Ugly The New Sexy, By Tanya Gonzalez

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.

Men do have different ways to respond to different situations than women, and it is

Jane has gotten used to cruelty and biased behavior towards her average looks, and develops a miserable self-esteem that believes the only possible way to describe her exterior is “plain”. This self-esteem prevents her from even beginning to recognize that anyone could appreciate her or find her beautiful in any manner. The society’s typical reactions and judgments shaped Jane’s self-esteem, and prevented her from receiving equal treatment as that of a beautiful woman.

Another key element of Wolf’s work is her focus on the deliberate and pervasive harm that women are suffering due to the beauty myth. This included the increased rates and severity of eating disorders and strict dieting, which inhibits women’s strength both physically and mentally. “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women 's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one” (Wolf 1990). Starvation inhibits the brain from thinking of anything other than one’s one survival, and therefore food, and this is a state that significant proportions of modern women exist in. Eating disorders can also lead to other mental and physical health issues, reducing women’s abilities to succeed in the outside world, all because they are ‘too good’ at what society is pressuring them to do. Another key way in which Wolf sees the physical harm of the beauty myth is in cosmetic surgery. The United States cosmetic surgical industry was worth $300 million when Wolf first published this book in 1991,

The portrait I choose is the Faces by Nancy Burson, 1992 (figure, 22.7). The portrait is the picture of two boys, and they are twins. In the description, Nancy used a cheap plastic camera for their look. The plastic camera creates a blurry effect on the subject, which is the two boys. The twins have the same shirt with the same pattern on them, and their hairstyle is similar as well. Their face features are almost identical consider they are twins. Looks closely, their face structure seems unusual for them compared to other children of their age. For example, the size of their nose is bigger and wider than the usual size. And their eyebrow bone is more arch. According to the textbook, the unusual facial structure might cause by genetic conditions, accident or disease. The twin may or may not born like this, and there are some other unknown factors decide how they look. However, this picture shows the characteristics of the children, such as pure, kind, optimistic, curious.

While reading “Beating Anorexia and Gaining Feminism” Marni Grossman, Grossman models how a woman’s image reins supreme towering over any other attribute she may posses merely to fit the beauty norm. By sharing her personal experience about recovering from anorexia, Grossman explains how feminism saved her life. Although growing up in a feminist-friendly household, she became engrossed in the standard of beauty mass-media projects at the age of 16. Because of the social

In a study done of female beauty icons, two time frames were studied, 1959-1978 and 1979-1988. In the research, the women who were portrayed as beautiful, and the icons in the media, were observed and over half of them had fit into the standards of having one of the eating disorders, anorexia nervosa (Vonderen & Kinnally, 2012).

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).

According to the documentary, woman and girls self-objectify, become depressed, and develop eating disorders. Woman self-objectify almost daily; they wonder if their coworkers will think they look too fat or too thin, woman worry about their skin and hair. The documentary states that self-objectifiers have lower ambitions, cognitive functioning, and confidence. Everything that might be slightly “imperfect” is amplified and seen as an issue that needs to be resolved. Self-objectification is a problem because people are trying to change their god given body shape and appearance to satisfy peers ideals.

Issues of dieting, fat, and slenderness are hot topics in our culture. Bordo addresses them from a postmodern, but historical, feminist perspective. In this essay, she attempts to explain the appeal of slenderness in our society; and also, how the ideology of normal our society holds can be mentally and physically damaging for many people.

Beauty has been a word that people use to described objects, things and most important people. Beauty can be defined in so many ways. The play “Beauty” written by Jane Martin has more than just one meaning. The author uses beauty to be her main objective that makes almost every situation in the play revolve around “beauty.” Being that beauty is considered something almost all women want and it can lead to devastation when you get greedy and envious about it, as it did to both Carla and Bethany.

Chronic dieting, low self-esteem, depression and, high levels of body dissatisfaction were among the major issues women face when addressing their body image (Gingras, Fitzpatrick, & McCargar, 2004). The severity of body image dissatisfaction have increased to such a dangerous state that it was added to the DSM-IV as a disorder now called body dysmorphic disorder (Suissa, 2008). One of the main reasons for the prevalence of these conditions in women was due to contemporary Western media, which serve as one of the major agent in enforcing an ultra-thin figure as the ideal for female beauty (Saraceni & Russell-Mayhew, 2007). These images and models presented by the media have become the epitome of beauty, pushing women who internalized these images to dangerous extent to attain these norms. According to evidence from previous studies, contemporary Western cultures have influenced women to an acquired normative state of discontent with their bodies, which have become the source of maladaptive eating practices, negative psychological outcomes, and, chronic health conditions associated with eating disorders (Snapp, Hensley-Choate, & Ryu, 2012). The seriousness of these body image conditions among youths and women have also led to congressional actions.

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

The female body image is highly influenced by the mass media and the media’s portrayal of women, ‘70% of college women say they feel worse about their own looks after reading women’s magazines’ (University of Massachusetts & Stanford University, 2006), the portrayal of women in the media has an unrealistic approach and brings out body dissatisfactions and this results in eating problems and disorders.

Feminism has been around now for over a century, but now with countless opportunities for girls in a variety of areas the girls interviewed are expressing their... boredom in society, and because of this reported, studies have shown the increase in of mental disorders from 32% in 1999 to 44% in 2006. Due to this boredom a reliance on the visual media surrounding them allowed them to pick on themselves with regards to their appearance. In terms of “diet and lifestyle”