Body Image in Media Essay Example

Beauty…it poses the age old question, is beauty in the eye of the beholder or is beauty only skin deep? What affects the way we determine the level of someone’s beauty? It’s very easy to see that this world is infatuated with beautiful people, but how do you become one? Who determines if you are one? Who decided what was beautiful? Where does the obsession to be beautiful come from? Body image is a pressing issue that plagues women and men alike. The problem can start at a very young age and grow into a deadly obsession that can cause eating disorders that can in turn become fatal. A large amount of body image standards come from the media. The media constitutes a large outlet that has the ability to make people believe it is a mirror of society and not that viewers are killing themselves to mirror the media. Magazine articles show emaciated models that tell young girls that thin is in or women that losing weight can be quick and easy with fad diets. These images develop unhealthy thoughts that continue to grow. Young girls are very impressionable and yearn to be beautiful and popular and hope to be one of the girls that get asked on dates like the girls they see on television. This does not change for adult women; they long to be desired like celebrity women and women in the magazines. The images portrayed in the media give the false sense that being skinny is what men want, and drive people to strive to become skinny. Plastic surgeries conducted in the United States in the past seven years have increased 72 percent (Author, Date). This figure shows that the obsession to obtain perfection in body image has become more of a problem then society would like to admit. Now if a young women wishes to look like the supermodel she sees in a magazine, she can implant her breasts, suck out her stomach, and have her legs liposuctioned. These procedures can be very painful and cost thousands of dollars, and yet the end to the trend seems to be nowhere in sight. In