls.” (Milkie). They knew these photos were unattainable and also had been photoshopped. However, even though the white girls knew these images were unrealistic, they still strived to be like them “because they believe that others find the images important and that others in the local culture, especially boys, evaluate them on the basis of these images.”

Who is to blame for how young girls are being portrayed on television and in music videos? Has it come to society putting more emphasis on money instead of protecting girls from being exploited in today’s new culture? This seems to be a growing problem across the United States that has caused some concern as to how it is affecting girl’s psychological well-being as well as their health. (Hatch, L., 2011) Girls are no longer interested in playing with dolls. Parents do not take their little girls to have play dates with their friends at a park, instead parents

The manipulation of photographs creates an unrealistic beauty standard that no one can achieve, not even those in the images. 98.3 percent of images we regularly see in magazines and in advertisements, are digitally altered to make the subject more desirable. Too often the subject is a woman objectified in order to promote a product. In turn, teenage girls see the pictures and compare themselves to them. They want to be the ‘ideal’ woman seen so frequently in the media, but because the image has been manipulated this results in an ideal that can not be naturally achieved. Consequentially, 53 percent of thirteen year old girls feel unhappy with their body. This increases to 78 percent by the age of seventeen. It is unfair that people are forced to see these pictures and learn to associate them with beauty. As a result, women are

Beauty standards are an extremely critical issue facing young women today across the country. Beauty standards are changing the way we perceive ourselves. Beauty standards change the way we dress, our make-up, our hair, and our size. We think about what others will think based on how we look. In the morning, while getting dressed, we may say to ourselves, “What will they think?” or “Is this shirt too tight? Too loose?” We wonder if our hair is the right color, or if our teeth are white enough, and the largest standard of all, if we are skinny enough. In a short clip, “Beauty Standards Around the World,” created by Buzzfeed (2014) shows how each country defines beauty. Buzzfeed uses the rhetorical appeals of pathos and logos to effectively convince the viewers that society is manipulating women’s perception of beauty. A young girl sent out a photo with no make-up on and her hair pulled back to photo shop experts around the world. The results were upsetting.

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

A young girl may hear a variety of tips on how to beautify herself, but do these pieces of advice make her genuinely happy? That sometimes depends on the music she hears around her, particularly on the radio. Many hit pop contemporary radio singles, generally performed by female recording artists, encourage a distorted perception of beauty that leads to the state of perception, which is usually nearly impossible to achieve. However, a select group of songs by female performers and their accompanying music videos promote the ideology that young women and girls do not have to make dramatic changes to their body or appearance to be perceived as beautiful. This message is widely spread by singers including Beyoncé, Meghan Trainor, and Alessia Cara.