Susan Bordo Never Just Pictures Summary

“I don’t hate you because you’re fat. You’re fat because I hate you,” an iconic “Mean Girls” quote briefly illustrates how fat is often portrayed in society. Movies and television series have a tendency to exclude overweight actors/actresses or use them as a center of ridicule. In doing so, it sends a misguided message to children, teens and adults who now feel the pressure of inadequacy. People have begun to examine the effects of body shaming in America. In the article “Fear of Fatness,” Peggy Orenstein, an award-winning writer, claims that the image of the ideal woman is rather impossible to achieve, and even those who may obtain it, still find flaws within themselves. Orenstein presents the idea that body fat is viewed as a negative

In recent decades, acquiring the body image and figure popularized by mass media and popular culture is becoming a rising and prevalent concern amongst people. Apparent increases in the efforts to achieve, match, and maintain the ideal body gathers attention and worry that it might impact perceptions on what sort of body stature is acceptable or not. Even some youths are beginning to pick up the idea that a body type that is not ideal to the type popularly portrayed by society is unfavorable. This desire for the ideal body is becoming immensely widespread that some people have even come to sign it as a priority, making this matter as an issue of concern. Susan Bordo expands and discusses in her essay “Never Just Pictures,” the development of

In Susan Bordo’s article entitled, “Never Just Pictures,” Bordo explores the driving forces behind the ever-intensifying, pervasive, and obsessive behaviors related to perceptions of and adherence to “acceptable” dictates regarding body image. Bordo’s insightful observations, examples, historical development, and logic shed light on how these dictates developed and from where they currently emanate, including the self-appointed societal, cultural, philosophical, and psychological “gatekeepers” of beauty in today’s society.

In fact, media is contributing to many false advertisements and unrealistic images that cause eating disorders. Media gives us these false beauty standards by making teens think they have to be thin and tall. Meanwhile, many teens want to be like the models and they try to be thin but instead of doing it the healthy way. The way they do it is to skip meals and that develops eating disorders. For instance, Arnett says, “Marketing and advertisement agencies focus on models such as tall, thin women or a muscular man with a chiseled jawbone when casting for photo shoots and television commercial” (265.) Therefore, we experience and seen is that the media do give us a false beauty standard which makes teens want to do everything that is possible to become like models. This has contributed

Marya Hornbacher’s memoir, Wasted, describes her lifelong battle with eating disturbances with focuses on anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. In modern day society, thinness is associated with “wealth, upward mobility, and success” (Hornbacher, 1998, p. 46). Thinness is “an ideal symbolizing self-discipline, control, sexual liberation, assertiveness, competitiveness, and affiliation with a higher socio-economic class.” (p. 46) Not eating also suggests that one have such a full life that food is not a priority. The media influences children to believe that one must be thin in order to be beautiful. To Marya, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, she must be perfect in order to be successful. She believed she could only be perfect if she had a perfect body, a perfect career, perfect relationships, and perfect control over her life and herself (p. 231-232).

One example of how social media has impacted the eating disorder problem comes from Fiji. In 1998, Television became available to the residents who called Fiji home. In just that year, eleven percent of girls started throwing up and went on dietary programs. Bordo argues that now more than ever, we are taught how to live through the demonstration of pictures. Our would has become digital and we are constantly being shown the “way we are supposed to look.” Bordo also discovered that eating disorders now have been pushed onto men as well, just in a different way. Men take steroids, are constantly working out, and always are looking at ways to become more muscular. With so many enhancement services the medical field has to offer, people think it is easier to obtain their “ideal” weight, when in reality it is just a way for the medical professionals to make a profit. Bordo concludes that families, racial, and cultural backgrounds all contribute to the way a girl wants to be perceived. Yet, until we can figure out how to halt the dysfunction and twisted view of ideal bodies through images and social media, this problem will never go

One of the most common issues that society faces today are the mental diseases related to eating. Bordo, in her essay, "The Globalization of Eating Disorder," tackles body-image distortion syndromes, because that is how the media lets people perceive its content, and make us believe that media standards are beautiful. It is important to understand that Bordo's essay contains a powerful message regarding the road we are taking with regards to how we

In her essay, “The Globalization of Eating Disorders,” Susan Bordo informs her audience of the growing trends in eating disorders. Through her argument, Bordo illustrates the cruel identity of body-image distortion syndrome while she searches for a solution to the eating-disorder problem by looking to its birthplace in culture. Making use of several examples and scenarios, facts and statistics, and appeals to pathos and logos to construct her argument, Bordo shows a strong intent on eradicating the growing crisis in a reasonably sound argument.

