It Is No Secret That Women Often Change Their Bodies In

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

In society, women relate to friends, models and actresses which are actually people who are in the industry portraying the ‘ideal body.’ Women think too much about what others think of them instead of just caring about themselves. They also choose to take the unhealthy approach and gain all these bad habits to obtain the ‘ultimate’ body image of this ‘ideal woman’ society has created.

Once upon a time, women were celebrated for their curves. Weight was a symbol of wealth and fertility in a woman. During this time, women were subjugated to being a housewife and nothing more. As time and society progressed, a woman’s prison became her body and no longer her home. Women had the freedom to vote, work, play, but could no longer be fat. This new beauty standard of thinness affects women in many ways. In “Add Cake, Subtract Self Esteem” written by Caroline Knapp, she describes her own personal experience on how this impossible standard affects women’s eating which leads to eating disorders and an unhealthy relationship with food. In “The Beauty Myth” written by Naomi Wolf, she describes the mental effects on women from a

Women are insecure. They constantly diet and scrutinize their bodies. They fall victims to the anorexically thin models appearing in the media. Why do men have it so easy? For years these questions are what women asked themselves. In a world where appearance is everything, women have been the main source of all the hype concerning the image and body. Advertisements have been criticized for years about putting the pressures of the “perfect” body into the heads of millions of women. Up until a few years ago, it was believed that only women had the eyes of society on them. Now the scales are balancing. More men are beginning to feel pressured, by the same society, to

The body image movement aims to improve the relationship between women and their bodies in a more positive manner (Dove 2014). Currently, women are suffering from an increase in body self-consciousness as a result of medias role regarding beauty ideals. Researchers have found that women worldwide do not view themselves as beautiful and are consistently troubled about their appearance and concluded that six out of ten girls are concerned about their appearances (Dove 2014). As a result, anxiety and self-consciousness are all contributing factors producing significant health concerns among women (Aubrey 2007). Media has developed a reputation in society for women to be held to unachievable beauty standards as they promote a “thin culture” (Hesse-Biber et al. 2006). This promotion of beauty standards has inspired the body image movement to educate and encourage women to love their bodies in order to achieve more self-esteem and confidence (Dove 2014). As well as, corporations are beginning to

Thesis: The media puts pressure on women of all ages to conform to their standards of what looks best, and this pressure results in women having a negative body image.

Today, a large majority of women will admit to being dissatisfied with the way their body looks. This is because of a thing called body image. Body image is the way one thinks their body should look like, and how they think others see it. This has become a major issue mainly because of the media. The media effects body image because they use women with what is considered the “perfect body” for advertising purposes. They are all over social media, on television, and on the cover of magazines. Since the media only shows women with one certain body type, this puts pressure on other women to look that way. The media should stop pressuring the perfect body type because it can lead to self-esteem problems in women, anemia or bulimia, and can even

A female should not feel insecure with her body when she is comfortable in her own skin, whether or not she weights 130 pounds or 150 pounds at 5’5”. According to Rehab’s study of the evolution of the female figure over one hundred years, “the body shapes of the most admired models have remained consistently slimmer than that of the average American woman.” Due to the significant increase in mass media throughout the twentieth century of the United States, there has been a noteworthy impact on the popular image of women. A woman being dissatisfied with their body is a everyday trend around the world where as

As Judith Butler (1990) and Barbara Risman (2004) suggest, physical sex differences are constructed by social norms, and at the same time performed according to them. The female role has been impacted by this construction of gender roles within today’s society, in particular while talking about women and their bodies. Women are expected to perform and reproduce normative femininity, through practices that regulate their body size, appearance and posture (Hill 2015). Katherine Mason (2013) details the way in which women are socialised into being mindful of the ‘male gaze’, learning that their bodies exist in order to be looked at and not to act. Therefore, while boys are taught to be physically active and explore with their physical abilities, women’s awareness of constant surveillance of their bodies and their actions, which should fit into the spectrum of ‘femininity’, impedes with their desire for the same exploration, and instead leads them to see their bodies as weak and fragile (Mason

Self-esteem can hit an all-time low for women who find themselves pursuing these methods but still don’t find themselves measuring up to the women in the images. What these women don’t realize is that the images they are seeing are fictional and that the women’s bodies do not look that way in the real world. Yet these women are still trying to attain this body type. They are working for an unachievable goal, and that is to have a body that looks like the photo-shopped and airbrushed bodies that are shown in the media. Not only can the media cause women’s self-esteem to plummet, it can cause them to become over sexualized.

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

Society creates a standard of beauty for women that often changes along with society due to a new perspective on what it means to be beautiful in our culture. These standards for beauty create what our society believes makes a woman desirable, attractive, perfect, and overall beautiful.  Which then enforces unhealthy and unrealistic beauty ideals that negatively affect women's self-image and their body image because society has attributed beauty to self worth. The result is with the ever changing standards of beauty means women use various ways to alter their bodies and appearance by clothing, makeup, hair, dieting, exercising, and even taking extreme measures to perfect their looks through surgery.

Beauty standards have been a major issue for many years now and women have been willing to change their bodies over and over to please themselves and others. Beauty standards are often defined in terms of hairstyles, skin color, and body size. The measures involved in having to live up to these standards are often risky in nature. For decades, what is seen as beautiful is centered around a women’s weight and size. Today, that standard is often defined as being thin. Women often resort to drastic means to attain that ideal image. However, achieving these standards can be expensive, can lower self-esteem and can be a threat to a woman’s health and life.

The media have constructed attractiveness for a long time many sociocultural standards of beauty and. Especially women’s body images have been a primary concern because the value of women has been measured how they look like. How women have similar body traits with the modern female body images has been a significant and essential issue, historically. The sociocultural standards of beauty which have been created by the greed of the media have dire impacts on young females. The current beauty level of the female body image in the media is thinness. In fact, the preferred female body images have been changed through the media. Throughout history, sometimes skinny women’s body images were loved, and sometimes over weighted women’s body images were preferred. Whenever the media have dictated the ideal female

In today’s society we let the media decide everything in our lives from what clothes we should wear, music we should listen to, and how we should look. One of the biggest problems that both men and women face is body shaming, because the media sets standards for young kids and young adults., they often times try and fit the description of “perfect” which leads these people to either be depressed because they do not look like people want them to look or harm themselves in order to achieve the desired look. The most common ways the media shames both men and women are by celebrities and how they are the “perfect” body, publishing magazines of what is the ideal man and woman, and by the people who believe being “too” fat is bad and being “too” skinny is bad.