Summary of “Never Just Pictures” The article Never Just Pictures, written by Susan Bordo, is about how the media’s usage of images of beautiful people with no body fat or imperfections cause the youth to develop eating disorders, and feel insecure about their own image. Susan begins by telling us about how the media targeted the nineteen year old star of Clueless, Alicia Silverstone, when she attended an award show a little bit heavier then the public was used to. She says that we are led to believe that “fat is the devil” and that having any excess fat is bad. She claims commercials and ads staring people with ideal bodies embed the idea that being fat is bad in our minds. One way she proves this is she uses a study that asked ten and eleven …show more content…
Body image disturbance syndrome is a disorder where one is “unable to see themselves as anything but fat, no matter how thin they become”(Bordo). This leads to one starving themselves or forcing themselves to vomit, known as bulimia. She says that the idea of a beautiful body has come from models and fashion designers, who claim that clothing doesn’t “hang right” on bustier people. Susan does not just have a problem with the pressure of society to be thin; she also doesn’t like people exercising too much. She claims that the gymnasts in the Olympics are unhealthy due to their lack of body fat and criticizes the commentators for being in awe of the athletes muscular bodies. Susan says, “the hormones unreleased because of insufficient body fat, the organ development delayed, perhaps halted” (Bordo). Susan doesn’t think children should strive to look like these athletes. . Susan goes on to write about how eating disorders and pressures to be skinny is not just a young, middle class, white girl problem anymore. She claims that all races and ethnicities are being affected by this problem. Men are also being pressured to maintain their bodies due to underwear, and such,
“Never Just Pictures” by Susan Bordo, is about how today’s society is influenced by the mass medias unrealistic ideas of how they are supposed to look. In this essay, the author breaks down the images being showcased by today’s culture concerning the aesthetics of the female body. Bordo also talks about how what was considered ‘beautiful’ or ‘perfect’ before has changed. Lately, the world has been on a craze to look like the air brushed model in the picture. Bordo explains how a lot of people are becoming more obsessed with their physique, and depending on looking thin to make them happy, instead of focusing on being happy and healthy.
The author of this article begins her analysis of the rise in eating disorders by acknowledging America’s obsession with being the ideal weight. From an extremely young age, American children are being taught that women in movies and on the covers of magazines possess the ideal figure. The author states “Children are being taught…being fat is the worst thing one can be” (Bordo 1). This is disturbing to say the least. There many attributes worse than being overweight: dishonest, cruel, and murderous to name a few. Bordo also uses an example in the first paragraph of her essay that is appalling. Alicia Silverstone, the lead role in Clueless, was completely bombarded with insults about her weight, though she had only gained a few pounds since her starring role. The advertisers did
In Susan Bordo’s article “Never Just Pictures: Bodies and Fantasies” this is an article that is informative as well as interesting. Bordo mentions celebrity names like Alicia Silverstone and famous dieting products like Citra Lean to introduce the “thin” trend in today’s popular culture. The author explains how today’s society explores different media cites to acknowledge how individuals should appear in today’s world. Advertisements have also become a big part on the reflection of society’s beliefs. Bordo talks about body figures that were once considered normal, have become known as an abnormal appearance. Bordo wants to convince the audience that being thin has become an issue that must be addressed by the general public,
In her article “Never Just Pictures,” author Susan Bordo analyzes how deeply teenage girls of today are effectively told how to look by mass media. Girls of the 21st century are constantly struggling with their own confidence and overall happiness simply due to the celebrities they see on TV and in magazines. Today, women are subconsciously told what the ‘perfect body’ is and anything less than that means that they are unwanted and fat. Bordo specifically described the experience of the 19 year-old Clueless actress, Alicia Silverstone, whom the tabloids consistently referred to as ‘fatgirl’ and ‘buttgirl.’ Bordo described that once a young woman is told that she is not worthy or that she is fat, countless psychological issues arise and begin
Marya Hornbacher’s memoir, Wasted, describes her lifelong battle with eating disturbances with focuses on anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. In modern day society, thinness is associated with “wealth, upward mobility, and success” (Hornbacher, 1998, p. 46). Thinness is “an ideal symbolizing self-discipline, control, sexual liberation, assertiveness, competitiveness, and affiliation with a higher socio-economic class.” (p. 46) Not eating also suggests that one have such a full life that food is not a priority. The media influences children to believe that one must be thin in order to be beautiful. To Marya, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, she must be perfect in order to be successful. She believed she could only be perfect if she had a perfect body, a perfect career, perfect relationships, and perfect control over her life and herself (p. 231-232).
