Portrayal Of Women In The Media

We, the American public are hit from every imaginable diretc ion every waking moment of our lives by slick advertising agencies trying to coerce us into or tell us why we need to buy their products. Their products will make us happier or thinner, or prettier. The advertisers often use the picture of youth and vitality so that the public will associate that particular product or service with being young and beautiful. They do this because of course in our society youth and beauty are to be coveted. Everyone would like to be forever young and beautiful or for as long as they can anyway. So, everyone is trying to look younger or wants to look younger. The things that we can associate with youth are obvious. We see the picture of youth and
The number one wish of most women and girls is to loose weight. Media presents images that tell woman and girls that acceptance means being unnaturally thin. The average fashion model, whose image we are bombarded with, weighs twenty-three percent less than the average American woman. Twenty years ago, the average fashion model weighed only eight percent less. Only five percent of all women are born with the ideal fashion model body, which of course leaves the other ninety-five percent inundated with images of only the five- percent ideal type body. Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfetc female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to "doctor" images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman's body when we are actually looking at setc ions of three or four women's bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women's body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these
The chief symptoms are self-induced starvation and/or binge eating and purging. For most this is a compulsive addiction similar to alcoholism. it leads to poor health, psychological problems, shame, guilt, shame and withdrawal. It is also destructive to family members and friends. The weight loss industry is now a thirty-three billion-dollar industry. Advertisements aimed at selling diet products portray food and the self as enemies and the diet products as our friends. What consumers are not told is that ninety-eight percent of those who lose weight through diet products such as pills, shakes, etc
. gain the weight back including additional weight. The advertisements only tell us that "you can never be too thin," and "starving and suffering got you into shape." The diet industry deliberately perpetuates dangerous attitudes about food and body image because it is profitable for them to make women feel terrible about their bodies, and the majority of women do feel that way. It is common knowledge that women in our culture are entirely more affetc ed by the slender ideal then are men and by beauty ideals in general. It is also more evident that the frequency of eating disorders is astoundingly higher among girls and women than among