Argumentative Essay On Body Image

English Comp 101
1 December 2013
Seeing Beyond the Mirror What is the perfect person? Someone who is tall, thin, muscular with blonde hair and blue eyes? That is what we were brought into this world to believe. In 2006, girls ranging from the age of five and a half to seven and a half had lower body esteem and dissatisfaction after being exposed to the Barbie doll (Croll 155). “In 2012, more than 236,000 cosmetic procedures were performed on patients between 13 and 19” (Zuckerman 1). Is this the kind of world we want to live in? Body Image is an issue that begins around the age of five. This is when children are exposed to Barbie and Ken dolls which they idolize. The media has created an illusion of the perfect person and people go to
We are constantly criticizing ourselves for how we look as we compare to these woman or men. Yet what we don’t realize is this is not at all how they really look. Photoshop can take a realistic person and make them look plastic like Barbie. They easily give you the ideal body image, longer neck, tiny waist, and a bigger chest. For finishing touches they go over your entire body highlighting to make the body appear better. In the end the person looks absolutely nothing like the fake human they created. In a country where the average person sees about 5,000 advertisements a day, it would only make sense that they have an effect on how we perceive ourselves (Gray, par. 4). The American Medical Association recently has announced they would be taking a stand against image manipulation in advertising (Diller, par. 3). One doctor had commented about Photoshop as, "In one image, a model 's waist was slimmed so severely, her head appeared to be wider than her waist. We must stop exposing impressionable children and teenagers to advertisements portraying models with body types only attainable with the help of photo editing software (Gray, par.
When you think of people who get cosmetic surgery, you instantly think of adults. What we don’t really know is how many teenagers get cosmetic surgery a year. A study in 2012 found that just 236,000 procedures were done on patients between thirteen and nineteen (Zuckerman 1). A major concern for those teens undergoing surgery is that they are still maturing and there body is growing, this would likely change their body image issues (1). As one study found that body image satisfaction did improve after plastic surgery, but satisfaction also improved as they got older (2). After studying eleven to eighteen years old they found that body image satisfaction was at its highest at eighteen years of age