As obesity escalates towards becoming an epidemic in modern day America, pressures to stay fit have become overwhelming from media and doctors. Mary Ray Worley, a member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), believes that modern day society is completely intolerant of obesity so much as to say that they "would rather die or cut off a limb than be fat" (492). She has made it a priority to convince Americans to accept obesity which she fights for in her essay, Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance. She believes that people should not be ashamed of their bodies, or try to change them to fit in with the crowd. She discusses a new outlook on body image and believes that we all should create “a new relationship
Because idealistic standards of beauty are raised, kids may grow up thinking that they have to look a certain way to be accepted. In their article, “Concurrent And Prospective Analyses Of Peer, Television And Social Media Influences On Body Dissatisfaction, Eating Disorder Symptoms And Life Satisfaction In Adolescent Girls,” Christopher Ferguson et al. mention that “increased incidence of eating disorders across the early and mid-twentieth century seem to coincide with trends in the media toward emphasizing thinness in women,” (2). Additionally, children are constantly exposed to unrealistic body ideals on television, film, and magazines. In fact, “the extent of exposure to magazines that feature and glamorize the thin ideal is positively correlated with disordered eating, even when controlling for the young woman’s level of personal interest in fitness and dieting,” (Levine and Murnen 17). If kids are always being exposed to unhealthy behaviors and ideas, it can make them feel pressured to look like the people they see in mass
“I don’t hate you because you’re fat. You’re fat because I hate you,” an iconic “Mean Girls” quote briefly illustrates how fat is often portrayed in society. Movies and television series have a tendency to exclude overweight actors/actresses or use them as a center of ridicule. In doing so, it sends a misguided message to children, teens and adults who now feel the pressure of inadequacy. People have begun to examine the effects of body shaming in America. In the article “Fear of Fatness,” Peggy Orenstein, an award-winning writer, claims that the image of the ideal woman is rather impossible to achieve, and even those who may obtain it, still find flaws within themselves. Orenstein presents the idea that body fat is viewed as a negative
While one may be tired of hearing women, specifically “feminists”, blame society for all of their problems, Susie Orbach illustrates several valid points concerning obesity and eating disorders in her essay, “Fat as a Feminist Issue”. With her feministic lenses on, Orbach highlights the underlying roots of why obesity and eating disorders are so prominent with the female sex. As said in her essay, “50% of women are estimated to be overweight” (Orbach 201), which is why women should definitely consider Orbach’s view on the obesity epidemic. Orbach argues throughout her piece that the struggle of women being “fat” is actually a response to the culture and social structure in which women are boxed in making it a feminist issue, not a matter of just overeating.
Therefore, the commendation of such look and shape commercializes unhealthy body image and procreates eating disorders. Unfortunately, at present the commercialism of a perfect body is encountered by almost everyone on everyday basis. The public is bombarded daily with images of glamorously thin women in commercials, on billboards, in movies in magazines and etc?According to Melanie Katzman, a consultant psychologist from New York, the media has actively defined the thin ideal as success and treats the body as a commodity. (Rhona MacDonald, 2001) It is evident that the persistent advocating of the media and the society produced a constant pursuit of thinness, which became a new religion. A study conducted by Harvard researchers has revealed the effect of media and magazines on adolescent girls in high schools. The children were exposed to fashion magazines and television commercials, and a while after were given self-rating surveys. The study found that sixty-nine percent of the girls said that magazine pictures
In reading Betty’s story, my own eyes were opened to the possibility that being fat is not only about overeating and failing to exercise enough. Rather, there are many underlying psychosocial issues that complicate the situation. As a society, perhaps all of the “fat-shaming” is only serving to increase obesity. Rather than being supportive, and attempting to help obese
With eating disorders on the rise today, the media plays an important role in affecting self-esteem, leading a large amount of young adults to develop eating disorders. Many adolescents see the overbearing thin celebrities and try to reach media's level of thinness and ideal body weight. "Sixty-nine of the girls reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of the perfect body shape" (Field). Not only is being thin associated with other positive characteristics such as, lovable, popular, beautiful, and sexy, but being overweight is connected with negative characteristics like fat, ugly, unpopular, and lazy. Therefore media is the distinct social pressure of operating to influence people to be thin and causing eating disorders.
The National Eating Disorder Association (2012) reports that the media and its representation of beauty is recognized as one of the factors contributing to the rise of eating disorders. Media Defused energy and anger in women by showing them peer shaped models. “the mass media are generally agreed to be an influential source of images and messages about the idealized body that women and girls are expected to strive for a control condition”(huon 2005). The media are a business that rely on people, and like any business, their purpose is to create opportunities for generating profit. The problem lies within the way people, most especially women, are treated by the media as products rather than human beings worthy of dignity, personhood, and respect. The media use discrimination, objectification, and dehumanization to police women’s bodies. The result of this is a rise in low self-esteem, dangerous body modification procedures, violence, and
Watching “Dying to be Thin” further solidified a slowly growing understanding of the media’s impact on self-image and its ability to steal a person’s life in a 30-second advertisement. As explained in the video, eating disorders have the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness. The onset of this illness seems to stem from a desire to achieve the unattainable and the subsequent desperation that ensues. “Dying to be Thin” properly explained the role of the media in saturating society with waiflike images that we are to perceive as perfect and worthy of love and adoration. This gives evidence to the idea that members of society have unfortunately become conditioned to feel that if they were not precisely the visual image of what is consistently thought of as desirable, they were then not good enough. On top of the role of ‘seed planter’ the media is also able to take credit for the creation of the mindset that, these body images, although 20% below normal body weight, can be completely attainable by the average person- if they just tried hard enough.
In the article, “Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance,” author Mary Ray Worley claims that society portrays that skinny people respect their bodies and have strong self-control, opposed to the fact that society portrays that fat people do not admire themselves nor feel a need to improve upon their bodies. Worley believes that society shames fat people, making them feel out-of-place and embarrassed of their own body, shape, and size. It is also implied by Worley that people of all shapes and sizes should feel comfortable with their own body, and that fatness does not always mean unhealthy. In the article “Too “Close to the Bone”: The Historical Context for Women’s Obsession with Slenderness,” author Roberta Seid claims that society has crooked expectations of how the human body is supposed to look. Seid continues on describing how the view of the human body and what is considered desirable has evolved over time. Authors Mary Ray Worley and Roberta Seid could agree on the fact that society shames fat people through the fashion industry, although Worley would go about it from more of an emotional, psychological way, rather than more physical like Seid would; Similarly, Worley and Seid would agree that health is more important than weight, although Seid would disagree with the fact that Worley believes people should eat as they please while staying active.