Does Size Affect Society's Perception Of Beauty?

To be frank, I also once had a view that only people who are skinny can be considered as beautiful. However, there is one incidence that changes my perception on the idea of what is the meaning of beauty and ‘perfect’ body. When I was in high school, I had a best friend named Alice—she was chubby and curvy. She was so obsessed with the America’s next top model shows. One day she expressed her desire to lose weight to me and I supported her. She also said that her boyfriend asked her to lose some weight to be more beautiful. She said that she really wants to look like the models and also to fulfill her boyfriend’s wish. After three months, she was hospitalized and I was so shocked with that news. She was hospitalized because there was something wrong with her intestines caused by her unhealthy diet. When I went to visit her, she looked very different—she looked sunken and sick. Begin on that day; I realized that it is really impossible to be like the models that we see everyday in the media and I also afraid on how good media is in order to distort society’s idea of beauty.

As a wise man once said, “To love yourself is to understand you don't need to be perfect to be good.” However young girls have so much pressure put on them to look in a way that is not only unrealistic but also unhealthy. As a result of this, young girls have a very negative body image and self-confidence.The problem is the unrealistic body standards that media and society have set for girls. According to SSCC, the average American woman is 5’4 and 140 pounds. There is a clear problem when the media is only advertising women that are 5’11 and 117 pounds, which is the average American model. Even though the body of a model is very rare and uncommon,girls are expected to look like they do. However, by promoting a positive body campaign, stopping the portrayal of fake and photoshopped models in the media, and expanding the diversity of models, we could lift unrealistic body standards and start accepting everybody as beautiful.

The subject of this article are young girls, mainly who are in their teenage years, but also the parents of teenage girls. However, anyone can be impacted and learn from this article. This article questions why society drills the idea of thinness into the minds of people, and every reader can take a different stance and have a different opinion on the issue. Some people may take a stance and say that individuals, themselves, are the only influence on their body image. However, others may take the stance and say that society, as a whole, has a huge influence on an individual and their body image. The author of this article, Erica Goode, includes many quotes from parents of teenage girls, who feel as if they need to go to extreme measures to fit in with society. In this case, the author is creating the stance that society plays a role when it comes to influencing an individual. Goode also provides many

Modern society is so based on image. Models today are airbrushed and Photoshop and that leads people, both male and female, to believe that they should look like something unnatural. Meaghan Ramsey tells the audience about her 1-year-old niece who looks at her self in the mirror and adores her reflection. However at some point people stop adoring them-selves because young minds become poisoned with a false image of what “beautiful” really is. The title of Meaghan’s Lecture is “Why thinking you’re ugly is bad for you.” She goes on to tell how teenagers and adults are finding themselves unattractive and how that is negatively affecting their lifestyles as well as the world. The sociological aspect of the epidemic is that from a young age, parents, media and religion, dictate to the youth what an acceptable appearance is. Low self-esteem is not natural but rather implemented on children by society. This affects people in a psychological way. Meaghan Ramsey goes on to say how many students, specifically young girls, are refraining from participating in class and even going to class, because they don’t want tot draw attention to their appearance. There is no biological aspect to this epidemic, because regardless of what these women look like, they still will

Body dysmorphic disorder is a distinct mental illness, which causes an individual to become obsessive on focusing on their flaws in appearance, and to others the flaw may be minor or not visible. It is also known as dysmorphophobia. Patients affected by BDD have deeply negative thoughts about their appearance. In the limbic system, hyperactivity causes individuals to feel as if they are constantly being critiqued and negatively judged by others. Individuals diagnosed with the illness often look into surgery for their physical appearance to enhance. There are more than 200,000 cases a year involving body dysmorphic disorder, and about 1 in 50 people are affected (Phillips, 2004). Constantly comparing their image to others, frequent looks in

As a child, young girls saw Disney princesses with unrealistic body proportions, which in turn led them to thinking that to be a princess one would have to be as thin as them. These standards worsened as time went on, and it has had extremely negative effects on developing young girls. Things such as eating disorders have exponentially increased due to the "need" to be skinny. Thousands of girls look into mirrors and only see "flaws" created by the media's definition of beauty. Women should not define their beauty by how their bodies looks, especially when those standards are set at such unrealistic levels. The fact that even today these unreasonable beauty standards still thrive is sad, and their must be change. The only way for change to happen is to change the beauty standards, and show women that they are all beautiful. With the increased access and use of technology over the past decade, the media's representation of beauty through the use of photoshopped images, underweight models, and unrealistic beauty standards, have had an increasingly negative impact on young girls and how they

As humans on this planet we often think about what others think about our appearance. We often, in this society, look at a person through their characteristics such as: looks, height, clarity of skin, and by how fat or thin one appears to be. In the article, The Diet Zone: A Dangerous Place, by Natascha Pocek, she states the fact that, in this society, we put a lot of emphasis on diets and appearing thin. From when we are children we tend to change our views according to the ways of man, and find ways to stay fit or to lose weight. With this constant loss of weight we tend to get into a hole of wanting to be thinner, and in my opinion that want leads to the attempts of so many girls developing some