Therefore, the commendation of such look and shape commercializes unhealthy body image and procreates eating disorders. Unfortunately, at present the commercialism of a perfect body is encountered by almost everyone on everyday basis. The public is bombarded daily with images of glamorously thin women in commercials, on billboards, in movies in magazines and etc?According to Melanie Katzman, a consultant psychologist from New York, the media has actively defined the thin ideal as success and treats the body as a commodity. (Rhona MacDonald, 2001) It is evident that the persistent advocating of the media and the society produced a constant pursuit of thinness, which became a new religion. A study conducted by Harvard researchers has revealed the effect of media and magazines on adolescent girls in high schools. The children were exposed to fashion magazines and television commercials, and a while after were given self-rating surveys. The study found that sixty-nine percent of the girls said that magazine pictures

At first glance, the picture by Louisa Gouliamaki seems to encapture a small group of people who appear to be in a state of chaos and a young woman in a purple hijab with water being poured over her face -- possibly due to exhaustion or overheating. The image itself does not properly convey the severity of the situation to onlookers because without reading the text that follows it, the photo could simply be a reenactment of an event or a completely different situation that what is depicted. In the article that follows Gouliamaki’s photograph, it explains that the subjects captured are Syrian immigrants trying to cross the Greek-Macedonian border, but being met with resistance; and a mother who lost her child in the disarray and collapsed from

When the subject of eating disorders comes up it is mostly teenage girls or women that are put in the spotlight. People focus on the modeling and advertising industries by calling them out for the unhealthy image they create for young women, even though it is well known that most if not all their images are photoshopped. The implied message of most advertisements raising awareness for eating disorders is that women are the only one that suffer from them. Based on the visualization of two ads- one from dove encouraging women to love their bodies and the other from NEDA (National eating disorder association) for a helpline both the of ads help to reinforce the false belief, that women are the only ones that suffer from eating disorders. But one aspect that people tend to overlook and that has not come to public attention until just recently is the rising number of cases in men and adolescent boys

The National Eating Disorder Association’s anti-eating disorder advertisement is an effective argument to show how serious and how much of a problem eating disorders are. Another purpose is to give one the perspective of unrealistic expectations of women. By using text, color, and placement, the advertisement gives the audience a feeling of shock and worry. These feelings make the viewer want to learn more about eating disorders and how they affect women more than men.

HIST 3163 Take-Home Assignment While both Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describe the horrors and terror of the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Chukovskaya is able to describe the terror felt and lived by the ordinary person in Russia at the time while Solzhenitsyn describes the terror felt by prisoners who were arrested, innocent or otherwise, during the Purge. In Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna, she aims to capture the dreadful atmosphere of Stalin’s Great Purge.

Eating disorders are a link to the subjection of the “ideal” person portrayed by the media. The obsession created by young girls over their body image has led to an increasing number of people who have developed an eating disorder to try to deal with their lack of self-esteem, rooted from the media. “The media says that if we fail at achieving this ‘ideal’ body image, we must try harder no matter what the costs” (Moak 62). The more women that are watching advertisements and commercials, the greater their desire is to be thin. According to Eating Disorder Awareness and Prevention Incorporated a study was conducted of 4,294 television commercials, which revealed one out of every 3.8 commercials send some sort of “attractive message,” telling

“The attention-grabbing pictures of various high-flying supermodels and actors on different magazine covers and advertisements go a long way in influencing our choices” (Bagley). The media is highly affective to everyone, although they promote an improper image of living. Research proved says those with low self-esteem are most influenced by media. Media is not the only culprit behind eating disorders. However, that does not mean that they have no part in eating disorders. Media is omnipresent and challenging it can halt the constant pressure on people to be perfect (Bagley). Socio-cultural influences, like the false images of thin women have been researched to distort eating and cause un-satisfaction of an individual’s body. However, it