Women 's Role Model On The Media

I really enjoyed watching the documentary, Miss Representation. It was very informative and eye opening. The film explores the impact that the media has on society and the misrepresentation of women. While the media can be a place to learn and stay up to date, there is also an ugly side to it. Our generation spends a huge amount of our time on our phones, computers, and watching tv so I feel like we are affected by the media the most. The media influences people at a young age impacting their views on themselves and the world around them. Girls especially get the message that their value is on how they look. The way media portrays women in movies and television over sexualizes women and dehumanizes them. This type of media can lead women to

Many of the things that we see in the media whether it’s seen in a song, a television commercial, a magazines, or a print advertisement we see that women are always portrayed in a negative stereotypical way. In almost everything that we see there is more women than men. Women are seen as sex objects that are only useful to serve and cater to men. We are also viewed as victims who are not supposed to protect ourselves and our duties are to play a female role such as cooking and cleaning. Now when men are seen in the media, they are viewed as being independent, strong, and aggressive they are taught to not have emotional attachments.

Teenage girls are at an impressionable time in their lives. Mass Media is a key idea in one of the factors of socialization that become important to teenagers. Teenagers look to the media for a sense of entertainment. Whether it is movies, magazines, or even some aspects of social media, teenagers get a lot of influence from the media’s message. The problem with this is the media has a specific way of doing things and can be negative to a susceptible teenage girl. Media’s way of portraying a woman can be skewed and unrealistic way from what reality is. Teenage girls then have a desire for this look or way. In this essay the three ways I will describe as to why the media can negatively affect a teenage girls body image is by showing

This isn’t a new problem, “the popular media (television, movies, magazines, etc.) have, since World War II, increasingly held up a thinner and thinner body image as the ideal for women”. This has begun to negatively girls at younger and younger ages. One study found that when they surveyed nine and ten year old girls “40% have tried to lose weight”. Another study found that “at age thirteen, 53% of American girls are "unhappy with their bodies", by the time these girls reach the age of seventeen, this percentage grows to 78%. Young women in this country are obsessed with reaching the beauty standards set out for them by the

The media plays a major role in the way our society sets certain standards and forms opinions. No matter where we go, the media is everywhere. The message that the media illustrates today is that “thin is in”. When was the last time you flipped through a magazine or through the television channels without seeing some type of advertisement promoting a new diet or new product being promoted by a super thin model or actress? Young girls are the main targets for new products. It is common for young girls to be obsessed with what is “in”. The message that young girls are getting from the media is that having bones sticking out is the way to look. They then become preoccupied with their bodies and self image. “ The exposure to ideal images coincides with a period in their lives where self regard and self efficacy is in decline, where body image is at its most fragile due to physical changes of puberty and where tendency for social comparison is at its peak” (www.eating-disorders.org.uk/docs/media.doc). The media illustrates to young girls an “idealized” shape which leads to being beautiful, popular, successful, and loved but which is not realistic to have unless you have the “idealized” shape. Therefore, they believe that their lives will be perfect as long as they are thin and have the “idealized” shape. The two main sources of media that reach young girls are television and magazines.

The documentary Miss Representation shines a light on the overwhelming impact the male dominated media has on the development of females. Women cannot grow up emotionally happy in our culture due to the overwhelming pressure they are given. As girls grow up and become women they are constantly being judged by those around them and are given a high standard compared to their male counterparts because of the media. Being strong, smart, and accomplished isn’t important as being beautiful and skinny. Today in America you are seen physically and not intellectually. With the media portrayal of women as sexual objects has come with severe consequences. According to the video fifty-three percent of 13-year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies

As a middle school student, I was oblivious to the unrealistic portrayals in the media, but I was not able to escape its harmful grasp. It seemed every girl at the school suffered with body image issues because their perception of beauty is what they had been taught by society. Anorexia and bulimia were far too common, while self-esteem and confidence were very hard to find. Not only were the girls trying to become “beautiful,” they were also trying to act older than they were. Starting at the extreme, drugs, alcohol, and sex seemed normal; far less extreme were the excessive amounts of makeup, skimpy outfits, and usage of the proper slang. These girls were merely doing what the media had taught them; they were being, or trying to be,