The purpose of this project is to help women and help them understand that they do not have to follow any significant standard of beauty. However, it is not easy to make them understand or believe when everything on social media is so unrealistic. These unrealistic images are appearing everywhere all over the country. We can easily find this in the magazines, commercials, and social media. The message being sent to women is that they are not pretty or skinny enough. Often, people think that their bodies are their own, but because of the fact that this phenomenon happens in this society makes women not be able to ignore it or think with a different idea. Annually, magazine companies spend billions of dollars on diet and exercise advertisements

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see a confident, smart, beautiful women or do you see someone else? Someone that you used to know, and might not ever see again. Before hitting puberty, you most likely had very few issues with your body and respected the various intricate things it does on a daily basis. Entering puberty, these ideas shifted and insecurities about your body started to filter into your mind. Instead of looking at all the wonderful things your body can do, you start to criticize it. In society today, the average female model (as unrealistic as ever) is 5’11 and 120 pounds, it is understandable why the average women feels like she is not good enough. A study completed at the American Association of University Women showed, “the way I look” is the most important indicator of self-worth in women, while for men, self-worth is centred on their abilities, and not their looks (Croll, “Body Image in Adolescents”). 66% of females are more likely to

There is many people, especially girls, that think their body isn’t right, they look ugly, or don’t like being seeing around pretty girls. There is always a girl that feels that way, everywhere you walk, but we never notice it. If you’re fat or skinny, it really doesn’t matter, it’s just really their mind being

“To be happy and successful, you must be thin,” is a message women are given at a very young age (Society and Eating Disorders). In fact, eating disorders are still continuously growing because of the value society places on being thin. There are many influences in society that pressures females to strive for the “ideal” figure. According to Sheldon’s research on, “Pressure to be Perfect: Influences on College Students’ Body Esteem,” the ideal figure of an average female portrayed in the media is 5’11” and 120 pounds. In reality, the average American woman weighs 140 pounds at 5’4”. The societal pressures come from television shows, diet commercials, social media, peers, magazines and models. However, most females do not take into account of the beauty photo-shop and airbrushing. This ongoing issue is to always be a concern because of the increase in eating disorders.

Teenage and college women are overly obsessing about their body images and constantly think that they need to be much skinnier, when they are not even fat. Many women today have the wrong idea of what the perfect body is, since there is no such thing as a perfect body. Every person is different and there can be no “perfect”. Being skinny is not the thing to strive for, but rather being healthy is. In this decade, women are constantly looking at models, T.V. shows and Instagram photos of girls that are stick-thin, or just very skinny, and they think that this is the way we as women in society must look. The problem is by excessively looking at these photos or T.V. shows, women become self-conscious, obsessive, unhealthy and simply unhappy.

70% of girls don’t feel good enough; that the bar is set too high for them to reach. Girls’ self esteem plummets at around age 12 and usually doesn’t recover until their 20s because media exposure tells them who to be. Many girls believe that happiness is a size and to be happy or feel good about themselves, they will do anything like plastic surgery, or even develop eating disorders. Although many factors impact how a girl perceives herself, such as genetics, the media, peers, the impact of the world can really push them over the edge and could lead to depression. Although youth and being skinny is glamorized, women should love and support their natural body types instead of changing their bodies through makeup and plastic surgery, making

Alexa, I fully agree with you that society promotes a certain body type making us think that is what body type we should have. Like you said there really is no perfect body type because everyone is different in their own special way. Some people look at someone on a runway or in magazines and think that's how they are supposed to look. The person modeling doesn't even look that way! They try to look like that certain body often to the point where it is unhealthy for them. I agree that a lot of people are changing how they look to be someone else whom that person they are trying to be is just a mixture of filters, makeup, and

Growing up we have been told that "It’s the inside that counts because beauty is only skin deep." And yet the media contradicts this idea every day. If looks don’t make a difference, or even matter, why are such a significant number of women hurting themselves since they're troubled with the way they look? Why air brush away our flaws? This is on the grounds that our general public has developed a specific self-perception that being sexy or beautiful is no longer about being yourself, it's in fact a long way from the normal average women size twelve. The ridiculous standard of perfect that women are brainwashed with, has caused many to developed "Body Dysmorphia." No women, child, or young lady should feel the need to look in a mirror for hours trying to fix something they feel should not be there whether it be a freckle they don’t like or how much tighter their clothes are compared to others. No person should turn to cosmetic procedures, dieting, changing the way the dress, or even their hair just because they want to look like the person on the cover of a magazine. The absurd so called ideal body measures shouldn’t exist. The idea that being perfect or sexy means that your thighs can't touch, your hair has to be long, have to be a size double zero, and your waist can't be as wide as your hips shouldn't exist. The media needs to develop realistic self-perception alongside the possibility that ladies of every ethnicity, shape, and size are excellent, not simply ladies who