preview

What Makes A Woman's True Size Affect Teenagers?

Decent Essays
Open Document

What good does making a human being appear skinny do for society? Why would a photographer transform a woman's countenance when her true natural beauty is what viewers long to see? How does presenting a woman smaller than her true size affect teenagers in today’s society? These questions are what society struggles with daily when one looks at a magazine, images of celebrities, billboards, or anywhere in the media. Photoshopping, a new artform, has taken over the media and has achieved high amounts of popularity. This trenchant art has also taken over the lives of teenagers in a controversial way. By studying and watching the manner in which one’s body can be edited, altered, trimmed, even manipulated in a simple photograph, one is able to determine …show more content…

When someone looks at the new generation, eating disorders, self-harm, and other issues are recognized as things affecting the body; all of these things are becoming more prevalent. A large body of research proves the idea that altering photographs causes eating disorders. The “exposure to thin models results in greater body focused anxiety” (Halliwell). Girls and boys are feeling the need to match the flawless, thin stranger in the snapshot. The anxiety initiated in an adolescent’s life from not meeting the standards of the ideal person in a picture provided by the media causes one to do these horrendous things to the body. Young teens have a negative body image. Girls are being trained to obsess over their weight and appearance not their grades, family, or worth, which are more important. The teenagers do not understand “the gulf between image and reality” that the media generates, which is hurting them mentally and physically (Grundberg 36). The people presented in the photos are expectations, but the reality is that teenagers will never be as thin as a twig, will never have perfect airbrushed skin, and will never have the exact body type one longs for. The precious body one has may never provide enough satisfaction in …show more content…

The media is not trying to have women, for example, think of their bodies as beautiful; the media does not care. Photographers that make use of photoshop claim their work is the “product of a sharp and observant eye” when in reality, their images are the product of a computer mouse reconstructing a real person’s body (Eggers 25). The people behind the camera take advantage of the youth’s self esteem, “ destroying their self-confidence” (Vaynshteyn). Correlated with low self esteem is depression, and countless adolescents face depression. Depression is precisely connected with the way women are depicted in magazines. As females observe other people of the same sex throughout the media, they realize that their body doesn’t measure up to the one viewed, causing girls to lack confidence in themselves. What the women really should be experiencing is not depression, but satisfaction because their body is not fake. Younger generations should be raised learning that advertisements with women are not real and that there are many different body types so that they do not have to face a low self

Get Access