Media's Depiction Of Female Beauty

It is no secret that today’s society defines beauty as thin, long-legged women with statuesque bodies. Examples are found everywhere just by glancing at the closest magazine ads or by scrolling down the latest fashion article online. Normal, everyday women are being forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the “Top-Model”-like women currently crowding up Hollywood. Media depicts women as an unattainable image. They pressure ladies to buy the products they’re advertising; luring them with false advertisements promising that with it, they too could be perfect. While the media portrays women in a certain way for advertising and marketing benefits, it has caused numerous negatives effects to women’s self-esteems nationwide, it contradicts

For centuries, women have found it to be difficult to live up and be the standard “runaway model”. Women have the pressure to fit in to be considered beautiful since ads and media have distorted society in how they view and evaluate beauty. The false representation of models in the beauty commercials have made women want to replicate them even though they don’t know what’s behind the editing. Even though this is a huge matter, companies did not stand back but instead made more commercials that self-degrade women constantly, except one. The Dove Evolution Commercial- “Campaign for Real Beauty” focuses on the way they change women sending a strong message to women about beauty and what it really

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

Beauty is a perception we hold in society as what is attractive or not. Our perception of beauty is a social construct, meaning that it is made through society through its depictions of beauty. In our society today, our perception of beauty is shaped through the media, since the media portrays specific standards of beauty that people feel they must follow. Although media portrays beauty across different races and ages, society’s perception of beauty is skewed towards a specific and established standard. This causes those specific groups to feel obligated to follow this standard of beauty rather than following a more diverse path. Therefore, our social construct of beauty is shaped through media’s biased portrayals of different races and ages, as it does not provide a realistic view of those groups standard of beauty.

Beauty standards in the media are one of many reasons feeding and eating disorders are a rising problem. The unrealistic body types of being extremely thin, in pop culture, are influential factors for many teens, especially teen girls. According to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), anorexia nervosa is a “restriction of energy intake, intense fear of gaining weight, and a disturbance in the perception of one’s body size” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Individuals diagnosed with anorexia tend to place a high value on their shape and weight, which can interfere with their daily lives. Individuals diagnosed tend to view of their body shape in a distorted representation. The motivation to become

The modern beauty standard has become an increasingly important issue because people have the freedom to decide, but the media largely influenced these choices on about beauty standard. Our advance of technology helps communicate with each other, but people are not fully aware of the influence of media. That is a major problem. The media broadcast images of beauty to control people consciously. Technological advance helps people to reach the information quickly and cumulatively, but media not always making people feel good about themselves. Most of the people experience powerless when a society values youth and beauty because it is impossible to meet beauty standard. People bombarded by images of men and women who are thin, beautiful, and youthful. This norm is slowly taking away an individual’s freedom of self-expression and consequently lose sense of self-worth. Camille Paglia, an academic and social critic who earned her PhD at Yale University, uses her artistic sensibility to argue that the current trend of plastic surgery leads to ethical issues, such as narcissism, sexism, and racism in “The Pitfall of Plastic Surgery”. Meanwhile, Daniel Akst, New York born journalist, claims that the attitudes of the typical American’s carelessness about their outfit and physical beauty in “What Meets the Eye”. Both authors define the beauty standard that created by the media and claim the issue of how the media set up the wrong beauty standard for audience; it is unattainable for

Writing for the Huffington Post, Temimah Zucker presents her opinion on society’s expectation for women in America through different forms of communication and advertisement. Zucker’s article is based off of what you as a woman, think of yourself, versus what society thinks of you. Zucker believes that society’s opinions and beliefs will constantly change through the generations, but your thoughts about your own beauty will not become gray to you; “Beauty is molded by society -- by the advertising, fashion, and cosmetic industries. We live in a society of billboards and ads, Photoshop, and Botox. We are trained to believe that size two is perfect, while most healthy women in America fit into a size 12.” (1)

According to Shaw and Lee (2015), in our culture, the manufacturing and consuming of products and the fashion industries create the beauty standards (pg. 191). Commercials, billboards, magazines, and other advertisements enforce these definitions. Therefore, beauty ideals reflect what the white, abled, and middle-class feel is beautiful. Even news journalists such as the women who report the newscasts are still “beautiful” women who fit the dominant ideology’s definition of beautiful.

Fair skin, long hair, light colored eyes, and thin bodies, all categories under the European ideal of beauty. While women who have these features are, of course, beautiful, the media and modeling industry have molded these ideals into the ultimate standard to compare the beauty of millions of women across the world. Whether consumers are flipping through channels on TV or pages of a magazine, European beauty standards are emulated in the actors and models the media cast, and with the rise of social media, these ideals have only become more prevalent. The use of these standards may seem harmless; however, Eurocentric beauty ideals have had devastating effects on both the women who do and do not fit within Eurocentric beauty standards.

Women today are often bombarded with countless images of highly distorted and photo shopped creations that are meant to represent the ideal woman. Every time we turn on a TV, open a magazine, or visit YouTube; we get forced into consuming these images. With ads running like Victoria’s Secret’s “Perfect Body” campaign, which featured very non diverse thin models in lingerie. Across the image of all the women were the words the perfect

When the word “beauty” comes to one’s mind, society immediately comes to mind also. Society plays a big role on what the definition of beauty really is. Society has it drilled into people’s minds that someone has to look a certain way to be beautiful. If a person doesn’t look like Kim Kardashian, Carrie Underwood, Miley Cyrus, or any other celebrity then they are deemed “not beautiful”. Society seemed to have forgotten that beautiful people come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and looks ("How Media Affects the Way Beauty Is Perceived"). What society is doing to all different kinds of people is what leads to self-esteem problems, depression, anxiety, etc. Many teenage girls are targeted and attacked for not being pretty enough or small enough.

Each presentation will relate to each other by symbolism of a mirror and our definition of reflection and perspective and by tying parallels from snow white into their work. Individual presentations include defining beauty standards, the impact on women’s body image and self-image, women’s beauty standards in the media, and evaluating how women go about trying to meet these standards.

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.

In the daily fight for the emancipation of women and the pressures and influence of advertising, women of all ages are coerced into physical and psychological self-torment trying to achieve an optimum look or image. This is something not limited to a few. One can see the work of television advertisers in high schools everyday as girls wear the same clothing, makeup and accessories as their favorite stars. They may also try to imitate models they see in teen magazines. While it is fairly obvious that such a phenomenon exists, what is not so obvious are the detrimental effects.

REPRESENTATION OF HOW WOMEN PROMOTE EXCERSISE IN NEW ZEALAND MEDIA AND HOW IT AFFECTS FEMALES