How Does Media Affect Society's Beauty Standards

A few years ago, when I played field hockey, most of my family members complimented on my weight and said I have changed a lot in years. After, one day when my family from Pakistan skyped us and said they wanted to meet me and my siblings, one of them commented on my weight and said I have gone “fat” than I was a few years ago. I felt really insecure about my body and quit field hockey as a result. I started to skip lunch in school and go down in the art room and not surround myself with people. I started to eat less and start to be more depressive. Victims of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia are ignored and disgusted by society because they do not fit the “perfect model image” of what society has grown among women especially. In my culture, I have seen many older women talk about how they must dress to “impress” their husband or how they compete against other women and compare each other. As a young woman, I have been constantly being told to lose weight so I can get married at an early age or go to the gym when you have free time. Media has imposed thinness through the female and male models advertising, though fast food restaurants who have included “healthier” choices, etc. Although our background and culture play a strong role in our eating habits, other factors like family, environment, low self-esteem, and difficult experiences can cause someone to become anorexic or bulimic. In today's society, many people are affected by eating disorders, are impacted by the images of slim women and muscular men appearing on front covers of fashion magazines. These eating disorders are most common among young teen as they starve or binge themselves trying to attain what the fashion industry considers being the “ideal” figure of a perfect woman or man. For example, in the Meghan Trainor’s song “All About That Bass”, where she sends a message which can be harmful to females

It is largely known that environmental factors correlate with the existence of eating disorders. For example, bullying and skeptical comments is the cause of eating disorders. Anything that has to do with pressure from one person to another to look or feel a certain way is an enormous impact (What Causes Eating Disorders?, 2017, p. 4). Any person who is severely underweight or obese is at a higher risk for being bullied. This is when the skeptical comments come into play, especially from loved ones. The media has an even bigger impact on those who struggle with weight issues and body image. Magazines sitting in the checkout lines or commercials that portray unrealistic expectations for men and women of the “perfect” body have a deeper effect on one’s self esteem.

According to the internet, 10 million American women suffer from eating disorders? Eating disorders are serious illnesses which are caused by irregular eating habits and concerns about body weight. As a result, eating disorders are caused psychological and environmental behavior which can often result in a fatal illness. This is what Kathryn Arnett experiences in her life. She explains how she developed an eating disorder in her essay, “Media and Advertisement: The New Peer Pressure.” The factors that contributed to Arnett’s eating disorder was media idolizing and portraying fake body images, teens developing and having low self-esteem, and parents not being present in their children's’s life.

Another way that the media is contributing to the increase in eating disorders is through the huge wave of fad diets, weight loss books, weight loss exercise machines, weight loss pills, and weight loss program centers. You cannot turn on a television channel without seeing a commercial for various methods of losing weight. The large majority of these programs, pills, and plans are ineffective in healthy weight reduction and only cause more problems for those who do need to lose weight. Also, those women who do not need to lose weight are made to feel as if they should. With so much emphasis put on weight loss, many women who are of healthy weights already begin to feel as if they too need to lose weight.

Movies, television shows and magazines portray rail thin woman as the ideal image of beauty. And the

People are often exposed to the media 's ideal body image, whether it 's through magazines, television, toys (e.g. Barbie dolls), or social media, it is almost impossible to avoid it. There are numerous of people who desire to look the way the world defines beauty. And although this may not seem like so much of a bad thing, this can lead to hardships for many people. This type of influence has caused countless individuals to endure an eating disorder in order to get the body they wish to have. Eating disorders are a worldwide problem that are very dangerous due to having many types of disorders and symptoms that occur, the effects that take place in a patient 's mental

The influence of the media on all aspects of culture and society has been a issue around the world. One of the social cultural aspects particularly influenced by the media is body image. A surprisingly large number of individuals, the majority of which are young women, develop their body image in with the ideas advanced by the media, which judge women’s attractiveness based on how thin they are. Body-image plays a very important role in our individualistic society. Modern beauty image standards which favor thin body image create an unrealistic expectation on young women, often resulting in eating disorders and other destructive practices, like self-harming, unnecessary or elective cosmetic surgery, decreased self-esteem and the use of harmful substances, like diuretics.

In our popular culture, the media worships the beautiful, perfectly made-up, perfectly-coiffed, perfectly-dressed, THIN woman! Our current standard of beauty is based on super models, actresses, musical artists, reality TV stars, all for the most part very thin women. With the overwhelming amount of these images bombarding us every day, the message seems clear: women who do not fit this standard of beauty are unattractive, unloveable, and unacceptable.

“We are, despite our efforts at resistance, conditioned to see thin as beautiful and, more to the point, beautiful as necessarily thin. As Regina Casper points out, early in our teen years we notice that ‘female socialization emphasizes good looks above everything else, and good looks demand what is difficult to achieve in out surplus society, namely a thin body. The pursuit of thinness hence is considered an acceptable and socially desirable goal’ (1994). Furthermore, fat women are not only deemed unattractive, but also lazy, slovenly, dirty, undisciplined, and unsuccessful”

There is a notion throughout not just American popular culture, but everyday life that if you want to be seen as a beautiful and accepted woman you must be thin. Women

In our modern culture, thin is in as the beauty standard. There has been an increase in eating disorders mainly in women with an increase in men. Through the media we see many thin women and that is seen as healthy and beautiful. In the modeling industry, being bone thin is seen as beautiful when in reality is a very sick and dangerous weight to be at. Through Hollywood and the media we are seeing many women who do not fit in this “beauty glove” as overweight and they shame them for it. This message is exposed and sometimes thrust into the faces and brains of children and teenagers. Many women are not happy with their current weight and would like to lose weight because they are unhappy with their body image or are being shamed for not fitting into the beauty standard

As Howard, a fashion model, states “Their ideal of beauty is described by thinness.” (2015) The fashion industry was created to show clothing garments, or fashion pieces. Society’s mentality is focusing on the young girls who are models rather than the actual garment. The girl who is portraying it must be in the ideal body weight on specific guidelines in order to sell to people. Young girls would be told they were too fat if they gain one more pound. Beauty isn’t measured by body image, nor the weight of how much you scale. Beauty is skin deep. Beauty is found within and won’t be nor will it be described based on your how to portray

There is something obviously wrong with these statistics. Women who subject themselves to these circumstances are fighting against their own body make-ups in order to fulfill the standards put out by the media. In order to change these staggering statistics in the future, we must examine what the media does to make girls and women obtain eating disorders.

Women have let the idea of looking beautiful take over their self-confidence and life. Healthy Place, an online magazine teaching women about living a healthy life, says that, “today's fashion models weigh twenty-three percent less than the average female, and a young woman between the ages of 18-34 has a seven percent chance of being as slim as a catwalk model and a one percent chance of being as thin as a supermodel.” So why do women push themselves to be excessively thin when these models are anomalies? They do it because the media tells them that this look is the only look that can attract men. Even if a woman is “beautiful” according to the media’s standards, she will always find something about her body that she hates, whether it is her hair or her belly button, no women is completely satisfied. Our society is very accepting of different religions and lifestyles, so why can we not accept different types of beauty as well?

Everyone has a different view of what is beautiful. Why are we never happy with how we look? Why are we so quick to compare ourselves to others? The simple answer to these questions is: Media. The media is constantly showing images of what is considered beautiful. These images greatly affect society and often impact the way people view themselves. Most of these images are unrealistic, and send unhealthy expectations to women; however most women are willing to do anything they can to achieve this look. In recent times, the notion of thin at all costs defines our culture. The media builds the idea of distorted body images, creating a belief that beauty is achieved through body weight.