Women's Bodies In Art

. While flipping further into the novel, I noticed several different works of art depicting women’s bodies in many different forms and ways. Each work of art displays women with some degree of nudity, some more severe than others, and each tells its own story of women overall during that time period. Later in the book, photos were included of women advertising products in a sexual and/or lude way, such as a hand pulling thin panty hose away from the thigh and a woman’s tongue licking a popsicle to advertise lipstick. Young girls are seeing these types of advertisements and feel they have to act and present themselves in a sexual manner to please others; that’s the message these advertisements are sending to their audiences. According to author
These numbers are nowhere near the body standard for height and weight that magazines display, which is an average height of roughly five feet ten inches with an approximate weight of around 100-120 pounds. This combination of height and weight is not healthy for anybody, male or female, and seems almost impossible to achieve without a rigorous and unhealthy diet along with excessive exercise. Even then, you can’t do anything about your height. When viewers look at these images of seemingly anorexic models and feel that they will never amount to them, their body image worsens and their self-esteem plummets. According to Psychology professor Jasmine Fardouly, “experiences of sexual objectification, such as exposure to objectifying media, can lead women to view themselves from an observer’s perspective and thus view their body as an object to be gazed upon (termed self-objectification) …research has found that exposure to sexually objectifying media—such as thin-ideal or sexually objectifying magazine images, television, and music videos is associated with greater self-objectification in young women.” (Fardouly, 447). Fardouly goes further on to say how low self-esteem along with poor body image can lead to something worse, and he claims how “self-objectification can lead to negative outcomes, such as body shame and anxiety, which in turn can lead to depression, sexual dysfunction, and eating disorders.” (Fardouly, 447). I can agree to this statement with confidence because I myself have experienced it for years, along with millions of others. Researcher Kara Kerr reinstates what Fardouly stated when she talks about how “self-objectification not only affects body image, but may also lead to depression…body shame and rumination mediate the link between self-objectification and depression in adolescent girls.” To