In the modern day media women are shown as to be too perfect to be true, Magazines show women how they are suppose to be, how they are suppose to ‘look like” by using photoshop to manipulate and sculpt a “perfect” female. Not only magazines portray this image but so does social media, Girls are expected to be ‘ Skinny, Blue eyes, Blonde with a perfect style and lifestyle’’ Making younger girls starve themselves and abuse their bodies to sculpt themselves out to be replicas of women how they have that so called perfect artificial image they present to the world. Girls/ Women are forgetting themselves and who they are. These girls are losing themselves along the journey not only losing their well-being but their identity from what makes them

There has been a growing trend of hypersexualization of women over the span of all forms of media. The women within these images are made to look perfectly flawless. They are extremely thin without a trace of fat or cellulite to be found. The people who consume this media are exposed to the idea that the women they are observing are models for true physical beauty. These standards are accompanied by an alternate message from the media that pushes the idea that women’s value comes from their beauty. While some women may understand that the messages about the ideal woman are unrealistic and false, it is found that adolescent girls are vulnerable to the media’s strategies due to their lack of media literacy as well as the search for their own identity during this developmental stage in their lives. The exposure to these standards of beauty can have several negative effects on the girls such as lower self-esteem, higher body dissatisfaction, depression, and eating disorders. SPARK and 4 Every Girl are two of a growing number of campaigns that are working to fight against the sexualized images of women in the media and the negative effects it can have on the viewers.

(Heubeck 2006) For many young people, especially girls, the ideal continues to chase them as they grow into young women. Young girls begin to internalize the stereotypes and judge themselves by media’s impossible standards. The power that the media holds in impacting the lives of young girls is detrimental and eventually affects their body image, their satisfaction of their own body, and portrayal of their body as an object.

As humans on this planet we often think about what others think about our appearance. We often, in this society, look at a person through their characteristics such as: looks, height, clarity of skin, and by how fat or thin one appears to be. In the article, The Diet Zone: A Dangerous Place, by Natascha Pocek, she states the fact that, in this society, we put a lot of emphasis on diets and appearing thin. From when we are children we tend to change our views according to the ways of man, and find ways to stay fit or to lose weight. With this constant loss of weight we tend to get into a hole of wanting to be thinner, and in my opinion that want leads to the attempts of so many girls developing some

Women have been misrepresented in the media for many years. Stereotypes have been around forever in media, but were portrayed more visibly in the earlier years. Although this misrepresentation of women is less subtle, the outcome of this issue is extensively impacting consumers and women in general. The impact of these stereotypes discourage women to pursue their goals, cause self-esteem issues, and hurt their chances at bigger roles in the business and political world. This also gives others false ideas and expectations. Some primary examples of concern include the value of women and girl’s looks over their personalities, the false imagery of the LGBT community, and society not taking women in politics and news seriously.

When the people you see on television are skinny, it changes how you want to view yourself. Family also pressures girls to be skinny and pretty. Sometimes, pressure at home is worse than ads out in public. “More than 80 percent of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat, that girls’ self-esteem drops at age 12 and does not improve until 20, and that that is tied to negative body image.” (Schulten, “Is There Too Much Pressure on Girls to Have ‘Perfect’ Bodies”, The New York Times) Most girls want to be thin because they think men are only attracted to really skinny women. “How did we get to this place where the worst insult you can hurl at

fifty times in the press. Male political figures might be called mean and terrible names, yet those words do not, more often than not, reflect superstition and fear (Monière 2006).

Language is a system of communication which consists of a set of sounds and written symbols which are used by the people of a particular country or region for talking or writing. It is considered as an art because when used it able to help a person develop or create a certain picture in the mind. Language being an artifact of culture means that it is an interesting thing that is created by the people. It is an aspect of their way of life of the people. It also helps in development of the people as writers and intellects. As a culture it is a people’s way of life and therefore the impact it has to human beings cannot be under looked.